Politics

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that in the wake of Republicans taking the House, she's doing exactly what the octogenarian leadership class in this era of American decline does every time voters invite them to gracefully leave the stage: hold onto power. The decision by Pelosi to not seek election as leader of the Democratic minority, choosing instead to stay on as a kind of speaker emeritus, means she will be effectively looking over the shoulder of her successor, be that Hakeem Jeffries or another unfortunate soul. She's Democratic Speaker for Life in all but name. She will be feted by a sycophantic media, which will glorify her and build her up, even as she overshadows the people actually tasked with running Congress. But then, that's mostly just the media anyway.

“Ballot harvesting.” To some, it’s a creepy term, conjuring images of hulking party machines plowing through passive fields of citizens, threshing their votes and delivering them to the ballot box. To others, the whole thing seems practically a conspiracy theory — a catch-all for sore losers who can’t understand how voters could have rejected their team. Feelings aside, ballot harvesting is a reality for much of the country. In twenty-seven states, your ballot can be returned by someone other than you. Further, only twelve of those twenty-seven have any limit at all on the number of ballots a person can turn in, meaning an eager harvester can show up with dozens or hundreds of ballots.

The day after the election last week, Roger Kimball posted a column here at The Spectator World acknowledging that he had no explanation for the failure of the vaunted red wave to sweep in from the sea. I had no explanation either, and still don’t after six days of ruminating on the question. Nevertheless I am forming a couple of tentative theories, in however provisional a way. Early this morning, I received a post from one Sasha Stone — a Substack writer previously unknown to me — titled “Joe Biden: The Man Who Wasn’t There.

He’s running Politics is a game of unwritten rules. In announcing his bid for a return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago last night, Donald Trump is betting that those rules haven’t changed quite as much as it has seemed in the days since the midterms. By pledging to “make America great and glorious again,” Trump is making a two-part and paradoxical gamble. First, Trump is banking on one of the oldest rules in the book: the power of incumbency. Despite what you might read in QAnon chatrooms, Trump is not the sitting president. But his unusual position of ex-president running for election means he is running on his track record. Evidently he and his team think that is their best bet.

“America’s comeback starts right now,” declared former and possibly future president Donald J. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club and private residence on Tuesday evening. Speaking for over an hour in uncharacteristically measured tones, Trump sounded downright businesslike, laying out the achievements of his first term, his aspirations for a possible future term, and the demerits of his once and likely future opponent Joe Biden. “President Trump’s tone,” Bryan Leib, a former Pennsylvania congressional candidate and executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, messaged me from the floor, was “calm, confident, and unifying.” About 18 minutes in, Trump matter-of-factly pronounced what everyone was waiting to hear: that he is a candidate for president in 2024.

In a move that he's been telegraphing for some time, Florida senator Rick Scott is challenging Mitch McConnell to be leader of the Senate GOP. Scott and McConnell have openly feuded about the Senate candidates this cycle, with Scott embracing a big tent approach even as McConnell spent more according to who he thought would back his stance for leadership than out of interest in achieving a GOP majority. His expenditures in Alabama, Alaska and New Hampshire are now examples deployed by those who blame McConnell and his attendant groups for the failures of the cycle. Whether this blame is deserved is dependent on who you're asking — but there certainly is some blame directed at Mitch and the choices his allies made.