Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

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.

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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.

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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.

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Letting John Fetterman debate was political malpractice

Like the proprietors of a gimp show at a carnival, Pennsylvania Democrats apparently get off on making the average viewer of their sideshow candidate feel deeply uncomfortable. Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, hobbled by a stroke that has done significant damage to his capacity, was wheeled onto stage at the sole Pennsylvania Senate debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz where the performance was cringe-inducing to a point that it made you want to change the channel, as if upon returning perhaps the dark joke that this man could be a senator would be over. This was a travesty.

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Stephen L. Miller

Hillary is the queen of election denial

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.

Monday

Paul du Quenoy

Why Trump is soaring as Boris falls

“In order to make our country successful, safe, and glorious again, I will probably have to do it again,” said former president Donald J. Trump at a rally in Texas last Saturday. It was yet another hint that he will seek the presidency in 2024. Over the weekend, British politics simultaneously fluttered at the possibility that former prime minister Boris Johnson might return to office following the resignation of his successor Liz Truss. Trump and Johnson share more than a scintilla of similarity. Large and blond, both men made their way into politics as flippant populist spoilers, antagonizing establishment critics while inspiring outsiders who felt excluded from elite decision making.

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Ben Domenech

The data is in and the cost of school closings was terrible

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.

David Marcus

A Republican takes the lead in… New York?

After two weeks of tightening polls in the race for governor of New York, a survey released Friday showed a one point lead for Republican challenger Lee Zeldin in his race against incumbent Kathy Hochul. This is a political bombshell in the making, and one would have expected some kind of major pivot or shakeup from the Democrats. But thus far, at least on the issues that matter most, Hochul’s tank has been empty, despite a weak effort on Saturday to address rising crime in the subway. This past week, Hochul was on Long Island, not far from Zeldin’s home, to talk about a state initiative to fix potholes. Yes, potholes.

Sunday

Roger Kimball

How the midterm polls became Democratic fan fiction

Psephologists of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your fibs! I write toward the end of September, when many pollsters are still treating their prognostications as a form of fan fiction. For example, one poll has star trooper Mark Kelly ahead of Blake Masters by 6.2 points in the Arizona race for US Senate. That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is ridiculous. Punditry isn’t prophecy, but mark my words: Blake Masters, absent some intervening catastrophe, is going to win that race and win convincingly. I am going to stick my neck out and say the same about John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz in the Senate race in Pennsylvania. “The polls” have Fetterman ahead by 4.5 points.

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Matt Purple

The Christian nationalism boogeyman

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.

culture
Ben Domenech

Pat Buchanan and thirty years of culture wars

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.

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Steve Bannon is off to the slammer

Tabloid conservatism is the felicitous phrase that Sam Tanenhaus, one of our most astute analysts of the modern right, gave to the approach that Donald Trump, who faces various possible indictments, and Steve Bannon, who has just been sentenced to four months in prison and a measly $6,500 fine for failing to testify before Congress’s January 6 Committee, concocted as an alternative to the stuffy establishment mode that had prevailed in the GOP. A self-proclaimed populist, Bannon turned the website Breitbart.com into a juggernaut on the right and propelled the Trump campaign to victory. Absent his hard-edged approach, which included bringing various former Bill Clinton inamoratas to a debate with Hillary, it seems doubtful that Trump would have won in 2016.