Politics

What to watch for in the governors’ races Given the razor-thin margins and an array of races that range from the compelling to the indecent (more on that later), the focus during these midterms has been on the Senate. That’s understandable, if not inevitable. But in thirty-six states, voters will also be selecting their next governor. Those races are of great local significance, of course. But they are also part of the national picture. Here are some of the trends to watch. Blue-state blues It’s possible that the most eyebrow-raising result come election night is not in a closely watched swing state like Georgia or Pennsylvania, but in deep-blue New York.

Hillary Clinton has an ominous warning ahead of the 2024 election: right-wing extremists, she said this week, are already planning to steal it. If they were, she would certainly know something about it. Hillary has been shrieking about “vast right-wing conspiracies” since the 1990s when she and her husband were mapping out their political futures of “Eight for Bill, Eight for Hill.” The poor woman just can’t catch a break. You'd have to hood Hillary like a falcon to stop her from talking about how elections have been stolen from her. She claimed that about the 2016 election, in which she seemingly forgot the state of Wisconsin existed for 104 days.

The Spectator's Amber Athey sat down with Newsmax's Greg Kelly last night to discuss Biden's recent interview with trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney. Watch here: [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://spectator.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022-10-24-Grabien-NewsmaxTV-Greg_Kelly_Reports-1699383.

Monday's release of the nation's report card on the academic performance of schoolchildren is just the latest stunning measure of how closed schools damaged young Americans. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which looks at the test scores of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading, is a devastating indictment of the nation's political leaders and teachers' unions, who collaborated to shut down schools and keep them shut for in-person learning long after those across most of the West had already reopened. We're only just beginning to comprehend the wreckage, which has had significant effects on school districts across the country, even after it was clear they could reopen safely. When Covid first arrived in America, its danger to young students was unclear.

Which of the zillion prophesied crises will engulf America next? At the moment, the most chattered-about is a “second civil war,” though some also worry that the United States could lapse more peacefully into autocracy. The left, of course, is consumed by fears of climate change drowning New York, while some on the nationalist right foresee a Camp of the Saints-style immigrant invasion overwhelming public services. Yet amid all the wandering imaginations and doomsday scenarios, there’s one contingency that has absolutely zero chance of happening: America as a Christian theocracy. With all due respect to Sohrab Ahmari and the Handmaid LARPers, there are greater odds of Beto O’Rourke being appointed god-emperor than of any kind of merger between church and state.

It was a relatively cool 85 degrees in Houston on the August evening thirty years ago when Republicans gathered at the Astrodome to renominate George H.W. Bush for the 1992 presidential election. The opening session’s speakers included Senator John McCain, Stanford professor Condoleezza Rice, and re-election campaign co-chairman Ken Lay, later to gain fame as a major figure in the Enron scandals. But the speech that would be the most memorable by far was delivered by a television commentator, syndicated columnist and former Richard Nixon hatchet man — the fifty-four-year-old Irish Catholic Pat Buchanan, who delivered what came to be known as “The Culture War Speech.

Lessons from Liz Ever wish your politics were a little more British? As Liz Truss heads to the exits after just six weeks in power, making her the shortest serving prime minister in the country’s history, that may seem a strange question. Westminster shenanigans feel more ignominious than enviable at the moment. Not to my colleague Matt Purple. Observing the Downing Street meltdown from Washington, he wonders what it must feel like to hold incompetent leaders accountable. He writes: If British politics has lately been ugly, grant it this much: at least they don’t have to stand for bad leaders. Truss was never a saint or a sun god; she was merely the current leader of the Conservative Party. Ho hum.