Do I detect a faint glimmer of good news? Is it actually possible that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that in the end Democrats will not be totally decimated in the congressional midterm elections?
Trump’s cult party still seems on track to capture the House, thanks to inflation (which is worldwide) and high gas prices (which are steadily declining), even though some new polls do show that the Democrats are suddenly competitive, thanks to ginned-up grassroots anger about the theocratic Supreme Court’s Roe ruling and the coup criminality being laid bare by the Jan. 6 committee.
But the blue party’s best hope is to retain control of the Senate – and perhaps pick up a seat, or even two. That’s important, because the Senate is the chamber that confirms judicial and presidential nominees. And if the Dems can somehow pick up two seats (giving the party 52), they’d be positioned to blow past their twin obstructionists – Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema – and abolish the ridiculous filibuster that’s making it impossible to pass good stuff. Like, for instance, a bill codifying abortion rights.
Fifty two blue seats may well be a foolish dream. But retention of the Senate is not. And that’s because the Republicans, infected by their MAGA pandemic, have come up with some Senate candidates who can most charitably be described as incoherent, ill-credentialed, extremist, or all three.
Consider, for instance, the farcical doings in Georgia. The GOP have prioritized picking up the seat now held by the Rev. Raphael Warnock, but Trump successfully gave his seal of approval to Herschel Walker, the ex-pigskin jock who’s vividly demonstrating that just because someone toted a ball and ran over people decades ago, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this person would have the remotest clue about life in the public realm.
Aside from all his non-stop lying about his non-existent credentials and the revelations about kids he sired but never disclosed, what’s perhaps most noteworthy – and perhaps the reason why he’s trailing Warnock in the polls – is that he sounds dumber than a box of rocks. As Erick Erickson, a conservative Georgia-based radio host, remarked eaelier this month, Walker “doesn’t have a deep grasp of the issues nor really the desire to learn those issues.” (Sound like someone we know?)
For instance, when asked this spring what he’d do about mass shootings, Walker said: “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff…Cain killed Abel. That’s a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things…What about getting a department that’s looking at young men, that’s looking at young women, that’s looking at social media.” More recently, he offered this treatise about emissions that contribute to climate change: “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up.”
Republicans also want to pick up the Arizona Senate seat currently held by ex-astronaut (and Gabby Giffords spouse) Mark Kelly. Problem is, the featured GOP front-runner is a Trump-endorsed loon named Blake Masters, a first-time candidate who still insists that Joe Biden stole the ’20 election. He’s also on record saying that America was wrong to enter World World II and that our entry in World War I was a secret plot concocted by the “Houses of Morgan and Rothschild.” He also said recently that gun violence in America should be blamed on “black people, frankly,” and his patron (the guy spending umpteen millions on Masters’ behalf) is Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, who has written: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” No wonder Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, is raising huge sums of money, far more than Masters, in a state that went blue in ’20.
So the Dems have a decent chance of holding the Georgia and Arizona seats – and potentially snatching at least one seat now held by the GOP. Like, for instance, Pennsylvania.
With conservative Pat Toomey departing, the GOP is stuck with Trump fave Mehmet Oz, the carpetbagging quack doc from New Jersey. He’s far behind Democrat John Fetterman in the polls, mainly because his celebrity cachet is trumped by the fact that his ties to Pennsylvania are thinner than dental floss. Fetterman is raising big money from small donors; Oz has been compelled to spend his own. Oz put out an anodyne statement the other day declaring that “Pennsylvanians demand leaders who will solve their problems in a meaningful and effective way,” but it’s hard to take seriously a guy who was federally investigated for a fake weight-loss cure, and who was outed as a fraud by the British Medical Journal and assailed by 1300 physicians who signed a letter calling him “a quack and a fake and a charlatan.” Fetterman, who unlike Oz has actual governing experienced, also benefits from having deep working-class roots in the state’s normally Republican southwest region.
Another potential Democratic pickup – though it seems far chancier – is in Wisconsin, home of notorious nutcase Ron Johnson, who has dispensed a lot of Oz-like quackery about Covid vaccines (he says they’re killing people: “All these athletes are dropping dead on the field”) and Covid cures (actual quote: “Standard gargle mouthwash has been proven to kill the coronavirus”). Maybe his nonsense won’t matter to voters in a state that narrowly went blue in ’20; maybe voters won’t care that Johnson’s Senate office played a role in floating fake elector slates in Trump’s attempted coup. Democrats haven’t even picked a challenger yet. But with Johnson’s statewide favorability rating in the danger zone – 37 percent – perhaps sanity can prevail.
For the Dems, other states are more of a stretch. Ohio used to be a swing state, but not anymore, and this year’s Republican-held Senate seat will likely go to reborn cultist J. D. Vance. One might theorize that Democratic candidate Tim Ryan, with his working-class brand, stands a decent chance to snatch the seat, but it appears that Vance, venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author, has successfully morphed from fierce MAGA critic (in 2016, he tweeted that Trump was “reprehensible”) to faithful MAGA bootlicker. So that seat will likely stay red – unless the conventional wisdom is flat wrong.
Simon Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic strategist and numbers-cruncher who’s virtually alone these days contending that the much-predicted red wave is more more mirage than real; that Senate races are indeed leaning blue in ’22; and that the Dems even have a shot at making the House midterms competitive. I’ll let him explain his reasoning:
“Gas prices have dropped 45 cents in the past month and are dropping now 2-3 cents a day, every day. This means that the huge psychological and economic effects of rising prices will certainly ease in the coming months. It gives the Democrats an opening to broaden out the economic conversation to include their achievements – very strong recovery, big job gains, record new businesses formed, historically low uninsured/unemployment rates, infrastructure investments, etc. And it will create more room for Democratic candidates to make the indictment of their opponents as too extreme, too MAGA. As we’ve been saying, opposition to MAGA has been the driving force of the last two elections, and with mass shootings, the end of Roe and fanatical abortion restrictions, a radicalized Supreme Court, extremist/terrible candidates, an unfolding criminal conspiracy involving dozens of top Republican officials to overturn an election, it is now likely to be the most powerful force in this election as well…It is a new, bluer election.”
His remarks may prove prescient. Or maybe, four months hence, I’ll look back at this column and wince.