Heheheheh.
Don’t “Heheheheh” too much - there was much the same fear in the GOP over Trump’s candidacy, and we know how that worked out.
In the meantime, internal DCCC polling shows the generic Democrat running six points behind the generic Republican in battleground districts.. It’s early yet and hardly time to panic, but it looks like widespread anxiety about the economy and a return of COVID is drowning out Dem’s positive message about recovery efforts.
If that’s true, flurb, then Dems can’t ever win. The economy is rebounding strongly and Covid deaths are climbing only because Republicans are opposing vaccinations.
Conor Lamb running for Senate in Pennsylvania. He’s got my support. ‘We won’t win this race on Twitter’ is the perfect message as both of his Democratic opponents seem to be very online and trying to outwoke each other.
Due to Voter suppression, I am not so confident.
Previously I would have been more sanguine about this — it’s just the way the pendulum swings in midterm elections. But Republicans have made clear that once they grab the levers of power they have no intention to relinquish them. The pendulum can only move one way.
I’m not sure how this gets resolved, but it won’t be pretty.
Better Lamb than red but LG John Fetterman (Jawn Futterman) is promising to basically offset Manchin and Sinema and I like that. “I’ll be that 51st vote.”
I get that, especially the concerns that Republicans will continue to adopt the tactics of their new hero Orban and drum up any number of ways to ensure minority conservative rule. Almost half of polled Republicans now say that force may be required to overcome “cheating” by Democrats.
But I won’t give up hope until independents start turning back towards Republican candidates. The electorate continues to drift leftward and Republicans can’t stop it from doing so. The shit has yet to really hit the fan; Pubbies are alienating more voters than the current administration.
Fetterman is beyond awful. The shitter thought it was cute to take a shot at now-Senator Ossoff when he lost the House special election.
I like Fetterman too - very progressive but with a personality and perhaps style that might really appeal to a greater voter base.
I’m neutral on Fetterman, but surely you’ve got to have more than a single sarcastic (but correct) Tweet in mind if you’re going to judge him “beyond awful.”
Senate Republicans have recruited their preferred candidate in Nevada, with former state attorney general Adam Laxalt announcing that he will challenge incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Laxalt’s family has deep roots in Nevada politics. His grandfather was former Nevada governor and Senator Paul Laxalt, and it came out in 2013 that his (until then unacknowledged) father is former Senator Pete Domenici. He’s also closely aligned to Trump, serving as his NV campaign chairman in 2020.
Nevada’s tilted blue recently and Laxalt still has a primary opponent, but his candidacy will make this a marquee race this cycle.
There’s some reason to see it as having gone the other way, I think. The Democratic margin there has slipped, relative to the national environment, in every presidential election since 2008. In 2020, it was to the right of the country in a presidential election for the first time since 2004. And the 2020 presidential result was about in line with how Jacky Rosen did in 2018 if you account for 2018 being a better year overall.
Congressional elections are trending toward being driven completely by national partisanship, which arguably makes sense for voters (ticket-splitting is not very rational in a polarized environment) but is completely catastrophic for Democratic chances of getting a majority in the Senate. I think there are ten(ish) Democratic incumbent senators in states that are to the right of the country, and just one Republican senator in a state to the left of the country (Susan Fricking Collins).
I am in NC and a funny thing I heard once is that Jesse Helms could run buck naked down I-85 and still win easily. Might have even been true.
BTW the 2020 census says that even as NC booms 50% of counties lost population, most of them rural and small town areas. Except for beach/resort areas almost everything east of Raleigh is dying.
And Ossoff himself course corrected. He ran as a neoliberal who refused to say if he supported Pelosi as Speaker in 2017 (and lost to a really strongly disliked politician) and ran far more progressive in 2020.
It’s the trend everywhere in the census data – rural counties are emptying out as urban and suburban counties boom. It’ll present Republicans some challenges as they try to redistrict more seats for themselves in Congress and state legislatures, but I’m sure they’re up to it.
Well then.
Here I was thinking absolutely everything has been all gerrymandered to fuck already.
The latest in Georgia, heheheheh:
The article reads like it was written in the 1990s. America isn’t playing by those political rules anymore. In the Trump and post-Trump era, a whole lot of conventional wisdom has been thrown out the window. I mean, by this author’s logic, Larry Elder shouldn’t even be within 20 percentage points of Newsom in California, and yet he’s very close.
Walker has the potential to pull off a mini-version of a Trump 2016 upset in Georgia. Newcomer? No problem, that already doesn’t count these days. Name recognition? Got it. Troubled personal past? Who cares about that in today’s politics, and especially, the GOP? Demographics? Sure, Georgia went blue in 2020 but 2022 will be a midterm and the momentum usually goes against the ruling party (the D’s.)