Today’s. Miscellaneous political news - Part 9

When you find yourself agreeing with Ann Coulter.

Um no, youngkin sounds English. ‘kin’ goes back to middle English with Greek roots ( or middle earth 😜 )

He’s such an ass trying to make anything racial to rile up his deplorable followers

I’m kind of curious how many of those are election deniers who were either attending the Jan 6 insurrection or are current members of Congress who were doing things like giving guided tours of the capital for other insurrectionists prior to the riot, trying to elevate false slates of electors or other traitor-y things that should have rendered them ineligible for election in the first place.

Is it possible that some of them could be found guilty of attempting to disrupt an official proceeding of Congress and not be seated in January because they are ineligible? 🤞

I think you might be celebrating a little too early.  Mark Kelly, the Democrat is the projected winner in Arizona and Masto (D) might win the senate race in New Mexico. Democrats only need to win New Mexico or Georgia to keep control.  Republicans have to win both to control the Senate.

And the House is a toss up, but races are breaking for Democrats.

Republicans had every advantage - unpopular president, sky high inflation, high gas prices, people worried about the direction of the country, congressional districts rigged and gerrymandered in their favor, voter suppression bills etc.  The election should have been a landslide victory for Republicans, but Trump lost another election for them.  People are tired of his drama and he backed the wrong candidates.

The elections were not rigged, Trump is just a loser.  And now, the Republican Party is reaping the benefits of sticking with Trump.

aj2hall
Masto, Nevada.. inch by inch!!

This is fascinating. I remember when Republicans had a postmortem after losing an election, and then promptly ignored it. Democrats had their problems, but in much of the country, it seems that voters have judged the GOP as too extreme. This is a bit from today’s NYT about what Republicans might do:





“ It’s unclear whether any of the Republican introspection about the election will make a difference. After the party’s losses in 2012, a post-mortem by the Republican National Committee counseled a move to the center, especially on immigration, to appeal to Latino voters and other voters of color. Republicans did the opposite, turning to Mr. Trump, who vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, with what initially seemed like positive results for the party. Since then, he has led Republican candidates to underperform in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

In an interview on Friday, Representative Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican who lost his primary after voting to impeach Mr. Trump, said Republicans had winning policy messages on education and so-called election integrity. But candidates then took those messages to extremes, he said, with talk of children identifying as cats or bamboo ballots manipulated by the Chinese. (The Trump-backed Republican who beat Mr. Meijer in the primary lost on Tuesday.)

“There’s this temptation to give in to those who view politics as entertainment and identity rather than policy,” he said. “It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot of folks who really enjoy and want to continue to reap the benefits of conservative governance, but what they’re a little bit less crazy on is conservative politics.” He called that politics “self-soothing and disconnected from reality.”

Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina and the head of the Democratic Governors Association, said in an interview on Friday that voters had assessed the economic issues that Republicans thought would be their deliverance, and weighed them against the prospect of Republican governance.

“Voters are not one-dimensional,” he said, adding that they ultimately opted for pragmatic leadership over “MAGA extremists who hang on to conspiracy theorists.”

Chris Sununu, the moderate Republican governor of New Hampshire, said on Friday that the policies his party put forward had turned voters off. A proposal by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, for a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, with exceptions for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest or threatened the life of the mother, was supposed to be a moderate position for the G.O.P. to rally around.

Instead, it fueled a sense that Republicans were pushing extreme policies even onto Democratic states. Coupled with the plan by Rick Scott, the head of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, to “sunset” the current versions of Medicare and Social Security, those policies were unnecessary “bits of gasoline on the fire,” Mr. Sununu said on a SiriusXM radio show.

And they fed a broader narrative that, for all of voters’ qualms about Democratic policies, they simply could not turn to Republicans as an alternative.

Voters’ judgment was “we’ve got to push back on extremism, we can fix policy later,” Mr. Sununu concluded.

The question was whether the party’s Trump flank would feel chastened or press its case in a narrowly divided House and Senate. In a long screed on Twitter, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who will exercise outsize power if Republicans win a slim House majority, blamed everything but the Trumpism she embodies: the news media, the Democratic donor George Soros and poor candidates who lacked “work ethic & ability.”

But she ended on what might be a conciliatory note: “My personal commitment is this. I’m going to work as hard as I can for as long as I can to fix the problems in order to put America first & that is for every single American to have a good country to live in.”

In Mr. Trump’s defense, Mr. Scott said, “While some might disagree with his tactics, President Trump endorsed candidates he believed in.” He added: “He raised, spent money and campaigned to elect them. And he believed in and worked hard to elect a Republican majority in the Senate.”

MSNBC projection

HOUSE
D.....216...at present 206
R.....219...at present 211

New votes out of Maricopa AZ
Hobbs. Still leading 34742

MSNBC projects Masto win in Nevada by 5,000 votes..

Gives Democrats 50 in Senate!!! Plus Harris as needed.