Politics Archives

Monday

November 14, 2022

The Republican circular firing squad

The saying used to go that "Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line," though lately Republicans seem mostly to fall on the floor. The circular firing squad has become a mainstay of GOP politics, even when — and this is what really sets them apart — they win elections rather than lose them. Republicans seem to love few things more than turning the guns inward and squealing "fire!!" So it's been since the 2022 midterms. The circular firing began with the party's moderate wing, which is always down for a little anti-Trump warfare. Governor Larry Hogan was on CNN last weekend where he trashed Trump for allegedly costing Republicans not just this election but the last two as well.

circular firing squad desantis influencers

Oliver Wiseman

When Biden met Xi

When Biden met Xi Joe Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping this morning was arguably the most important of his presidency so far. The two leaders spoke for more than three hours ahead of the G20 summit in Bali. It is their first in-person meeting since Biden became president and it comes at a low ebb for US-China relations. The aim appears to have been to deliver a reassuring message of deescalation and cooperation. “I absolutely believe there need not be a new Cold War,” said Biden after the meeting. “We’re going to compete vigorously, but I’m not looking for conflict. I’m looking to manage this competition responsibly.

Dave Seminara

Our leaders will learn nothing from these elections

Elections are an opportunity for us to deliver messages to political leaders most of us will never meet. We can’t send Donald Trump a text, nor can we talk about inflation over an extravagantly expensive Jeni’s ice cream cone with Joe Biden. The best we can do is to vote and hope that in our collective numbers we can make ourselves clear. Yet early indications are that the leaders of both parties are poised to learn absolutely nothing from the midterm elections. Let’s examine some of their delusional reactions. The White House hasn’t commented on whether Joe Biden played the recent $2 billion Powerball drawing (which CNN recently accused of being systemically racist), but if he didn’t buy a ticket, he should have.

Ben Domenech

We can blame Mitch McConnell, too

So now it's time to figure out who to blame. The post-election spin from the world of Mitch McConnell is that the GOP's failure to flip the Senate is on Donald Trump and National Republican Senatorial Committee head Rick Scott, and that candidate selection and expenditures are the reason that we don't have a Republican majority in the upper house. For anyone who paid attention, this doesn't pass the smell test. In the wake of a number of fractious primaries, GOP Senate candidates essentially went dark in the summer, their ad budgets expended and without the resources to get back on the air. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer and the DSCC defined the Republican outsiders for a new audience of general election voters.

John Pietro

Time for the GOP to call out Democrats’ primaries meddling

If there is one lesson the Republican Party needs to learn from this year’s elections, it is that fringe politics and conspiracy theories are not popular. The GOP lost independents by three points to Democrats, a fatal statistic for any midterms. Poor candidate quality, a problem Senator Mitch McConnell pointed out to many Republicans’ chagrin, lost the party winnable seats across the country. The Democrats played a small part in this result through their cynical support for far-right candidates in Republican primaries who they suspected (correctly) would be easier to beat in November. Through various PACs, Democrats spent around $53.275 million to elevate 13 extreme Republican candidates, six of whom won their primaries. All six lost in November.

Saturday

November 12, 2022

William Murchison

Saying bye-bye to Beto

Bye-bye, Beto. Well, the self-serving political show-off known to Karl Rove in his Wall Street Journal commentaries as Robert Francis O’Rourke, of El Paso, Texas (“Roberto” in Español = “Beto”). Texans rejected his latest overtures and entreaties, re-electing Republican Governor Greg Abbott by an 11 percent margin on November 8. The margin ought to have been larger, given Beto’s lack of serviceable credentials, and it would have been, save for all the outside money and media fawning that came Beto's way. Still, 11 percent did the job. It finished, in Texas at least, Beto’s career of self-promotion, removing him from the reach of the credulous and naïve. At least I hope so!

Elle Gyges

Kevin McCarthy’s Faustian bargain

If the returns from Tuesday are any indication, most American voters are breathing a sigh of relief. Thanks to split-ticketing, third-party candidates and some abstentions, the forecasted Red Tsunami seems to have been more of a mild upswell. Yes, poll workers are still counting votes in some races — and Georgia’s Senate runoffs will extend past Thanksgiving. But it seems Americans have once again voted for divided government by giving Republicans a slim majority in the House of Representatives. Victorious politicians often talk about “trusting the voters,” but this time the voters really seem to have had a sense of humor. Just as they are deposing House Democrats, they are also tying would-be speaker Kevin McCarthy to the whipping post.

Friday

November 11, 2022

Ben Domenech

The time to move on from boomer Republicanism is now

Having been saddled by everyone involved with the largest portion of blame for Tuesday's election disappointment, Donald Trump's descent into the pit of despair takes exactly the form you could expect: a series of Mean Girls rants about everyone more popular than he is in the Republican Party. There has been much talk over the years about how there's a Good Trump and a Bad Trump, but the truth about our 45th president is that, just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of the Hulk, he's always angry — he just controls it better when times are good. Now that times are bad — or as bad as they can be when you have millions more Republicans voting than Democrats and you just dislodged Nancy Pelosi from power — he is reverting to his true form. It ain't pretty.

genghis donald trump boomer republicanism establishment

Oliver Wiseman

A tale of two post-midterm missives

A tale of two post-election missives With the votes still being counted and Republicans coming to terms with Tuesday’s disappointing results, the last few days have seen the publication of two very different score-settling memos. The first was from Mike Pence on Wednesday. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pence divulged new details about his “last days with Donald Trump” Pence details his interactions with the former president in the days between the 2020 election and Inauguration Day in January 2021. He paints a picture of Trump losing patience with his VP. Pence recounts a conversation on the morning of the day Congress was set to certify the election results: I rose early that day and worked on my statement to Congress. When the phone rang a little after 11 a.m.

Thursday

November 10, 2022

Roger Kimball

Republicans need to figure out mail-in voting

I have been thinking about the phrase “the fix was in.” What it means is that a certain result was predetermined. It carries with it a suggestion — but only, I think, a suggestion — of something, if not quite illicit, then at least not quite above board. Why have I been thinking about that pregnant phrase? If you said “the midterm elections,” go to the head of the class. I have no idea whether there was anything corrupt or underhanded about the election, notwithstanding the Caligula’s horse moment of John Fetterman’s election to the United States Senate. It was odd, no doubt, that the people of the great state of Pennsylvania elected a mentally incompetent trust-fund leftie who never saw a dead baby he didn’t like.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

The normie election

Since Tuesday’s shocking midterm results started trickling in, the chattering classes have scrambled to make sense of yet another election we forecast so very poorly. The media promised a red wave of epic proportions; instead, President Biden had the best midterm elections of any US president since 2002, despite his dreadful approval ratings. In the lead-up to the vote count, poll after poll found that Americans’ top issues were inflation, the economy, crime and immigration — kitchen table issues on which the Democrats have performed abysmally in recent years. Everything pointed to a very bad night for the president’s party. So why didn’t voters send a clear message to Democrats about their misplaced priorities, as we in the media were so sure they would?

Cockburn

Hurricane Nicole backs Ron DeSantis over Trump

The red wave didn’t happen, but Mother Nature is unleashing waves of torrential rain on Mar-a-Lago ahead of the wedding of Donald Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, to billionaire Michael Boulos, set for this weekend. Cockburn can’t help but marvel how Hurricane Nicole spared Ron DeSantis’s reelection on Tuesday, but is now, along with Republicans everywhere, unleashing some Old Testament-style vengeance on the Trump family. Tiffany Trump is reportedly “flipping out” as Mar-a-Lago has been partially evacuated and staff sent home ahead of the impending storm. Much like the red wave Trump was prepared to take credit for, Page Six reports that many Trump friends “might not make it” to the party (just as they failed to make it to their own victory parties earlier this week).

Matt Bilinsky

The battle for Los Angeles drags on

On the surface, the contrast between the two candidates in the Los Angeles mayor’s race couldn't be starker. Rick Caruso – a white, family-friendly mall impresario with a sparkling tan and pristine suits — against Karen Bass — a black female nurse-turned-community organizer-turned congresswoman. Yet, when Bass and Caruso were asked at the closing of their initial debate, “What is one word to describe the state of Los Angeles?” they both had the same answer: “Crisis.

Amber Duke

J.D. Vance was practically destined to win Ohio

Republican J.D. Vance wiped the floor with Democrat Tim Ryan on Tuesday night. It was a surprise for all the professional pundits only because the Ohio Senate race had been obscured by all kinds of white noise. The mainstream media worked overtime to paint the contest as a toss-up and the Democrats insisted they were going to flip the seat. Just a couple of weeks ahead of the election, multiple polls had the race at a statistical tie. Vance ended up winning by seven points. Several Republican consultants told me that they never believed the race would be close. Ohio, they pointed out, was ground zero for the working-class realignment that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016. Trump won the state again by eight points in the 2020 presidential election.

Daniel DePetris

Don’t expect the midterms to change our foreign policy

President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies were expecting a romp on Tuesday. So were many of the career prognosticators surveying the election landscape. Instead, many of the close Senate races, including in all-important Georgia and Nevada, haven’t been called. Those of us who have been staring at the returns for hours on end still don’t know the full extent of the results. But what can be said with reasonable certainty is that however the balance of power stacks up, foreign policy is likely to be the same as it ever was. The status quo is an all-powerful force inside the Beltway, where conventional wisdom rules the roost and any tilt away from the mainstream is usually corrected before an honest discussion can be had on the merits. Part of this is institutional.

Teresa Mull

How Fetterman appealed to a suffering Pennsylvania

Dr. Mehmet Oz has conceded to John Fetterman but has yet to say anything publicly, probably because, like many Republicans — myself included — he’s just not sure what to say. How could Fetterman, a tattooed, scowling, sloppily dressed goon with a concerning and unsightly neck lump (when I Googled his name, “Fetterman neck” was the third suggested search term), whose debate performance a mere two weeks ago was nothing short of pathetic, possibly have defeated a polished, successful, well-spoken heart surgeon for US Senate? Fetterman’s victory is almost unbelievable, until you zoom out and look at the state of Pennsylvania and most of the country.

Wednesday

November 9, 2022

Matt McDonald

Georgia gets ready to runoff… again

Atlanta, Georgia Here we go again. For the second time in as many years, Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock is headed to a runoff. Neither he nor his Republican opponent Herschel Walker has secured 50 percent of the vote in Georgia, the state office confirmed Wednesday afternoon. The pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Heisman Trophy-winning running back will face off again for the US Senate seat on Tuesday December 6. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jolt newsletter made clear on Wednesday morning, “split-ticket voters” were the key to pushing the Senate race to a runoff.

Paul du Quenoy

At Mar-a-Lago as the red wave died out

It was a dark and stormy election night at Mar-a-Lago, former president Donald Trump’s Florida home and private club, which is the marquee residence of our island resort community of Palm Beach. In the world outside American politics, Tropical Storm Nicole was gathering strength and bearing down on us. Earlier in the day, the Island (always with a capital “I,” unless you’re not really a resident and don’t know any better) was placed under a hurricane warning. About an hour before the party started, the town issued a mandatory evacuation order to take effect at 7 a.m. the following morning. All this was forgotten as euphoric Republicans gathered inside the gates, snugly out of the gusts and downpour.

Ben Domenech

The winners and losers of the 2022 midterms

In every election, there are the winners and losers, but there are also winners and losers away from the ballot box, which oftentimes are more important and have a longer tail than the vote-getters. In the 2022 midterms, here are the winners and losers as I see them. Loser: Donald Trump Well, this one is obvious. The former president weighed in with all his political energy behind multiple candidates in this cycle, particularly in divisive primaries and statewide races where he often chose outsiders over more experienced candidates. The Trump fatigue factor was clearly a problem this time around, with his choices in some races utterly rejected by voters.

Stephen L. Miller

Time to cancel Trump’s Political Apprentice

Donald Trump did not emerge from the wonkish world of conservative politics and policy. He was a product of the national media and international entertainment industry, and he brought that unique swagger to the White House in 2016, after several years of flirting with the idea in interviews. He honed his image of a savvy know-it-all billionaire businessman on NBC’s The Apprentice. The show was number one in the network television ratings for several years, as Trump plucked C- and D-list celebrities to compete for his affections. But the success of the over-the-top WWE showman persona that put Trump in the White House has not rubbed off on the political candidates whom he's selected over the course of the last three elections — 2018, 2020 and now 2022.