Yes, my apologies. It’s a newer acronym that has come about because of the same phenomenon as the I-35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin. Back in the day, let’s say 30 plus years ago, there were actual separately identifiable cities of Brownsville, Harlingen, McAllen, Edinburg, Mission, Weslaco, etc. Now it feels like one giant suburb that starts at Space X in the east and goes all the way out to Rio Grande City in the west, so the all encompassing RGV name has been applied.
Overall I don’t think the endorsement moved the needle, but under the hood I think we’re seeing why Dems are positioned to win in a wipeout. A lot of the lunatics who make up the face of the right understand how badly Trump has effed the Party. I think El Sayed ends up winning by at least seven points.
Carlson isn’t quite that. He is not concerned that the party is effed up. He is hoping to make a third party run for president and is aware that the far left and the far right sometimes meet on other axes. I do not believe El Sayed is in any way antisemitic but Carlson clearly is and some of those who support El Sayed are. He wants their support later.
Marist College poll from Iowa: Turek (D) 50%, Hinson (R) 42%
For Governor, they have Sand (D) 54% to Lahn (R) 42%.
OK, it’s only one poll, but Marist is a quality pollster.
(Slight mistake in their lede. That’s not quite a double digit lead for Turek.)
Winning a Senate seat in Iowa was not on my bingo card but that is a fantastic sign for Democrats.
It’s probably an outlier, but if Dems actually win IA by 8 points, they probably win Kansas and Nebraska too.
FWIW, Nate Silver’s midterm-elections poll model FLIPR now has the chances of the Democratic Party taking the US Senate as about 2 in 3. And Silver is generally very conservative (no pun) regarding Democratic chances in races in general.
The deep details of the analysis are pay-walled, but Silver offers a lot of surface-level narrative for free on his Substack:
In FLIPR’s view, it’s no longer accurate to describe the battle for the U.S. Senate as a “toss-up.”
In our terminology, that designation covers all races where neither party has more than a 60 percent chance of winning. But Democrats’ Senate chances are now between 63 percent and 69 percent in all three versions of FLIPR, including 65 percent in our headline “Deluxe” version.
… Conversely, expert ratings imply a much different political environment. The Cook Political Report, for example, counts seven races as “toss-ups,” including states like New Hampshire where models and prediction markets imply that Democrats are heavy favorites.
This cautious view is misaligned with the long history of strong opposition performance in midterm elections, especially when the incumbent president is as unpopular as Trump. And it’s becoming harder to justify by the day. There’s not much longer to go — 44 days until Nov. 3 — and both national polls and race-by-race polls have been extremely strong for Democrats since Labor Day.
New poll: El-Sayid leads by 7 points, 47% to 40%. Poll was from Suffolk University.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6104183-el-sayed-polls-ahead-rogers/
…aaaand Rogers is now attempting to put daylight between him and Trump six weeks before the election. Mike Rogers breaks with Trump, calls for Iran war to ‘end quickly’
I’m surprised Trump hasn’t already come out swinging about how Rogers is a traitorous RINO.
Embattled Roger Marshall in Kansas, who is trailing in a couple of polls, has not aired an ad showing Trump in quite some time (at least, I haven’t seen one.) He’s trying to run on his flimsy record of helping farmers, but mostly it’s been attack ads. His Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, is a pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, a church that he founded in 1990. Even though he’s a man of the cloth, he’s far too woke for Kansas, according to Marshall.
But Rogers still supports the SAVE Act (make it harder to vote). Isn’t that much more important to Trump than the war?
NYT today has a bit highlighting Pelota’s bad bossdom. No gift this time, not sure how many I have left.
Do I think there is different standard for those of the Trump world and others? Yes I do. Do I think a male boss who used those same slurs would be reacted to the same way? No. Does the behavior described sound great? No it does not.
But more importantly, do I think voters in Alaska will care? Not at all. But in a race this close I still wonder why the effort to find bad boss stuff. Was it Klobuchar who was alleged to have thrown a stapler at someone? It seems to be a pattern.
I think the most obvious answer is the same reason they ran a Tom Cotton op-ed saying the military should be called in to shoot protestors, or devoted 10 times as many headlines to Hillary’s emails than any of Trump’s scandals, or ran 10 times as many headlines about Biden’s age/health than Trump’s.
They’re the New York Post with better prose (but the same number of pros) and they want Republicans to hold the senate.
Hmm, this seems to hark back a couple years when there was a thread about how the NYT was anti-Biden (then Harris). Yeah- what is the purpose of this article? And the NYT article is based upon former staffers who demanded anonymity- in other words- a couple people angry at being fired, who will not even come forward..
Here is the counter-
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6109004-peltola-denies-ny-times-report/
Yep.
I mean, this is just gossip, not news.
Democrats in Maine on Wednesday accused Republican senator Susan Collins of corruption after a major media outlet reported that the FBI had proposed investigating her for allegedly accepting bribes – before Donald Trump derailed the inquiry.
The article from the investigative newsroom ProPublica rocked the race for Collins’s Senate seat, which is crucial to Democrats’ hopes of winning control of the chamber in the 3 November midterm election. The outlet reported that in the run-up to Collins’s successful bid for a fifth term in 2020, the head of her Super Pac had solicited a campaign donation from contracting firm Navatek, which demanded assurances of business from the government in return.
Using a shell company, Navatek CEO Martin Kao later sent $150,000 to the Super Pac, then told other executives he had been informed Collins would ensure the firm won $32m in federal contracts. In late 2024, the FBI was moving towards investigating the arrangement, in what would have been a large-scale political bribery inquiry, but the agents leading the case were pushed out amid a wider purge of the bureau Trump ordered after returning to power last year, while a justice department office that oversees investigations of politicians was gutted.
See, now this is actual Senate campaign news.
The good news is for all the media tongue clicking, Klobuchar has been the single biggest electoral powerhouse in the Democratic party. Even in the 2020 primary, even in 2024, she’s overperformed at the ballot box. So maybe more candidates should be eating salads with combs.
And I would personally not only suspect that Alaskan voters care little about accusations against a politician they feel they already know well, but that Native voters may rally around what seems unfair targeting of one of their own (she is of Yup’ik descent).
Peltola is also an absolute shark. (No fish pun intended) I don’t think it would be incorrect to call her the savviest politician in the state. The fact that she seems poised to win her 3rd statewide election in a blood red state really points to that.
The bit about Peltola’s daughter’s pet chameleon and its live lunch escaping into the halls of Congress is charming. A little innocent fun for a change.
As long as Noem is no longer around. She probably would’ve had a go at those too.