Do the Republicans have a secret weapon they can deploy in the midterms? In fact, I think they have two weapons, one sort-of-secret, the other out in the open but somehow not quite recognized. “That’s good,” you say, if (faute de mieux) you want the Republicans to win. Midterms, we’ve been told ad nauseam, almost always favor the party out of power. I believe that the last time the incumbent party won in the midterms was in 2002 when George W. Bush, riding the tailwind of public sentiment following the September 11 attacks by our Muslim friends, picked up eight House seats.
Many of the most noteworthy Democrat candidates hail from la-la land
At the moment, all the polls have the Dems leading by a comfortable margin. As I write, the RealClearPolitics generic poll puts the Dems ahead by 7.2 percentage points. Nevertheless, I think it likely that the GOP holds the House, indeed that it extends its majority. Ditto with the Senate.
Mere wishful thinking on my part? Maybe. But consider those two weapons.
The sort-of-secret weapon the Republicans have is the Democrats. Many of their most prominent candidates are – pardon me for introducing a technical term – nuts. They are crazy, insane, bonkers, out there where the buses don’t run.
“Yes, but Mamdani,” you say. True, the beaming one easily scooped up the mayorship of New York on a platform of property confiscation, “free” education, buses, groceries, housing, etc., all tinctured with large doses of more-or-less patent anti-Semitism. But already Mamdani’s rictus is faltering. Soon, I predict, he will be like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, gone except for the creepy grin. Check in on those city subsidized grocery stores a couple of months after they open to see what I mean.
Item: the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary happens on August 11. The polls currently have state Representative Francesca Hong ahead by a comfortable margin. Should she be the candidate and then win in November, she would tick a number of “I got there first” boxes. She would be Wisconsin’s first female governor. She would be the state’s first Asian governor. And she would be the Badger state’s first bipolar governor. I am not speaking metaphorically. The woman is barking. In a 2023 interview, Hong noted that she had had a mental breakdown at 18, had overdosed on lithium and been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. Perhaps that is why in 2020, just as Covid hysteria was heating up, she declared that she is in favor of canceling Thanksgiving. “Cancel Thanksgiving,” she wrote. “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women so be it.” “Folx” is nice.
The Dems have a boatload of Hongs. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed just won the Democratic primary for the Senate. Unlike Hong, El-Sayed is not clinically crazy, unless you think that advocating for things like “Medicare for all,” as El-Sayed does, makes you certifiable. He is also, it is worth noting, the poster boy for the so-called “Red-Green,” i.e., Commie-Islamist, alliance. My point is that the so-called “progressive,” which is to say socialist, which is to say militantly anti-American, listing-toward-communist wing of the Democrat party, is now regnant. This has been widely recognized and deplored on the right.
But more worryingly for the Democrats, it has also been recognized and deplored by the remnants of sanity on the left. Senator John Fetterman has noticed it. Even Bill Maher has noticed it, announcing that “my vote is in play.” Even, to dip a toe into the fever swamps, gibbering James Carville has noticed it. Carville looked around and saw that people such as Hasan Piker, the anti-Semitic, “wasn’t-9/11-nifty?” Mao-wannabe, were gaining influence among young Democrat voters. Either the Democrats reject Piker, said Carville, or I reject the Democrats.
My point is that many of the most noteworthy Democratic candidates hail from la-la land. Some commentators argue that they represent youth, hence the future. I think that they are so extreme in their views that the majority of voters in most states will reject them. Since 2+2 still equals 4, this means most of them will lose. So, the sort-of-secret, nonetheless well-known weapon the Republicans command has nothing to do with the excellence or political potency of their own candidates. Rather, it follows from the extreme and widely unpalatable nature of Democrats’ marquee candidates. Where are the pro-American Democrats? Where are the Democrats who would proudly call themselves patriots? Who understand and laud the almost magical power of the free market? They used to exist. They are now a vanishing breed.
The other weapon the GOP possess is almost in the nature of a superpower. Its name is Donald Trump. Every few weeks, we are told that President Trump is finished, that MAGA (which stands, remember, for “Make America Great Again”) is history, that a more decorous normality is about to descend upon Washington. But that never seems to happen. Instead, most Trump-endorsed candidates win their primaries. Many go on to win their elections. The Wall Street Journal joked that President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he has, on his own accounting, won the war with Iran something like nine times. That is amusing. But the reality is that President Trump, with the conspicuous help of Israel, actually has won the war.
Henry Kissinger once said that the only time you could trust the Iranians to negotiate candidly is when they had run out of ammunition. That is probably true. But they have, for all intents and purposes, run out of ammunition. We took it out. It is possible that a further strike or two will be necessary, but there is not much left to strike. It is endgame time in Iran. The market will soar, the price of gasoline will fall, the GOP will extend its majority in both the House and the Senate. QED.
Comments