Arizona

In his first outdoor rally since his July 13 near assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke to a crowd in Asheboro, North Carolina, Wednesday, surrounded by panes of bulletproof glass. The rally was held between hangars at the North Carolina Aviation Museum. Storage boxes were stacked around the perimeter to create additional walls and to block sight lines, and snipers were positioned on all the roofs.  During the rally, Trump spoke of the Biden administration’s national security failures, notably the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and the Russia/Ukraine and Gaza wars. Trump said that if he wins the election, he will ask for the resignation of every senior military official involved with the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruling that upheld an abortion ban from 1864 had Democratic campaign managers practically breaking out their tap shoes. In between the breathless rants about how “women will die” because of the ruling (that Arizona’s attorney general immediately announced she would not enforce), the opportunists of the left couldn’t hide their true ambition. John Heilemann told the nodding eggheads at Morning Joe that the “political effect” of the ruling “could not be better for Joe Biden.” And there it is: Democrats are far less concerned with an archaic abortion ban and far more concerned with changing the political winds for their floundering incumbent. Can you blame them?

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the bipartisan independent from Arizona, announced Tuesday she would not seek re-election. This isn’t the biggest shock, considering Americans’ current aversion to conversation and compromise.  The senator kept silent for months, avoiding any questions about her political future. But over that time, her approval polls remained as low as her Election Day chances.  In a social media post, Sinema lamented the current era of hyperpartisanship.  "It’s all or nothing. The outcome is less important than beating the other guy,” she said in a brief video. “The only political victories that matter these days are symbolic... Compromise is a dirty word.

Newly-minted Maryland Senate candidate David Trone threatened to “execute” a delivery worker at one of his business locations in Tempe, Arizona, according to a police report exclusively obtained by The Spectator. Trone, who has accumulated millions of dollars as the founder and co-owner of the country’s largest independent wine and spirits retailer, Total Wine & More, was in Arizona on December 15, 2021. It was there that he allegedly threatened to execute Crescent Crown Distributing merchandiser Cody Huard, who was at the time making a delivery at the Total Wine Tempe location; Huard called the police following a heated run-in with Trone.

“What’s the problem with Arizona?” I’ve been asked this question countless times in the past week, as I was after Election Day 2020. That year, it took nine days for major media organizations to call my home state for President Joe Biden. This time around, the major races were called after six, but several down-ticket contests still hang in the balance. Friends as far away as Hungary and Brazil asked how their entire nations can count votes in a few hours, while it takes Arizona a week or more. Not to mention Floridians, where races were called an hour after polls closed. Back in 2000, the Sunshine State was the electoral laughing stock. Now, it’s Arizona’s turn. Boy, did we earn it. Two decades ago, Florida’s presidential tally between George W.

The dust is still settling around the congressional midterms, but it looks like Republicans will retake the House by a very slim margin and Democrats will have an ever-so-slight lead in the Senate. But with stubbornly moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Republicans can be fairly confident the upper chamber will not try to advance the most extreme parts of President Biden’s agenda, even if they do increase their majority by one seat in the December runoff in Georgia. And of course, because of the flip in the House, those uber-progressive proposals will never make it up to the Senate. The governor’s houses in Maryland and Massachusetts may have flipped blue, but Republicans knew they were lucky to be holding them in the first place.

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.