Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Friday

Amber Duke

Could Gretchen Whitmer lose in Michigan?

The gubernatorial showdown in Michigan has quickly become one of the most exciting races heading into the 2022 midterm elections. Just a few months ago, it seemed that incumbent Governor Gretchen Whitmer would easily secure re-election. Now, she is neck-and-neck with Republican Tudor Dixon. Things looked good for Whitmer early on, at least partially because the Republican primary was a mess. More than a dozen candidates threw their hat into the ring for the scandal-spoiled race. One of those candidates was arrested for his role in the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, while multiple others were disqualified as part of a signature forgery scheme.

Tudor Dixon (left) and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (right) (Getty Images)
Oliver Wiseman

Why these midterms will be the crime elections

The crime elections The District of Columbia’s City Council might seem a strange place to start a political newsletter a few days out from the midterms. As Democrats will never miss an opportunity to remind you, voters in Washington, DC will not get a say in a race that will help decide control of Congress. But a meeting of city leaders this week is an instructive part a national story that will be central to next week’s vote. On Tuesday, the DC Council voted 12-0 to support a rewriting of the capital’s criminal code. Reforms include reduced mandatory minimum sentences, the expansion of the right to jury trials for most misdemeanors, a broadening of the opportunities for early release and the elimination of accomplice liability in felony murder cases.

Thursday

Teresa Mull

Poverty is a major issue in the midterms

My friend here in rural Pennsylvania is the director of our local anti-hunger program. It’s orchestrated through the YMCA and has been ongoing for years, mostly providing supplemental food for rural children. But the program started running at full throttle when Covid hit in March 2020, and now, more than two years later, my friend tells me they’re doing about 25 food distributions a month — more than they were doing at the height of Covid. What’s more, he’s seeing twice the number of people lining up for free food, and 85 percent of those people have jobs. “When people think of hunger, they think of poverty,” my friend says.

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Stephen L. Miller

Democrats made Kari Lake a star

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, the national media and the Hillary Clinton campaign devised a plan to elevate Donald Trump and so-called “lunacy” over a field of up-and-coming Republican politicians. According to New York Times journalist Amy Chozick, who was embedded with Hillary Clinton’s campaign from inception to death, campaign manager Robby Mook called a meeting with an agenda of specifically asking “How do we maximize Donald Trump?” Chozick also noted how Mook “salivated when a debate came on, and Trump would start to speak. ‘Shhhhh,’ Robby said, practically pressing his nose up to the TV. ‘I’ve gahtz to get me some Trump.’” We all know how that worked out.

Wednesday

Matt Purple

Eight Democrats we all hope lose this November

It is midterm election season, an important period on our political calendar as it marks that there's only two years to go until the next presidential election. And while something called the "blue wave" supposedly took hold last summer, the latest polling shows that Democrats are in trouble. How much trouble? You do hate to wish ill on a party running a campaign based on third-trimester abortion access and an imagined threat from brownshirts. But given the choice, here are eight Democrats we wouldn't mind seeing ousted this year. 8. Representative Jerry Nadler Nadler presided over both impeachments of Donald Trump and is a fairly reliable progressive. The New York rep is not the most inept Dem out there — but then he did almost dislocate his nose trying to remove a Covid mask.

Cockburn

White House deletes tweet bragging of Biden’s role in inflation crisis

You know the Democrats are grasping at straws when you see the White House Twitter account praising President Biden for this year’s increased Social Security checks. Particularly, Cockburn is at pains to point out, as the increase in Social Security is indirectly indexed to inflation. "Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in ten years through President Biden's leadership," the White House bragged on Tuesday. Even Twitter's in-house moderators were taken aback, deigning to slap a "context" label on the post. After helpful users added the missing context on Wednesday, the White House's tweet mysteriously disappeared. How curious!

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Oliver Wiseman

The meaning of Biden’s midterm meandering

What Biden’s midterm meandering reveals On Tuesday night, Joe Biden characterized next week’s midterms as “a choice between two vastly different visions for America.” It is just one of the ways in which Biden has painted the vote as a high-stakes contest. Earlier in the year, the focus was on “ultra-MAGA” Republicans with the November contest framed as a “battle for the soul of America.” Now he has fallen back on a tried-and-tested Democratic strategy of fear-mongering over Republican designs on Medicare and Social Security. Hardly an indicator that the president and his party think things are going well. But as striking as Biden’s closing message is, where he is delivering it really drives the message home.

Amber Duke

Union Station is the perfect backdrop for Biden’s speech

Less than a week out from the 2022 midterm elections, the White House announced that President Joe Biden would be delivering a speech warning of alleged "threats" to democracy. The backdrop for the address tonight that will almost assuredly accuse his fellow countrymen of being extremists and traitors? Washington, DC's Union Station. In many ways, Union Station is the ideal backdrop for a speech by the leader of the Democrat Party. It is the perfect embodiment of what the left's foolish and deranged policies have done to our nation: reduced a once thriving and majestic place into a crime-infested trash heap. Just seven years ago, I interned down the street from Union Station.

A woman sits with her dogs outside Union Station March 22, 2016 in Washington, DC (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

Tuesday

Leighton Woodhouse

Saving San Francisco

San Francisco mayor London Breed held a press conference on October 5 concerning her city’s most deadly problem: the open air drug market in the Tenderloin neighborhood. The speakers included the police chief and two newly appointed allies of the mayor: the district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, and the supervisor for the district adjacent to the Tenderloin, Matt Dorsey. The message from each of them was clear: the police and the district attorney would no longer ignore open drug dealing and public drug use, which has become endemic in downtown San Francisco. “Let’s be clear: selling drugs is not legal,” the mayor said. “Using drugs out in the open is completely unacceptable.” The city could be forgiven for needing the reminder.

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David Marcus

We should be better than Paul Pelosi conspiracy theories

Always give it three days. This is a golden rule of journalism that requires reporters and commentators to wait when speculating on big salacious stories. It's a rule that works, but not when it's ignored, as it has been by both sides of the political spectrum in the case of the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House. Democrats pounced, as usual, on their claims of MAGA extremism; meanwhile, too many on the right have indulged in disgusting conspiracy theories about the assault. On Sunday morning, less than two days after the news of the assault broke, the new Twitter head honcho Elon Musk weighed in. Responding to a tweet by Hillary Clinton alleging a political motive, Musk tweeted that there was a tiny chance that something else had prompted the violence.

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Cockburn

Tim Ryan has big ‘divorced guy’ energy

Has Tim Ryan thrown in the towel? The Democratic candidate for Senate in Ohio won’t know the final outcome in his bout with J.D. Vance for another week. So why, Cockburn asks, does he give off the downtrodden vibe of a man locked in a custody battle? “I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know what else I can say,” the congressman tweeted yesterday evening, presumably with a shotgun to his chin. “If we don’t meet our final end-of-month fundraising deadline tonight, we risk losing this race — and Ohio could fall off the map.” Cockburn wonders how neighboring Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia would feel about Ohio falling off the map. Extending Lake Erie southward a few hundred miles could offer some lucrative real estate opportunities.

Monday

Grace Curley

Why the Democrats’ ‘election denier’ trope is backfiring

In New Hampshire, the race between Democratic senator Maggie Hassan and retired Army Brigadier General Donald Bolduc is heating up. Politico revealed on Friday that the GOP super PAC Sentinel Action Fund, encouraged by Bolduc’s recent surge in the polls, confirmed a $1 million ad buy for the Republican. Do Democrats still think Bolduc’s defeat is a sure thing? During the primaries, Democrat-aligned groups sure seemed to. They found the idea of a Hassan-Bolduc matchup so appealing that they actually boosted the pro-Trump Bolduc by donating to his campaign. Why did they like him so much more than his opponent Chuck Morse? Well, Bolduc is an "election denier.

stacey abrams

Sunday

Tony Woodlief

Politicians’ backstabbing family members are the worst

Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family. I recall Michael Corleone’s warning to Fredo from The Godfather every time I see a political candidate’s family members denounce him in public. Even mobsters understood that family comes first. Not in agreement are the fourteen relatives of US Senate candidate Adam Laxalt of Nevada, who have endorsed his opponent. Ten of them likewise posed for a photo with the state's Democratic governor in 2018. One of Laxalt’s cousins accuses him of “using the family name to pursue a political career,” a claim you’ll only hear because she’s using the family name to advance it.

Saturday

Matt McDonald

On the ground with Obama, Warnock and Abrams in Georgia

College Park, Georgia Former president Barack Obama came down to Georgia stump for Senator Raphael Warnock and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. But more significantly, the 44th president of the United States dedicated a good chunk of his stage time on Friday to mocking Warnock’s opponent Herschel Walker. In a move reminiscent of his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech — which supposedly provoked Donald Trump to run for the presidency in 2016 — Obama performed a stand-up bit to demonstrate that Walker’s proficiency as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star did not equip him to serve in the US Senate. “Let’s do a thought experiment,” Obama said. “Let’s say you were at the airport, and you see Mr. Walker, and you say, ‘hey!

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Friday

Oliver Wiseman

All signs point to a red wave

All signs point to a red wave It’s now just under two weeks until the midterms. Judging by the mood music on both sides of the aisle, all signs point to a very good night for the Republican Party. In the last few weeks, Democratic anxiety that their summer bounce had faded has morphed into something approaching a full-blown panic. The party’s closing message has shifted away from abortion and democracy — themes that many Democrats had hoped could deliver a stronger-than-expected showing come November — and onto the economy and healthcare. Look at the flight paths of the party’s big beasts as well as where last-minute money is being spent, and it all indicates a party playing defense — and struggling.

Thursday

Josh Hammer

Now is the time for a strong social conservatism

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation. At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.

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Matt Purple

Democrats are losing because liberalism has become cruel

Welp, so much for the blue wave. That towering electoral tsunami, which was to deluge the midterm races in a soggy detritus of worn masks and Planned Parenthood pamphlets, has given way to a stark reality: 2022 is a Republican year. It was always a Republican year, as some of us have been pointing out. Voters simply weren't about to prioritize third-trimester abortions over rising crime and the price of beef. So it was that Jill Biden this week was dispatched to campaign in Rhode Island. Rhode Island. And while she no doubt made a pitstop at Brown to hobnob with her fellow doctorates, she was mainly there to campaign for endangered Democrats. In Rhode Island. A Democratic congressional PAC, meanwhile, is dumping money into deep-blue New Jersey.

Wednesday

Jennifer Sey

When will Fauci admit the ‘open schools’ parents were right?

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

Teresa Mull

A healthy Fetterman would have lost the debate too

Last night’s debate between Pennsylvania US Senate candidates Republican Mehmet Oz and Democrat John Fetterman, was, as The Spectator’s own Ben Domenech described it, “political malpractice.” Watching Fetterman mumble, stumble, stutter, and glitch his way through answers made Joe Biden on a bad day sound like FDR delivering his stirring “Fear Itself” speech. But stroke or no stroke, Fetterman has no record to laud, and the policies he promotes are indefensible. Fetterman showed why he is unfit to serve right off the bat when the moderators (the real stars of the show) asked the candidates, “What qualifies you to be a US senator?” Both Oz and Fetterman seemed to confuse this basic question with “Why are you running?

Oliver Wiseman

The Alaska GOP votes to punish Mitch McConnell

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.