Posted on 08/21/2022 7:05:51 PM PDT by Ennis85
The speaker is exactly half the ex president’s age but his speech is the full Trump. “Joe Biden has turned the southern border into the world’s capital of drug trafficking,” says JD Vance, celebrity author of Hillbilly Elegy and Trump-endorsed Senate candidate for Ohio. To cheers from a capacity crowd in Youngstown, 1,500 miles from the Mexico frontier, he adds: “We do not have to allow the poison and the sex trafficking that’s flowing into our state thanks to the open border to continue to do so. We can shut that border, we can build the wall, and we can make it so our people in Youngstown can feel safe and secure in our own country.” The reception is even warmer for his guest Ron DeSantis, whom many in the 650-strong audience are convinced will become US president in 2024, or in 2028 after a second Trump term. The Florida governor praises Vance, 38, as “somebody that’s going to be a leader, and not just be a follower — and we need that in that swamp now more than ever”. DeSantis is there to boost his own national profile but also to prop up a novice candidate running neck-and-neck with his Democrat rival in a state won comfortably by Trump in 2020. Vance — a former “never-Trump guy” who once described him as “cultural heroin” but now campaigns with the zeal of the convert — is becoming a problem for Republicans ahead of the November midterm elections. He is one of four vulnerable Republican candidates in Senate races that the party would be confident of winning in a normal electoral cycle with an unpopular Democrat in the White House. All of them were elevated by Donald Trump, all lack experience and all either have extreme views or awkward personal histories. Their struggles have raised a possibility that would have seemed outrageous until very recently — that Democrats might not just retain control of the Senate but could perhaps grow their majority. For months, it had been widely assumed that a “red wave” powered by anger over high inflation would give the Republicans a sizeable majority in the House of Representatives and flip the Senate, now split 50:50 between the parties with tied votes settled by Kamala Harris, the vice-president.
But two recent polls — simply asking voters if they prefer Republicans or Democrats — show an extremely close contest nationally: Morning Consult put it at 46 per cent Democrat to 42 per cent Republican, while Fox News found them both on 41 per cent, compared to a seven-point Republican lead in May. Meanwhile, the Cook Political Report has revised its forecast for the Republican gain in the House down from 20-35 seats to 10-25, and data analysis site FiveThirtyEight now gives Democrats a 63 per cent chance of retaining the Senate. Even a small House majority would give Republicans the power to stymie the president’s agenda and launch aggressive committee investigations into his son Hunter, the origins of the coronavirus, Afghanistan, the southern border and more. But without the Senate, they will not be able to send conservative legislation to Biden’s desk to veto, or block federal government appointments so easily. Three developments have shifted the political landscape. First, the Supreme Court ruling in June to reverse the federal guarantee of access to abortion re-energised many Democrat-leaning voters. Second, Biden has put together a run of legislative success that may increase the party’s appeal to independents. Third, Republican primary voters have picked candidates such as Vance who have put winnable races in doubt. “This election is very much in a state of flux,” says Dave Nagle, a former Democratic congressman in Iowa. “There’s a stirring out here. It started with what female voters regard as the intrusion into their private lives when the Supreme Court started talking about banning same-sex marriage and curtailing contraception, let alone the right to choose [abortion].” It is not just Democrats saying the “red wave” is suddenly more like a ripple. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, said last week there was “probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate … [where] candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome”. It was a dig at the way his sworn enemy Trump rode roughshod over his more moderate suggestions. Trump, 76, retains a firm grip on the party, given an extra boost by the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that he utilised for a fundraising bonanza, and most of his picks swept through their primary races. However, he usually rates fealty above electability in a candidate, and some of those he pushed are struggling to appeal to a wider voter base. Polling has shown Vance’s Democrat opponent Tim Ryan, 49, slightly ahead all summer — although an Emerson survey last week put Vance in a three-point lead. Still, that is much closer than Republicans would expect in a state that Trump won by nine points and where the retiring incumbent is from their party. In Pennsylvania, where another Republican is standing down, Democrats are also in the hunt to pick up a Senate seat. Trump’s pick — Mehmet Oz, 62, a TV doctor — is floundering against a well-known state Democrat, John Fetterman, 53, the lieutenant governor. Fetterman has a double-digit polling lead after a week spent battering Oz for a video he posted about the difficulty of shopping for crudité ingredients — an effort intended to highlight inflation but that backfired because it suggested a multi-millionaire out of touch with ordinary voters. It was political suicide by vegetable. “When you have a celebrity doctor candidate who is complaining about the cost of making a crudité, you know the Republicans don’t have a sure touch in some parts of the country,” said Timothy Naftali, associate professor of public service at New York University.
“That doesn’t mean [Oz] is certainly going to lose, but what we can say now is that Trump has chosen some very weak candidates,” says Timothy Naftali, associate professor of public service at New York University. “And in areas where they should be doing well, they’re not.” In Arizona, Democratic senator Mark Kelly, 58, was viewed as one of the party’s most at-risk incumbents. But the Republicans’ selection of 36-year-old Blake Masters, a hedge fund executive and outspoken supporter of Trump’s false election fraud claims, has allowed Kelly to open up a large polling lead. And in Georgia, another vulnerable Democrat — Raphael Warnock, 53 — has edged ahead of Herschel Walker, 60, a former NFL star whose past of alleged domestic violence and several unacknowledged children has caught up with him. Trump is not the only backer to these candidates. Vance and Masters both worked for the billionaire financier Peter Thiel, who has bankrolled their political aspirations. Thiel, 54, a co-founder of PayPal, donated $13 million to a fund helping Masters and $14 million for one supporting Vance. Thiel was also a smaller-scale donor to Harriet Hageman, the pro-Trump candidate who last week defeated the anti-Trump congresswoman Liz Cheney in Wyoming, and to Joe Kent, an Army veteran running in Washington State, who unseated Jaime Herrera Beutler, another of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Kent has vowed to launch an impeachment of Biden for leaving Americans behind in Afghanistan. Biden’s own approval numbers have ticked up only slightly, but suddenly he does not look as much of a drag on his party’s midterm prospects as at the start of the summer. Petrol prices are more than a dollar down from their peak, inflation has cooled for now and Congress unexpectedly passed several bills capped by the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act — the biggest-ever public investment in green energy and other climate measures. It also allows Medicare, the health insurance scheme for over-65s, to negotiate drug prices and caps the cost of insulin. Some Democrats have revived comparisons of Biden with Lyndon B Johnson, a master of domestic legislation with giant achievements such as the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Act that outlawed racial discrimination in elections. “Biden has seized the moment that he has, the same way that LBJ did, but their moments are different,” says Naftali. “Biden has a 50-50 Senate, so to have achieved what he has — it’s remarkable,” says Naftali. “LBJ was in a progressive moment when he could expand dramatically the social safety net … This is a different time. “American people — Biden supporters, for the most part — were looking to him to restore trust and the dignity of the office, to restore consistency in foreign policy, to manage the end of the pandemic and to achieve whatever could be achieved in the middle lane of American politics ... I think he has done that very effectively.” The mood change over the summer has left Democrats cautiously optimistic they will avoid a November rout. “The confluence of several factors has mitigated substantially what I thought would be a very bad midterm,” says Denny Heck, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Washington state and a four-term former congressman. “A lot of that is the Roe v Wade decision but there are other factors,” he said. “For example, in the third congressional district in Washington State, if Jaime Herrera Butler had been on the general election ballot, that would have been not much of a chance at all for Democrats. Now they’re wondering, is there a path there? There probably is — it’s pretty narrow, but there’s a path. There are others [Republicans] that just are not quality candidates, not running quality campaigns. “So Democrats’ prospects look a lot better than they did ... But, as I tell my fellow Democrats, don’t get carried away. It’s still a midterm with a Democrat in the White House.”
I can’t wait until they lose! They will be in a panic.
...scent? Is there a pun in there that I am missing?
Anything a Democrat tries to scent must smell of anal secretions.
“Return to scenter...A Dress unknown!”
Barf alert? I don’t think so. Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz are both firmly on Trump.
They won their races. N’uff said. McConnell represents the same “candidate quality control” operation of the Beltway aristocracy that is the disease of America’s political body.
To this day old guard Republicans and democrats would lie, cheat, steal, to get an unapproved candidate from being elected. They feel those acts are a legitimate quality control function they are obligated to undertake regardless of voters.
The candidates have a head start; they have name recognition.
Never heard of the nitwit author
Good let them think that way. Let them think they have it in the bag! There’s nothing worse than being overconfident!
British liberal rag.
This is their latest psyops campaign to depress Republican turnout. When it doesn’t move the polls, they’ll drop it and move on to the next scam.
Begins and ends with Dominion. The DEMs are not coughing up both the House and the Senate in the midterms. They may not cough up either.
Does this idiot not understand that the illegals are already invading the midwest? Heck...the Democrat Party is shipping them there!
hahahahahaha Yap, it was Trump who cast millions of votes personally in those 2 states to make Oz & Walker win!
Republican primary voters had absolutely nothing to do with it! Those voters are just robots who follow Trump’s endorsements...
hahahahahahahahahahahaha
Thanks for the laugh.
Did you not hear that Biden has awarded TikTok from peoples republic of china tasks to process voting in United States?
Just setting up the “November Miracle” whereby the ‘Rats somehow increase majorities in both houses of Congress while saddled with a dotard with an approval rating in the teens.
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The Republicans ( approx 250 minus 5) have remained silent on Trump attacks and only pop up to praise Joe Biden while they support his legislative bills.
Their silence on Biden’s corruption and incompetence stand in stark contrast to an immediate “Resistance” campaign waged against Trump. The Election ink wasn’t dry and FBI agents were Texting - Viva Le Resistance, mimicking the Dem campaign.
The Republicans made the decision that they were better lending support to the Jan 6th committee with their silence - better off doing away with Donald Trump, just as they killed off the Tea Party. They have tacitly sat out the last two years, and that has raised Bidens and Dems numbers as there has been no organized opposition.
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Flawed candidates? President Trump didn’t endorse John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski or Ben Sasse did he?
Talk about FLAWED....
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