New York Times: If There’s a Red Wave Election in 2018, This Will Be Why

This piece is just about right we think. The mid-term elections could go either way, but one does get a sense that momentum is building for the Republicans. It does feel like they could solidly beat back the Dems, and it’s starting to feel like the GOP, a Boehnerless, Ryanless, Trump led GOP might even make headway in the mid-terms even though historically the party in power usually gives up ground. We’ll see. As we’ve said recently it feels like it’s 50/50 that the Dems take the House. But for the first time in a year the general political vibe feels like it favors the Republicans. Maybe. Who knows really?

The response in Virginia from the anti-Trumpers last year was robust. Northern Virginia, filled with government employees, turned out and the Democrats did well. Maybe we’ll see something similar on a broader scale this fall in the other states. But times have changed significantly from November of last year and they have mostly changed in Trump’s favor.

And as the author of the attached article points out, who would vote for impeachment at this point in American history, just as the country is getting some of its mojo back? That’s what the Democrats want to do. They want to throw the country into chaos. They say they don’t but that’s what an impeachment effort would do.

But do the American people want that? They seem pretty tired of chaos to me.

And this needs to be said every once in a while. Though somehow “red” has become associated with the GOP in this country over the last 2 decades, red is a lefty color. Blue is actually conservative. The colors flipped in the 1992 campaign. So it annoys me when people talk about a “blue” or “red” wave, or “voting blue/red.” We aren’t Honduras or Paraguay or something. We don’t vote colors in this country.

(From The New York Times)

This year’s class of Republican candidates seems to get that in ways that they didn’t in 2016. As a result, the Democrats’ advantage in the generic congressional vote dropped from 13 points in January, according to the Real Clear Politics poll average, to 3.5 points at the end of May. A Reuters poll, which recorded a 14-point Democratic edge in April, gave Republicans a 6-point advantage last month. Apparently “resistance” and impeachment aren’t as popular as Democratic megadonors like Tom Steyer and their vassals would have Democratic candidates believe, although RealClearPolitics and Reuters now show Democrats with roughly an eight-point advantage.

Ned Ryun, a veteran Republican activist, noted that the polls now closely mirror the polls in May 2014, when Democrats went on to lose 13 House seats. He also notes that while there are nearly 40 Republicans who are not seeking re-election, only six of them represent districts won by Hillary Clinton. Financially, Republicans are in much better shape, with the Republican National Committee holding $44 million in cash while the Democratic National Committee is $5 million in debt.

There are even more cracks in the Democrats’ front line. Longtime Democrats like Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster and confidant, are sick of the scandal mongering. Mr. Penn wrote recently that “Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again.”

At some point, the combination of scandal fatigue — there is almost no crime of which Mr. Trump is not regularly accused — and the continuing revelations of improprieties by government officials (in the F.B.I., at the Department of Justice and elsewhere) will lead voters to believe that Mr. Trump got a raw deal.

Click here for the article.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/