Yes, that’s why there is a possibility the decision may be overturned.
But any competent campaign organization would have made sure to collect a big enough margin so that even if a very large number of signatures were thrown out there still would have been enough left to satisfy the legal requirements.
Apparently, Trump has been unwilling to endorse the frontrunner for the Ohio Republican U.S. Senate nomination, Josh Mandel, because he thinks Mandel is some sort of sex freak.
“Trump—who has long been addicted to dishing tabloid-style gossip and dirt—has for months told people close to him that he thinks Mandel is a charisma-free weirdo and dork, according to three sources who’ve spoken to Trump about Mandel and the Ohio contest since last year.”
I had not heard of this particular angle regarding Mandel, who creeps me out for other reasons. But if Donald Trump thinks your sex life is a problem, then maybe it is.
In other news, Marjorie Taylor Greene has endorsed Mandel’s nearest competitor, J.D. Vance, which gives Vance a leg up on the Utter Loon vote.
The problem is that she not only had to collect 3,500 signatures but must have at least 100 signatures in at least 19 counties. As you get to some of the smaller, solidly Republican counties I can see how that would be a real challenge for a Democratic candidate.
Well there were 20 counties in the district she used to represent. She should have been able to get 100 signatures out of each of them. Then you add counties like Polk (Des Moines), Story (Ames), Johnson (Iowa City), Scott (Davenport)…
Mandel is utterly unscrupulous, blindly ambitious, has zero charisma and is a total dweeb, but this is the first I’ve heard that he’s also freaky in bed.
The House is too large for me to tackle (and less important). Someone else is free to start a thread.
The general logic is that things swing towards the party opposite the President during a midterm year.
That said, I think the center has some sense that the Republican party has gone nuts, Trump is pushing for less-electable candidates on average, and the Republicans are defending more territory.
I’d probably give a break-even on the question, from the above. And I would say that will send it to the tried and true question of “How’s the economy doing?”
If people have jobs and the stock market is good, Democrats will win the Senate. If not, then Republicans.
That said, it’s probably worth looking at who has been put forward by the two parties in each state that’s at risk… (To follow, maybe tomorrow or later.)
Even though the unemployment rate is low, the stock market is quite volatile right now, and inflation is the number one issue on voters’ minds. Unless inflation gets tamped down by November, I think the Republicans should have an easy road to taking the Senate and the House. That and the fact that the Republicans are rigging the voting laws in their favor in many states.
Looking at the cook political report it appears to be near a toss-up at the moment.
The demomocrats appear considerably less likely tthan reputations o sweep all or nearly all of the swing states given their bad approval numbers at the moment. However if the national effect is small enough that the individual races matter more they might have an advantage in some states where the gop has to defend a very tight state with a retiring senator. But really it’s going to be extremely difficult to predict before primaries are over.
Inflation is an increasing total number of dollar bills in circulation. Rising prices without quantitative easing are dollar bills flowing to lower waged workers who are having to do extra labor because of changes and hiccups in the everyday operations of their jobs.
The stock holders don’t like the high prices but the average voter might find them appealing - especially if they stick around after supply chain issues start to come under control.
This is not an accurate explanation of what’s going on. Nominal wages have risen ~5% over the last year while prices have risen ~8%. Real wages have fallen something like 2.7%.
People are pretty unhappy about this. I predict the Democrats will be routed this year unless things change pretty quickly and stay changed until November, which seems unlikely given the war (oil prices aren’t going to drop a lot) and China finally getting smashed by Covid (commodity and durable goods prices aren’t going to drop by a lot).
Democrats will sweep both the House and Senate big time. Time to put feet back and relax.
The democratic voters made a big push in the 2020 elections to win the senate - barely. They were motivated by Trump and the COVID disaster. They gave the democrats the power to do something good and the democrats have done - what, exactly - with it? What have they done to make people think “I’m really glad I went out and voted last time and I’m going to make sure I do it again”?
Midterms are more reliant on voter enthusiasm than presidential years. The democrats are running on “well we’re not the republicans!” again. Which is reason enough to vote for them, but not enough to get disinterested voters to come support them.
Rents are absurd, inflation is out of control, wages are going nowhere relative to any of that, no working class person’s economic future has improved and no one has seriously proposed any way to do so. Can the democrats expect unlimited, enthusiastic support while never giving their base anything of substance to actually improve their lives?
Their job should be easy - they’re the party that nominally cares about about 95% of Americans while the other party is pure evil - and somehow they’ve managed to not win a single fucking messaging battle anyway. They are grossly incompetent and mostly not actually interested in making things better for the average American, and all they can run on is “hey, we’re not pure evil like the opposition” - which is true, but it doesn’t win midterms.
I would amend this to, "If public perception (and media reporting) is that people have jobs and the stock market is good…"
I’m not convinced reality enters into it much.
From research that I’ve seen about “economic health” and voting, on Presidential elections, it’s pretty tightly tied to the on-the-ground situation of how the average person’s wallet is feeling and the average direction that’s headed - and that that’s pretty immune to spin, future projections by experts, or anything else. It’s the dumb and wholly selfish and immediate version of “how the economy is doing”.
This is a tricky one IMHO.
There’s: “I’m out of work, behind on my rent/mortgage, and can’t pay my bills so…”
Or
“I’m okay financially, thank goodness, but…”
Like I said, reality is hard to get a handle on. But I do agree with you that what is going on in one’s own household is the MOST compelling reality, if not the UNIVERSAL reality.
They tried to pass lefty wet dream legislation (failing) and they ignored the issue of simply cleaning up all the glaring holes in our system that Trump exposed.
I don’t generally agree with Quinta Jurecic, but I think she did a pretty good article on that:
That said, in politics, everything that you do at the beginning of the two year cycle is largely irrelevant to the vote. I could make a strong, data-driven argument that your average voter has about two weeks of political memory.
So, realistically, there’s nothing to stop congressional Democrats from turning that all around this year. If they want to win centrists and the sane, they could simply focus on sanity this year and hit the finish line having pushed out all memories of the Families Plan with anti-gerrymandering legislation, stricter appointment rules for the President, cleaned up the ERA, etc.
They very specifically passed another big stimulus payment (the $2000 checks that the Georgia Senate runoff candidates campaigned heavily on), which probably exacerbated the inflation problem we’re dealing with now. This may be a clear Menckenian case of “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
I agree this could work. If the Democrats start being effective and passing bills people like, they could turn this around. But if they could have done that, why didn’t they start doing it last year and keep doing it?
I agree generally with the prior point that voters have an appallingly short memory and there’s time for the Dems to somehow transcend their cautious nature and pull off something inspiring, but I also agree that enthusiasm is key.
And here, I think, Biden is a problem. He’s blandly competent, and that’s just not enough to counter the right-wing media running amuck with fire-alarm full-panic deception. The Dems need a boisterous cheerleader, and Biden is a principal visibly running out his last term before retirement.
The left votes for. The right votes against. Trump was so uniquely terrible that he convinced voters on the left to line up behind Biden, but that’s done.
I say Biden will do his calm-down-everything-is-fine thing, and that means the House is lost and the Senate goes net one Pub.