In the wake of Monday’s Wide World of News, in which the recent clear shift towards Republicans in the midterms was explained, additional Democratic and Republican strategists all reached out to say, yes, that is what they are seeing also.
Then Politico, The Hill, and Douglas Schoen and Andrew Stein (in a Wall Street Journal op ed) all wrote much the same thing as I did. Note the general lack of pushback to the thesis from Democratic voices in these pieces.
Then the Associated Press ran a piece on a midterm factor you should familiarize yourself with – the prospect that Democrats will lose a lot of House seats currently held by rising star candidates who were first elected in the Trump cycle of 2018.
(My Magic 8 Ball and ouija board judgment is that the trajectory of no marquee race was altered meaningfully by Monday night’s debates.)
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Say it loud and proud: WIDE WORLD OF NEWS!!!
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FIVE BIG MIDTERM PUZZLES
* Is the White House going to come up with a new messaging approach before the midterms? (The president’s 11:15am ET “remarks at a political event at the Howard Theatre” could provide a clue there today…)
* Will there be some real-world event involving abortion or Donald Trump that gives Democrats a jolt?
* Will the fundamental underlying political weaknesses of Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and/or Ted Budd in North Carolina allow Democrats to keep majority control of the Senate?
* Could perceptions of economic conditions surge just so at the end towards the negative in a way that brings Republican House gains above 30 seats?
* Will Republicans leverage crime (and maybe parents’ rights) in a manner that – combined with the economy – actually put us back in tsunami territory?
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Now, here are two paragraphs from conservative Wall Street Journal columnists, who are in fact speaking in both cases for the entire Gang of 500 and for 74.5% of honest Democratic campaign consultants and elected officials:
* Columnist #1:
The reason Democratic candidates talk about Trump and abortion is that they don’t have anything good to say on crime or the cost of living. And they don’t have anything good to say because President Biden largely adopted the Sanders agenda, and they all voted for it.
* Columnist #2:
If Joe Biden’s Democrats take the hammering they deserve for their performance in the past two years, it is hard to see how the president can seriously continue with the proposition that he will be running again two years from now. The ambitious and the restless in his party will surely lose no time in amplifying the increasingly loud murmurings about his incapacity for office. The investigations that a Republican-controlled House will unleash will weaken him further and hasten the urgency of Democratic leaders in their search for an alternative.
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ESSENTIAL READING
None.