Politics Archives

Saturday

November 12, 2022

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.

Oliver Wiseman

Red ripple

Red ripple The red wave wasn’t to be. As I write, control of the Senate and the House both remain up for grabs. It looks likely that the Republican Party will grab control of the House while John Fetterman’s victory in Pennsylvania gives Democrats the upper hand in the battle for the Senate. The ramifications of a disappointing night for Republicans will be wide-ranging. To name a few, the results underscore the need for the party to move on from Donald Trump (more on that below), call for a rethink to the GOP message on abortion and leave House minority leader Kevin McCarthy with a much more complicated route to the Speaker’s chair. I was at what was supposed to be a raucous victory party thrown by McCarthy in downtown Washington last night.

Roger Kimball

How did I get the midterms so wrong?

How wrong can you be? About as wrong as I was about the character of the midterm elections. I thought there would be a red wave, fueled in part by high-octane orange fuel. Clearly I was wrong. It is no consolation to know that I was hardly alone in my assumptions. Nor is it much consolation to hear from Donald Trump that it was a “GREAT EVENING” because there were “174 wins and nine losses.” I didn’t check his math, but even if accurate it is obvious that there was no red wave. Several of his high-profile candidates lost, most conspicuously Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The fact that he lost to a man who is ostentatiously a mental incompetent added insult to injury.

Matt Purple

Why didn’t Democrats pay a price for their extremism?

The modern political pundit is a voice in the wilderness, a self-styled beacon of truth against a pampered and bought-off establishment. Yet to cut against the trend: I was wrong about last night's midterms. I thought it was going to be a Republican rout. Even after the Dobbs decision came down and Democrats saw a boost in the polls I still didn't think abortion would ever trump inflation and crime in the minds of voters. And while 2022 didn't see a blue wave, it sure didn't see a red wave either. Instead the scene this morning looks a lot like the status quo. If current vote totals hold, then the Senate will remain 50-50 with Kamala Harris breaking the tie, while Republicans haven't flipped enough congressional seats to retake the House.

Oliver Wiseman

Donald Trump is an albatross around the Republican neck

Donald Trump spent the days immediately before the midterms teasing and threatening his biggest Republican rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. At a rally in Philadelphia, he coined the nickname Ron DeSanctimonious. Then, on the night before the election, flying in his 757 from Ohio to Florida, he said that he thought a DeSantis presidential run would be a “mistake,” that “the base would not like it” and that “if he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.” DeSantis said nothing. Instead, he let the voters do the talking. And their voice was heard very clearly last night.

David Marcus

Another blue day for red New Yorkers

Lee Zeldin’s fairytale run for governor of New York fell short on Tuesday as he lost by roughly five points to incumbent Kathy Hochul. The race began months ago, and at first seemed out of reach for the Long Island congressman. But a strong campaign focused on crime pulled him to within striking distance before petering out. To put the race in perspective, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, whom Hochul replaced after his resignation in 2021, won the governorship by twenty-two points in 2018, and most prognosticators saw a similar romp in the cards for Hochul when the 2022 cycle began. But in the end, though he captured the imagination of the nation, Zeldin could not capture the governor’s mansion in Albany.