Free Republic

Herschel Walker’s 100,000-vote loss in Georgia puts the exclamation point on the “Donald Trump is electoral poison” narrative. If the former president had deliberately attempted to sabotage the Republicans' chances ever since November 2020, he could not have been more destructive than he actually was. In the Senate, the Trump effect meant Republicans lost chances at a whopping 10 seats (one of them two times!) they either should have won or in which they might have been competitive. In the House, Trump’s harm was more diffused, but almost equally baleful. On Jan. 5, 2021, Republicans lost two Senate seats in...

When your main campaign sales pitch is based on your “clout,” and you lose the basis of that clout, then your campaign is probably a goner. For that and other reasons, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu has almost no remaining path to re-election. Landrieu’s self-proclaimed clout as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Energy always was rather illusory. Now, with Republicans running the Senate and a Democratic president wholly antagonistic to Louisiana economic interests, Democratic loyalist Landrieu will be doubly blocked from influence on behalf of the state. Landrieu will keep trying to “localize” the election by ginning up irrelevant issues...