Michigan

Former vice president Joe Biden had an impressive showing on ‘Mini Tuesday’, crushing the delegate count and potentially sticking the fork in Sen. Bernie Sanders’s faltering campaign, but Biden’s sudden primary victories belie major concerns about his ability to translate that success into a general election. Biden pulled in two quick victories in Mississippi and Missouri, which signaled big trouble for Sanders since he lost Missouri by less than half a percentage point against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden continued his sweep by taking Michigan, the biggest prize of the night and a state in which the Democratic socialist pulled off an upset victory in the last election.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.

One interpretation of the midterm election results in the Rust Belt, where Democrats made substantial gains (though not across the board), is that Trump’s unpopularity dragged down Republicans. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania propelled Trump to victory in 2016, and his inability to sustain a base of support there cost Republican candidates for state and federal office – or so the interpretation goes. There’s probably a measure of truth to this. Trump’s approval in Michigan, for instance, lags at 44 percent, according to CNN exit polls; the state re-elected a Democratic senator without much fanfare, as well as a new governor, and several well-established GOP House incumbents were ousted.

Paying homage to Republican national security officials and touting your allegiance to intelligence agencies might seem like an odd strategy to channel the enthusiasm of anti-Trump voters this election cycle but it’s the course chosen by a handful of CIA-operatives-turned-Democrats with decent odds to win House seats today. Foremost among them is Elissa Slotkin, a former ‘Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy’ in the Obama administration who is quick to point out that she also served dutifully under George W. Bush, and apparently assumes that will have electoral appeal among voters in Michigan’s 8th congressional district.