The Morning Jolt

Good morning and Happy Friday to you all — Jim Geraghty will be back on Monday, but I’m in the Jolt seat until then. On the menu today: A rebuke of the unmerry band of moaners attempting to blame Republicans’ disappointing midterm performance on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

The Myth of ‘Minority Mitch’

On Monday, Republican Arizona Senate hopeful Blake Masters was feeling powerful. Although he was still behind incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly in the polls, he had closed the gap in recent days. Moreover, Republicans appeared to be poised for a big day, and Kari Lake, the state’s gubernatorial nominee, was ahead of her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. The wave and Lake, he seemed to think, might carry him to victory.

So confident was Masters on Election Day Eve, he found the time to tell the Wall Street Journal all about how he would how he would use his new office in Washington to remake the Senate GOP.

“I certainly think we need new leadership,” said Masters when asked about McConnell, before going on to declare that McConnell “will not own me, McConnell doesn’t love me. And clearly, he had a chance to help. He didn’t do it.”

“He doesn’t want me in there, but he’s about to be stuck with me,” continued Masters.

It wasn’t the first time that Masters, who secured former president Donald Trump’s endorsement during the Republican primary, had expressed such sentiments. Four days earlier, he promised the Daily Mail that he’d be a “thorn” in McConnell’s side. A few months ago, he was insisting that he was “a much better candidate than Mitch McConnell gives me credit for” (he was trailing Kelly by more than ten points at the time) while publicly imploring McConnell to invest money in his race. A couple of months before that, Masters said McConnell was “not good” at “legislating” and expressed his preference that McConnell be replaced as leader.

But if McConnell is supplanted in the coming days — although that doesn’t seem especially likely — Blake Masters probably will play no role in such a coup; early on Friday morning, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman projected that Masters had been defeated by Kelly, though votes are still being counted, and major news outlets have yet to call the race.

And this, you see, is all McConnell’s fault, according to Matt Gaetz and other like-minded pundits.

It’s apparently McConnell’s fault that Trump endorsed an unattractive general-election candidate in the Arizona primary. It’s McConnell’s fault that Masters made himself unattractive by embracing the lie that Trump won the 2020 election in order to secure the former president’s endorsement. It’s McConnell’s fault that Trump also endorsed J. D. Vance in Ohio (again, in no small part because he embraced the stolen-election lie), forcing McConnell’s super PAC to spend $32 million defending a seat in a state Trump won by eight. It’s McConnell’s fault that Trump was loath to spend any significant amount of the money he’s raised on the candidates he endorsed. It’s McConnell’s fault that Peter Thiel, Masters’s mentor and benefactor during his primary contest, declined to spend money on his general-election campaign until it was too late. It’s McConnell’s fault that Masters was unable to raise money from small-dollar donors himself. And it’s Mitch McConnell’s fault that Blake Masters is so unappealing as a candidate that he is currently running over 60,000 votes behind Lake, over 150,000 votes behind the Republican nominee for state treasurer, and almost 50,000 votes behind the Republican nominee for state attorney general.

Could McConnell have spent more money in Arizona? Absolutely. It is true that the Senate Leadership Fund, a McConnell-affiliated super PAC, decided not to expend its resources on Masters, though a sister PAC did spend around $13 million on Masters.

Circumstances around the country (that’s a euphemism for the nomination of subpar candidates in Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Georgia) forced McConnell to make tough decisions, and it’s more than fair to question the decisions he made, including investing in Lisa Murkowski, who voted against confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and Joe O’Dea, who didn’t come anywhere close to winning in Colorado.

McConnell, even if he can be critiqued on strategic grounds, cannot in any reasonable way be expected to take the fall for the nomination of lackluster candidates across the country pushed by Donald Trump and Peter Thiel. Neither Trump nor Thiel showed a willingness to spend big on Masters in the general election; the former because he is hoarding money for his 2024 primary campaign against Ron DeSantis, and the latter because he apparently suffered from buyer’s remorse.

Moreover, the charge that McConnell was punishing Masters for his critiques of the longtime Republican leader — leveled by, among others, the Federalist‘s Tristan Justice — makes little sense. J. D. Vance also previously suggested that McConnell should be replaced, musing that “McConnell has clearly shown he’s a little, sometimes a little out of touch with where the base is,” and that it was “time we move beyond the very old leadership class that’s dominated the Republican Party for a long time.” Yet McConnell spent big to ensure that the GOP did not suffer an embarrassing upset defeat in Ohio.

Notably, commentators such as Justice are quick to criticize McConnell for not spending the money that McConnell raised the way that Justice would have spent it if he’d raised it, and are also quick to make excuses for Trump when the former president trashes the GOP’s candidates less than a month before Election Day. It’s almost like he reasons his way backward from what he wishes were true.

If Republicans are to improve upon their performance in 2022, they’ll need to first identify what the root of their problem is, and I’d submit that, his own mistakes aside, McConnell provided an accurate diagnosis in August: “Senate races are just different — they’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”

ADDENDUM: Another day, another Dominic Pino article to recommend. Be sure to read his case for impeaching Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in the latest issue of the magazine.

Isaac Schorr here, filling in for Jim Geraghty; buckle up, because you’ve caught me in some kind of mood.

There is no menu: You’re home, Dad’s a terrible cook, all that’s in the fridge are frozen vegetables — and he’s doing the best he can.

The ‘We’re Just Plain Evil’  Blueprint

I can’t foresee myself ever casting a vote for a Democrat because to me, there are virtually no redeeming qualities to the institutional Democratic Party.

It has a bottomless appetite for spending money it doesn’t presently have but intends on taking from me. It has an intolerable tolerance for crime, homelessness, drug use, and disorder. It has no care for the Constitution, and no confidence in the righteousness of America’s position vis-à-vis those of its geopolitical and ideological adversaries. It supports experimental treatments on and the castration of children suffering from gender dysphoria. It supports elective abortions on-demand until a child is born.

But Democrats mostly contain their flaws to misbegotten policies that they’re able to paint in an appealing-enough light on the campaign trail.

They couch their support for violent, unthinkable late-term abortions in the reasonable-sounding notion that an unplanned pregnancy presents a woman with a tough decision that should be kept between her and her doctor, or hide behind “support for Roe v. Wade.” They say that if we don’t provide children with the euphemistic “gender-affirming care” they seek, they’ll kill themselves. They screech about the separation of church and state. They know that in the cities where crime is most pronounced, they’re mostly protected by their complete dominance of local politics and government, and when things get really bad there, they pay lip service to policies aimed at cleaning up the streets.

The GOP, meanwhile, is increasingly embracing the approach of the Republican Party of The Simpsons:

Too many Republican candidates present themselves as — and voters throw their support behind — the proudly malicious, whose primary virtue is their vice. I’m making the furthest thing from a novel point by holding up Donald Trump as the preeminent example of this phenomenon, but my goodness, what an example!

It was less than two years ago that Trump egged on a mob that stormed the Capitol chanting about hanging his own vice president on the basis of a lie he was peddling. Three weeks ago, he urged “U.S. Jews” to “get their act together.” On Monday, Election Day Eve, he called Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “an animal” just a little over a week after her 82-year-old husband underwent brain surgery for injuries sustained while fending off an attacker  with intentions to break the Speaker’s kneecaps. How do you explain away any of this?

And Jolters, you may recognize that this is a non-exhaustive list.

Moreover, his unrestrained id has trickled down into the party’s candidates. Arizona’s Kari Lake praises do-no-gooders such as Wendy Rogers and tells “McCain Republicans” — a reference to the late John McCain, who endured being bayoneted in the foot and stomach, having his arm broken, ribs cracked, and shoulder shattered as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese — to “get the hell” away from her rallies. J. D. Vance boasts that he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Doug Mastriano attended the rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol riot. Blake Masters cut an ad during which he proudly pronounced that “Trump won in 2020.” Mehmet Oz used his status and medical expertise to make money selling magic beans. Herschel Walker . . . well, God only knows what Herschel Walker has done.

However much Trump — who endorsed each of these candidates during their primary contests — may smile upon this lot, most Americans are revolted by those who say, do, and revel in revolting things. And the only people who don’t recognize Trump and his cronies’ behavior as revolting are political addicts who have their unrestrained id fed by low-knowledge, high-energy media personalities such as Benny Johnson, who on Election Day declared that, “What the Republican electorate wants is a strong executive who utilizes and wields power over his enemies. And then destroys his enemies and makes them grovel, makes molten salty tears flow from their faces.”

People whose frustrations with the results — and reasonably some of the processes around — the 2020 election quickly gave way to a certainty that it was stolen from them, a certainty that’s been reinforced by true believers and line walkers (“it wasn’t stolen, it was RIGGED!”) alike. People for whom time and an affinity for the results of the Trump administration’s policies desensitized them to the obvious, exhausting malice of the administration’s namesake. People who are assured by the commentators they mistakenly trust that what’s really holding the GOP back is the presence of Dan Crenshaw and Ben Sasse in Congress. People who have concluded that because the media will take every opportunity to smear conservatives, no real conservative offense matters.

Now, some of Trump’s candidates have or may ultimately prevail. But if Tuesday proved nothing else, it’s that general-election voters are sensitive to the malice that some amount of the GOP electorate seemingly no longer is, and that they’re willing to respond to it by punishing the Republican Party collectively for its indulgence. How else do you explain the Democrats’ ability to win in purple and even red (Kansas!) states while saddled with a wildly unpopular president, mass dissatisfaction with the economy, and fiascoes such as the Biden administration’s surrender to the Taliban?

So when a candidate offers you the “molten salty tears” of his opponents, ask whether voters might want something that tastes better. And when you’re reading or watching conservative media that only ever pushes you toward a single conclusion — that you are righteous and your enemies should be made to endure the worst — ask yourself if they’re not sending you down a road that ends in disappointment.

Malice can win under the right circumstances, namely, when facing down more malice (see: 2016), but generally, it’s a losing ingredient. It need not be included to deliver sweeping conservative electoral and policy victories (see: Ron DeSantis this year, Glenn Youngkin last year).

While Democrats may not have earned their overperformance this year, Republicans richly deserved their underperformance. If they don’t relearn to recoil at unbridled malevolence — and instead follow the lead of Vance, House Republican Conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik, and others by insisting that Trump and the inevitable baggage that comes with him are not only the past, but the future of the GOP — they’ll deserve the string of disappointments that come.

ADDENDUM: Be sure to read Dominic Pino’s article on the debt of gratitude Republicans owe their candidate for governor in New York. Lee Zeldin turned in quite the performance:

In what turned out to be a less successful Republican House performance than expected nationwide, New York’s Republican congressional candidates did well. In the likely narrow Republican House majority that will result when the dust settles, it’s possible that New York will have made the difference between GOP control and another term as speaker for Nancy Pelosi. For that, we have Lee Zeldin to thank.

On the menu today: Well, that was awful. The much-touted red wave felt more like a red splash in a kiddie pool.

Don’t Let Anyone Tell You It Was an Okay Night for Republicans

No excuses, Republicans. Everyone thought you had just about the ideal issue environment for a midterm election, and the exit polls verified it. Seven in ten voters said they were “dissatisfied” or “angry” with the state of the country. Around three-quarters of voters nationally characterized the state of the economy as “poor” or “not good,” and the same amount said that inflation has caused them severe or moderate hardship. About two-thirds said that gas prices have been causing them hardship. You had parents livid about the learning loss in schools because of the long closures for Covid-19 and inappropriate materials in the curriculum. You had an unpopular president, who was such a liability that Democrats couldn’t let him go anywhere near a swing state.

And the nation, deeply dissatisfied with the way the Democrats were running things, looked at what the GOP offered as the alternative and concluded, “Nope, I’ll stick with what the Democrats are giving me” in a lot of key places.

If you can’t elect a lot of Republicans in an environment like this, when can you?

I don’t ever want to hear another Republican claim he stands for the silent majority. As I warned in September, if your silent majority doesn’t show up to vote in large numbers, it doesn’t have that much say in how this country is governed. We could even argue that a silent majority that doesn’t vote might as well not exist at all.

There was one spectacular bright spot for Republicans: the state of Florida, where Ron DeSantis absolutely demolished Charlie Crist, in the kind of landslide that alters the political identity of the state. As of this writing, DeSantis beat Crist, hitting almost 60 percent to Crist’s 39.9 percent.

I don’t know if Ron DeSantis became the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination last night. I do know that he should be the front-runner now. He is far and away the strongest candidate, and he has led a sweeping change in one of the country’s most consequential states. I think it is revealing that the exit polls indicated that 33 percent of Florida voters said they want to see Donald Trump president run in 2024, and 45 percent said they wanted to see DeSantis run for president in 2024.

Also note that a lot of hype about Florida’s Democratic Senate candidate, Val Demings, turned out to be empty blather. Senator Marco Rubio mopped the floor with her, winning almost 58 percent to her 41 percent.

But beyond the Sunshine State, Election Day 2022 was largely a debacle for Republicans, considering the scale of the opportunity before them. Republicans are on track to win the House. Great, but when you start the cycle with 212 Republican House seats and a vacancy in a GOP-leaning district, you should win the House!

Somewhere out there, there’s an alternate universe where Republican primary electorates nominated clean-cut, articulate state legislators and state attorneys general who knew a lot about the issues and had some governing accomplishments to point to — you know, normal candidates — instead of daytime-talk-show hosts, football stars, and tech investors, based upon whoever proclaimed their absolute loyalty to Trump the loudest. I would love to see how that batch of candidates did. Considering how candidates such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp, Ohio governor Mike DeWine, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu all romped to victory, there’s a good chance that a bunch of normal GOP candidates would have performed considerably better. Normal works. Normal wins. Normal gets stuff done.

Maybe it’s long overdue that Republican primary voters recognized the value of normalcy.

One of the most glaring examples of this is in New Hampshire. While Sununu was cruising to reelection, Don Bolduc was losing his race to incumbent Democratic senator Maggie Hassan by about ten points. It sure looked like Chuck Morse would have been more competitive than Bolduc, but New Hampshire Republican primary voters, convinced they knew better, chose Bolduc.

I went out on a limb picking Bolduc to win the New Hampshire Senate race, in part because I believed Hassan’s job-approval and favorability numbers indicated vulnerability, and in part because some GOP pollsters were, in retrospect, insanely overconfident about Don Bolduc. Thanks a lot, Trafalgar and Saint Anselm!

In Pennsylvania, credit Mehmet Oz for being “the little engine that could” and fighting back after trailing badly early in the campaign, but in the end, maybe he was the Ford Pinto after all because he had to start from that massive deficit. John Fetterman was off the trail for three months, and when he returned, he could barely campaign! That lone debate went about as badly for Fetterman as it possibly could have! And yet Fetterman won comfortably — as of this hour, with 93 percent of votes reported, he leads Oz by a full three points, or around 155,000 votes. It is more than fair to wonder if the man Oz barely beat in the primary, David McCormick, would have been able to beat Fetterman.

In Arizona, Blake Masters looks like a bad joke of a candidate. As of this hour, he’s trailing by seven percentage points, or more than 100,000 votes. Mark Kelly is not exactly a whirling dervish of raw political charisma; he won his first special Senate election with 51.2 percent in 2020. Masters won the GOP Senate nomination over state attorney general Mark Brnovich, who won his reelection battle as state AG in the Democratic wave year of 2018, 52 percent to 48 percent. Would Brnovich have amounted to political roadkill the way Masters has?

As of this writing, the GOP nominee for Arizona governor, Kari Lake, who led most of the polls throughout the fall, is trailing Democrat Katie Hobbs by about 12,000 votes, or .6 percent, with 66 percent of the vote reported. Not that long ago, she looked like the Next Big Thing in Republican politics. This morning Lake looks wildly overhyped, with awful political instincts; what Arizona Republican in their right mind tells “any McCain Republicans” to “get the hell out” a few days before the election? This is the inverse of Charlie Crist’s declaring, “Those who support the governor should stay with him. I don’t want your vote. If you have that hate in your heart, keep it there.” Lake never had a big enough lead that she could run around telling people she didn’t want their support.

She’s already making noises indicating that the snafu over printer ink in Maricopa County means the election was stolen from her, even though no one can find a voter who wanted to cast a ballot but could not. I suppose she envisions a promising career as the Stacey Abrams of GOP politics.

A strong wind was blowing in the Republicans’ direction, but far too many of their ships refused to reel in their heavy anchors.

Credit Herschel Walker: He ran hard, and at this hour, it looks like he’ll get another crack at it in a runoff in Georgia. In Ohio, J. D. Vance won by about the margin he was expected to, 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent. There are still a bunch of votes to count in Nevada, but Adam Laxalt is currently ahead by 22,000 votes, 49.9 percent to 47.2 percent.

But let’s face it: In some races this cycle, Republican primary voters — in some cases, helped along by Democratic spending — nominated clowns who ensured that Democrats wouldn’t have to lift a finger in the general election.

Among last night’s other GOP losers: Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, Maryland gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox, Illinois gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey. We’ve seen Republicans such as Tom Corbett and Larry Hogan and Mark Kirk and Bruce Rauner win those states not too long ago.

My takeaway from all this is that Americans are tired of the circus, the freakshow, the in-your-face, all-controversy-is-good, Trump-influenced wannabes. The country’s got real problems, and they won’t be solved by table-pounding pop-culture celebrities who want to emote populist rage on Hannity. Maybe that schtick can win you a primary, and if you’re in a sufficiently Republican-leaning district or state, you’ll be okay. But the country is full of purple and light-blue states that the GOP needs to win if it wants to steer the ship of state.

Donald Trump wants to announce he’s running for president later this month? Why? What’s he got to offer?

Inflation is at 8.2 percent, the average price of gas nationwide is $3.80 a gallon, crime is rising, the waves of migrants at the border continue, and the learning loss among kids at school is real. Democrats deserved comeuppance for the way they’ve run the country for the past two years, and by and large, they didn’t get it in the 2022 midterms. Don’t let anyone tell you this was a “good enough” performance by Republican candidates. Opportunities like this year don’t come along very often in politics, and the GOP largely fumbled it away last night.

The Senior Political Correspondent Accountability Project

Looking back on my predictions, I expected Republicans Ron Johnson, J. D. Vance, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Chuck Grassley to win their Senate bids, which all of them except Johnson, whose race is still too close to call at this hour, did. I expected Democrats Fetterman, Michael Bennet, and Patty Murray to win their Senate bids, which they did. I predicted “Herschel Walker will finish ahead of incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, but I think he will finish just short of 50 percent, triggering a December 6 runoff.” At this hour, Warnock is ahead by about 35,000 votes, but the race is still on course for a runoff.

But I’m kicking myself for picking Bolduc.

In the governor’s races, I expected victories for DeSantis, Greg Abbott in Texas, Brian Kemp in Georgia, and Kristi Noem in South Dakota, and they all won.

I expected Democrats Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Laura Kelly of Kansas and Tim Walz of Minnesota, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania to win, and they did. Some people thought I was being too pessimistic; I wasn’t being pessimistic enough. I picked Lake over Katie Hobbs “by a wide margin” — ugh — and Tim Michels over Tony Evers; Democrats won those two.

My heart said Lee Zeldin would win the New York governor’s race, my head said Hochul and the Democrats had panicked enough to keep her in Albany, and like Thor against Thanos, I should have gone for the head. Coming within five percentage points, as the numbers indicate at this hour, is a respectable finish for a New York Republican running statewide, and may well have helped the GOP win a bunch of House races. But Zeldin is still down 300,000 votes against an uncharismatic governor who’s overseeing a crime wave.

I expected Republicans to win the House with 235 seats to Democrats’ 200, a gain of 23 seats. It’s too early to get a sense of the final count, but that looks a little high based upon what we know so far. Those who contended I was being too cautious — and were envisioning GOP gains of 30, 40, 50 seats — were likely basing their expectations on past GOP wave years, never looking clearly at just how many races were in play, and how Republicans started with an awfully high floor.

I did correctly predict that Jennifer Kiggans would beat Elaine Luria in Virginia’s second district, and that Democrat “Abigail Spanberger will hang on against Yesli Vega.” I didn’t really predict that Hung Cao would win, but said that, “If Cao wins, we’re moving from ‘red wave’ to ‘red tsunami.’” Cao ran a strong race, but Jennifer Wexton won, 53 percent to 47 percent, in a district Biden won handily in 2020.

ADDENDUM: You can watch my disappointment and pessimism steadily grow during my appearances on Megyn Kelly’s big election show last night.

On the menu today: Welcome to Election Day! if you have not voted already, you should go out and vote. Good men and women died to preserve that right. (Correction: You should look up who’s running, try to develop an informed opinion, and then vote.)

In my neck of the woods, the only office on the ballot is the U.S. House of Representatives, and incumbent Democrat Gerry Connolly is likely to beat Republican Jim Myles by about a bazillion to one, but I’ll go out and be that one. Yesterday, I made my final predictions for the House and Senate races. Today, I’ll make my final calls in the governor’s races and one key local race.

Gubernatorial Predictions

Just as we are unlikely to know which party will control the Senate as Tuesday evening turns into Wednesday morning, we will likely be waiting a long time for the results in several key governor’s races.

“We won’t have unofficial results from all parts of the state and all valid counting done until Wednesday night,” Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office, told the New York Times in late October. “There may be counties that report far earlier than that, and there may also be races that, you know, therefore, are called prior to that.”

Michigan’s incumbent Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer does not deserve a second term, but I notice that she’s at 48.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, usually a sign of an incumbent being right at the threshold. (One ominous indicator for Whitmer: Turnout in Detroit is projected to be down significantly from 2018.) I think Republican Tudor Dixon comes close but no cigar, but apparently, we won’t know who won for a while.

In New York State, polls don’t close until 9 p.m., and the state is notoriously slow in its counting of ballots and releasing results. The good news is that mailed ballots should be a much smaller slice of the total this year; according to the Associated Press, “About 552,000 absentee ballots have been sent out with more than 188,000 returned so far.”

My head says panicking New York Democrats have done enough in the past week or two to save Kathy Hochul against the late surge from Lee Zeldin. My head also notices that Hochul is still leading by a bunch in several of the final polls. Remember, in the last good midterm year for Republicans in 2014, Andrew Cuomo won, 54 percent to 40 percent. My heart says that the issue environment is about as bad for Democrats and good for Republicans as the GOP could ever hope for, Hochul has terrible retail skills, and Zeldin is running with the passion of a man who nearly got stabbed because of his rival’s atrocious policies on crime. My heart wins out: I’m picking Zeldin.

You know which state counts its votes really quickly? Florida. After the national embarrassment of the 2000 recount — hanging chads, etc. — the state invested in all kinds of technologies designed to make the process run smoothly, quickly, and transparently.

This means that shortly — probably very shortly — after 7 p.m., the networks will declare that Florida governor Ron DeSantis has won reelection, an early indicator that he has won by a very wide margin. DeSantis’s win, and what it means for any 2024 presidential bid, may well be the only interesting thing for the network talking heads to discuss for a while as they wait for the other polls to close and results to trickle in from the other key states.

DeSantis is going to romp, winning by at least ten percentage points — and maybe closer to 15.

All cycle long, I’ve been fascinated by the more-or-less doomed sequels in the forms of Stacey Abrams’s gubernatorial bid in Georgia and Beto O’Rourke’s gubernatorial bid in Texas.

As mentioned yesterday, it is hard to beat an incumbent in general, it is hard to beat a GOP incumbent in a GOP-leaning state such as Georgia and Texas, and it is just about impossible to beat a GOP incumbent in a GOP-leaning state in a GOP wave year. This has been clear since the beginning of the cycle. This basic dynamic of politics does not change if the Supreme Court ends Roe v. Wade, or because of the terrible school shooting in Uvalde, or even if there’s a lot of enthusiasm for Beto at an Austin music festival. All cycle long, Democrats have insisted — and spent close to $170 million — in a counterargument that amounts to, “Nuh-uhh!”

In life, what is most effective and what feels good are rarely the same thing; if they were, none of us would ever have to go on diets. If Democrats really wanted to win a governor’s race in a southern state, what would be most effective would be to run a relatively pro-life, relatively pro-gun candidate such as Louisiana governor Jon Bel Edwards. (Edwards gets to pass a lot of progressive legislation on other issues by not antagonizing social conservatives on those two issues!) What feels good to Democrats is to run candidates who are way too far to the left for their states — such as Abrams and O’Rourke — but who get gushing profiles in publications such as Vanity Fair and Vogue.

For those who wonder why Abrams and O’Rourke inspire such passionate enthusiasm from the progressive grassroots and those seemingly endless swooning articles in glossy magazines, I liked this observation from Jacob Stern over in The Atlantic:

Winners have to deal with the unglamorous minutiae of actual governance. They have to figure out how to translate campaign promises into concrete policies. They make mistakes, and people get disillusioned, and approval ratings decline. Losers are spared these indignities. Politically speaking, they don’t survive long enough to let anyone down. Unsullied by compromise, losers can be made into lodestars.

Abrams and O’Rourke retain their starry-eyed fan bases because it’s been a long time since either one has had to actually do anything; their time in office is long forgotten.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp will win by at least eight percentage points, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will win by at least ten percentage points.

In Arizona, Kari Lake will win over Katie Hobbs, and the finger-pointing among Arizona Democrats will be delicious. Hobbs’s decision not to debate Lake may be seen as the most consequential, self-inflicted political wound since Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley contended that Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling was a Yankees fan in the 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts. Look, John Fetterman got up on stage, had maybe the worst debate performance of any Senate candidate in decades, and barely lost any ground in the polls. Surely, Hobbs could have turned in a better performance than him!

There’s been an ominous turn for Oregon Republicans, where left-of-center voters appear to no longer be quite so evenly split between Democrat Tina Kotek and progressive independent Betsy Johnson — a dynamic that put the GOP’s Christine Drazan in a great spot for much of the race. Once again, I’m going to follow my heart over my head and pick Drazan to hang on in a close one.

Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, seems like the classic kind of candidate who gets swept in by a wave year for his party and gets swept out by a wave year for Republicans. Tim Michels won’t win by a lot, but it will be enough.

In Nevada, GOP challenger Joe Lombardo has enjoyed a small but stable lead over incumbent Democrat Steve Sisolak almost all year, and I expect that lead to hold when all the votes are counted.

In a couple of blue states, Republicans who looked like longshots closed the gap a lot in the final weeks of the cycle, but just ran out of momentum toward the end. I look at the numbers and see New Mexico Republican Mark Ronchetti coming close but then losing to incumbent Michelle Lujan Grisham. My Three Martini Lunch podcast cohost Greg Corombos thinks Ronchetti can pull it off, so if this turns out to be a GOP win, I should listen to Greg more often.

I had hopes that Republican attorney general Derek Schmidt would knock off Kansas’s incumbent governor, Democrat Laura Kelly, but it looks like Kelly will hang on.

Minnesota is another state that deserves a respite from its current subpar governance under an overwhelmed Democratic incumbent, but it looks like Tim Walz will hang on over Republican Scott Jensen there.

In Maine, former governor Paul LePage’s big comeback bid against incumbent Democrat Janet Mills never turned into much.

As in the Senate races, there are some gubernatorial races featuring GOP incumbents that just never got competitive, despite Democrats’ hopes. Iowa’s Kim Reynolds looks set to win reelection in landslide, as do Ohio’s Mike DeWine and New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu. Publications such as Vanity Fair quoted South Dakota Democrats’ contending that the gubernatorial race featuring GOP incumbent Kristi Noem was “very, very tight,” and I guess I have a different definition of “tight,” because the last Emerson poll had Noem up, 56 percent to 37 percent. No one has even bothered to poll South Carolina since early September; Republican Henry McMaster will cruise to another term there.

Then there are the gubernatorial races in which Republicans were never all that competitive, and the party can and should ask themselves if there are ways to prevent primary voters from leaving them stuck with fundamentally unserious, uncompetitive nominees. In Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro will mop the floor with Doug Mastriano, and local Republicans will fairly ask if Mastriano was dead weight, making Mehmet Oz’s effort in the Senate race more difficult. In Maryland, departing governor Larry Hogan will turn over the governor’s mansion to Democrat Wes Moore; there’s no indication that Republican Dan Cox ever made Moore even break a sweat. In Illinois, incumbent Democrat J. B. Pritzker was always going to have a gargantuan financial advantage, but Republican Darren Bailey barely amounted to much more than a speedbump. Come on, Illinois Republicans; Jeff Blehar deserves a competitive race one of these cycles.

Yes, these are all states where Democrats spent millions during the GOP primary to promote the Republican candidate that Democrats deemed least electable. But GOP primary voters don’t always have to take the bait, you know?

One Big Local Race with National Implications

In the Los Angeles mayor’s race, I think Rick Caruso — the closest thing the city has to a conservative — will pull off the upset victory over Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass. The news is not that Katie Perry, Kim Kardashian, Chris Pratt, Gwenyth Paltrow, or Snoop Dogg voted for Caruso. The news is that Perry, Kardashian, Pratt, Paltrow, and Dogg felt comfortable sharing that fact on social media, an indicator that in heavily liberal Hollywood, it is now acceptable to acknowledge that L.A. has serious and worsening problems, and that the city’s usual Democratic leaders aren’t getting the job done.

Some cities hit bottom so hard, they’ll try anything, even deviating from the standard Democratic machine politics and going with a guy who’s in the neighborhood of being a Republican. (Yes, Caruso changed his party registration to the Democrats, but he’s still on the board of trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.) Oddly enough, Vox wrote about this race as if Bass were the underdog, which may prove prescient.

ADDENDA: Tonight, I will be joining Megyn Kelly on her program, at various points between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., along with RealClearPolitics’ Tom Bevan and a host of other guests.

In case you missed it, yesterday in the Washington Post, some guy examined what House Republicans will do on Day One of their House majority and in the weeks that follow.

I’m used to being torn to shreds in the comments; what was striking was how many Post commentaters were absolutely livid that a column in that newspaper would treat a GOP House majority in 2023 as if it were a given. This says to me that a lot of grassroots progressives have chosen to believe that Democrats will hold the majority — which the numbers indicate was always a longshot, and is now looking like the longest of longshots.

Those commenters were not merely hoping that Democrat eke out a 218-seat majority, they contended that I was being irresponsible and ridiculous for writing about what Republicans will do if — and let’s face it, when — they win the majority. There are going to be a lot of shocked progressives staring at their screens tomorrow morning.

On the menu today: As much as I may feel in my heart that the top story this morning is the New York Jets beating the previously 6-1 Buffalo Bills, our attention must refocus on tomorrow’s midterm elections. This is just about the latest possible date for final predictions in the battle for control of Congress, so below are the final calls on control of the House and the big races in the Senate. (Tomorrow, I’ll go through the governor’s races.)

Red Dawn

I guess I’ve put off my election predictions for as long as I can. I usually prefer to hold off until right before Election Day, because you never know when some October surprise — or more accurately, a November surprise — will come along and change the dynamic, or give those last few undecided voters a reason to break a certain way.

But I think one of the big stories of the 2022 midterms is how much the dynamics haven’t changed. This looked like a big GOP wave year back in the spring; it looked like a more modest GOP wave year back in midsummer; and it’s steadily looked more and more like a big GOP wave year as autumn progressed. I also think a lot of the “Democrats will keep the House and gain seats in the Senate” talk since summer amounted to Democratic and media wish-casting, seeing what they wanted to see instead of what was there.

Throughout the summer and fall, I thought Republicans were going to win 20-25 House seats and finish with at least 51 Senate seats — a “pretty good” wave year. (At least, I think that’s the answer I remember giving on The Editors podcast.) Now that we’re at the election’s eve, I think we’re on the higher end of a red-wave year, and approaching “red tsunami” territory.

In some circles on the right, it’s become almost trendy to dismiss all polling as skewed and too inaccurate to be of any use. I believe that polls can give you a ballpark sense of the state of a race. Yes, every once in a great while, all of the public polling will be wildly off base, such as in the Maine Senate race in 2020. Sometimes, you’ll have one particular pollster that is way off from everyone else, such as when Quinnipiac kept showing a tie race in the South Carolina Senate race in 2020, and that helps shape the narrative in a not-so-accurate direction. But we remember those races because they stood out for being so far away from the final results. Democrat Mark Kelly led almost all of the polls in Arizona in 2020, and he won — albeit by about three percentage points fewer than his final result in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Republican Joni Ernst led most, but not all, of the polls in Iowa and ended up winning by 6.6 percentage points — about four points higher than her RealClearPolitics polling average.

By and large, if a candidate is the leader outside the margin of error by the end of the race, they’re going to be the winner when all the votes are counted. The challenge is when they have a lead within the margin of error, such as Cal Cunningham’s 2.6 percentage-point lead in the final RCP average of the 2020 North Carolina Senate race. Republican Thom Tillis eked out a win by 1.2 percentage points. Polls are going to have a tougher time accurately showing which candidate is ahead when the race is close.

“But Jim, the polls always understate the Republicans support for the Republican candidate,” you say? First, not always, and second, the public polls are already pointing to a big GOP wave. So even if you think there’s a systemic problem of reaching enough white, blue-collar voters — a GOP-leaning demographic — this points to a GOP wave so large, not even a systemic polling flaw could obscure it.

In the Battle for the House . . .

The Cook Political Report has 212 seats rated solid, likely, or lean Republican. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball says the GOP has 219 seats that are rated safe, likely, or leans Republican. RealClearPolitics has 227 seats rated solid, likely, or lean Republican.

For the past week or so, my back-of-the-envelope math envisioned a GOP House majority somewhere between 229 and 241, and I’m sticking to that. Give the Republicans the 212 seats in Cook Political Report, with two-thirds of the 35 races in the toss-up category, and you end up with 235 Republicans and 200 Democrats, so put those down as my final prediction numbers.

The only specific U.S. House races I will make predictions for are three in my home state of Virginia, in part because they provide useful barometers of the scale of the GOP wave, and partially because Virginia polls close relatively early — 7 p.m. Eastern time. (Also note that Virginia does not have a senatorial or gubernatorial election this year, so there is no “top of the ticket.” House members must win or lose on their own merits.)

Virginia’s second district, which includes Virginia Beach and Norfolk, is arguably the most competitive in the country, and I think that if this turns out to be a normal wave year, incumbent Democrat Elaine Luria will fall to Jennifer Kiggans. As of November 1, Republicans and their allied groups had spent almost $2 million more than the Democrats had in this race. If Luria hangs on, it will be an early indicator that Democrats are doing better than expected. A year ago, Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe here, 55 percent to 44 percent.

In Virginia’s seventh district, I suspect Abigail Spanberger will hang on against Yesli Vega, partially because redistricting made this district a bit more Democratic-friendly, and partially because Democrats and their allied groups dumped enormous resources into keeping this seat — nearly $20 million by November 1. (You used to be able to afford to run a Senate campaign with that kind of money!) Last year, Youngkin won here 52 percent to 47 percent. If Spanberger loses, it’s an early indicator that Democrats are doing worse than expected.

In Virginia’s tenth congressional district, one of my favorite GOP challengers of the cycle, Hung Cao, is trying to beat incumbent Jennifer Wexton in a tough district — under the new lines, Youngkin was just short of McAuliffe last year, and Democrats usually win with well more than 50 percent. Cao’s a good candidate in a wave year, with Wexton winning the ad war by a large margin, working in a fairly blue district, If Cao wins, we’re moving from “red wave” to “red tsunami.”

In the Battle for the Senate . . .

My first prediction is that late on Election Night and into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, we won’t know which party will control the Senate. Our Brittany Bernstein wrote up a much-needed review of when we are likely to hear the results of key Senate races.

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin do not allow election officials to begin validating mail-in ballots until Election Day, which slows down the counting process compared to other states. Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of the commonwealth and top election official, told the New York Times that she expects “results to take at least a few days.” This is exactly what you don’t want to hear when you want to dispel conspiracy theories that an election is being stolen or results are being altered by behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Smaller, more sparsely populated Republican counties will report first, and larger, more densely populated Democratic counties and cities will report later. The early returns will show Mehmet Oz leading by a dramatic margin, and then Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will show John Fetterman gaining quickly and likely taking the lead. Many Republicans, likely egged on by Donald Trump, will contend that the election was “rigged” or stolen and that there’s no way Oz could have lost to a man who can barely communicate.

In other words, I think Dr. Oz will fall just short in Pennsylvania. He’s run a steadily improving campaign, evolving from a Ford Pinto into a Little Engine That Could. This is the call I’m least confident in, because I think there’s a chance that a small but decisive percentage of Pennsylvanians are telling pollsters they’re voting for Fetterman and just don’t want to admit they’re voting against the guy who had a serious stroke.

In Wisconsin, Riley Vetterkind, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told the New York Times that, “Given that unofficial results in both the 2018 and 2020 general elections weren’t largely complete until the early morning hours after Election Day, it would be reasonable to assume it may take until then for unofficial results to be tabulated and posted this year.” I think Ron Johnson will win reelection over Mandela Barnes by a surprisingly comfortable margin, but we may not see an official call until Wednesday afternoon.

New Hampshire officials are warning that an anticipated increase in write-in votes could lead to results being reported later than normal on Election Night. In New Hampshire, localities decide when polls open and close, but they cannot close before 7 p.m. I think Don Bolduc will beat incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan, but it is likely to be very close, and we will not see a declared winner until later in the week.

In Ohio, polls close at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, and I expect J. D. Vance will quickly be declared the winner over Tim Ryan. Vance is pulling away in the polls, and the worries of early August are long forgotten. It turns out that Ryan only looked like a strong candidate when he had the airwaves to himself.

In Colorado, most ballots are sent by mail, and results are reported by the counties to the state’s reporting system at 7 p.m. local time, which is 9 p.m. Eastern. I think Republicans will get their hopes up as it takes longer than expected for organizations such as the Associated Press to call a winner, but incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet will indeed beat Republican Joe O’Dea. (If O’Dea does win, remember the Democrats’ odd desperation to tie O’Dea to Trump in the final weeks of the race.)

Washington State votes mostly by mail as well, but some voters choose to cast ballots in person on Election Day, with polls that close at 8 p.m. local time, which is 11 p.m. Eastern. Tiffany Smiley has run about as good a campaign as any Republican can expect, and if Washington Democrats had been caught napping, Smiley might have pulled off the upset against longtime incumbent Patty Murray. Alas, Democrats spent a lot to ensure Murray serves her sixth term in the Senate.

In Arizona, the secretary of state’s office begins posting results at 8 p.m. local time, which is 10 p.m. Eastern, and state law permits the tabulation of early ballots prior to Election Day. More than 1.4 million Arizonans have cast ballots already. To me, this race and Pennsylvania are the two most difficult in which to project a winner: purple-ish states with incumbent Democrats who looked safer a month or two ago, against a Trump-endorsed Republican with all the momentum. My prediction is that Democrat Mark Kelly hangs on against Blake Masters by the skin of his teeth, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a narrow win the other way. It’s easy to envision a scenario where GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake ends up winning the governor’s race by a large margin and pulls Masters over the top.

In Nevada, polls close at 7 p.m. local time, which is 10 p.m. Eastern. Certain Nevada localities have voted to do a hand-count of the ballots, and then use a machine count to verify the results. Republican Adam Laxalt has led consistently, and Catherine Cortez Masto’s share of the vote is terrible for an incumbent — as low as 43 percent in certain polls. I know the unions and the old Harry Reid machine can help Democrats overperform their final numbers, but the headwinds just feel too strong for Cortez Masto to overcome. (Nevada’s inflation rate is worse than the national average, and it’s the dominant issue on people’s minds.)

In Georgia, I now think that Herschel Walker will finish ahead of incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, but I think he will finish just short of 50 percent, triggering a December 6 runoff, which I think Walker will win. (Also remember that libertarian candidate Chase Oliver has been getting 2 or 3 percent in polls, and that’s within the normal range for a third-party candidate.)

By midnight Eastern, we probably won’t have sufficient results to declare a winner in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, and Georgia is likely to go to a runoff. We might have a strong indication there’s going to be a GOP Senate majority if New Hampshire has enough of the votes tabulated, pointing to an insurmountable lead for Don Bolduc.

The under-discussed stories of this year are the Senate races that Democrats hoped would be competitive that just never became real races. In Florida, two-term incumbent Marco Rubio will beat Val Demings handily, which should make people ask whether those major mainstream-media columns touting Demings’ chances in late September were wishful thinking.

In Utah, two-term incumbent Mike Lee will beat Evan McMullin handily, which should make people ask why they were still seeing major mainstream-media columns touting McMullin’s chances in mid October.

Beating an incumbent senator is difficult. Beating a two-term senator is even more difficult. Beating a two-term senator in a state that usually favors that senator’s party is really difficult. And beating a two-term senator in a state that usually favors their party in a wave year that favors that senator’s party is just short of impossible. Whether or not you like to hear something does not affect its truthfulness.

In Iowa, that Des Moines Register poll in mid October that showed incumbent GOP senator Chuck Grassley only ahead by three points was probably just an unusual sample; the newest DMR poll showed Grassley up by twelve. Yes, that’s the closest race Grassley has run since 1986. No, that factoid doesn’t really matter that much, and yes, that should make people wonder why they were seeing major mainstream-media columns in mid October touting this as “the sleeper race of the year.”

With Bolduc, Laxalt, and Johnson winning, I come out to a 51–48 GOP advantage by the end of the week, with Walker and Warnock headed to a runoff. It wouldn’t shock me if Oz or Masters or both won, giving Republicans a 53- or 54-seat majority.

ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, you are likely to see some progressives scapegoating Joe Biden’s on-and-off “bipartisanship,” or Democrats’ supposed tendency to be “too nice” if the expected GOP wave materializes tomorrow for the expected GOP wave. But thankfully, you’re not the kind of reader who would buy into those excuses.

On the menu today: From the FiveThirtyEight forecast to the big-picture stories in the mainstream newspapers, the story is that Republicans have enjoyed a late burst of momentum in this year’s midterm elections. What doesn’t quite smell right to me is that the dynamics changed so dramatically in a span of three weeks or so. Not that much has changed in the country in the past month, suggesting that this was always a GOP wave year, and it’s just that a lot of people who cover and analyze the campaigns just didn’t want to see it.

Is This a Late Surge to the GOP? Or Was It Always There?

I understand that in the final weeks of a campaign, polls are conducted more frequently and by a wider range of organizations, opportunities for a trailing candidate to turn everything around dwindle, early votes get cast, and “the cement dries.”

I’m neither a Nate Silver superfan nor a hater; I think he calls them as he sees them. FiveThirtyEight runs a model that calculates the likelihood of each party to control the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. As of this morning, that model says there is a 55 percent chance that Republicans win control of the Senate, and an 85 percent chance that Republicans win control of the House. That’s a perfectly logical sentiment in line with polling, the political and economic environment, gut feeling, etc.

But about three weeks ago, on October 13, the same model showed that Democrats had a 66 percent chance of holding the Senate and a 31 percent chance of holding the House. That’s a dramatic swing. In fact, this past Sunday, the Democrats were still projected to hold the Senate, at 52 percent.

Does it feel as if the political environment changed that much in the past six days, or the past three weeks? What is the biggest thing that happened in the past three weeks? The John Fetterman–Mehmet Oz debate? Don Bolduc’s rise in New Hampshire? Maybe if you squint, the outlook for Blake Masters in Arizona’s Senate race has gotten a little better?

The state of the country hasn’t changed much in the past three weeks. The inflation rate, the unemployment rate, and other major economic indicators are updated monthly. The national average unleaded gas price is about one cent lower than it was a month ago.

But some big national polls did shift dramatically within the span of a month. Ed Morrissey noticed that CNN’s generic-ballot survey shifted seven percentage points toward the Republicans in a month, and Marist’s survey saw a similar six-point shift. Ed speculates that the prospects for Democrats were held aloft for months by polls of registered voters in the mix. As I pointed out in late September:

Once you sort out the pollsters using registered voters from the pollsters using likely voters, a clear pattern emerges. CBS, Emerson, Rasmussen, ABC, and Trafalgar are using likely voters, and their results average out to Republicans leading by 2.8 percentage points.

Economist/YouGov, Politico/Morning Consult, NBC News, Fox News, New York Times/Siena, and Harvard-Harris are using registered voters, and their results average out to Democrats leading by 2.83 percentage points.

As I also noted then, some pollsters’ definition of a “likely voter” probably includes people who aren’t likely to vote but who don’t want to admit that to a stranger on the phone. In the latest CBS News Battleground Tracker poll, which has Republicans ahead by one point on the generic House ballot, 74 percent of registered-voter respondents said they would definitely vote, and another 13 percent said they probably would vote. Based upon history, it seems exceptionally improbable that 87 percent of registered voters will actually turn out and vote this year.

Your mileage may vary, but from where I sit, a lot of people who cover races wanted to believe that Democrats would defy the odds and the historical pattern. They wanted to believe that Democrats would overcome a president with low job-approval ratings, utterly abysmal right-track/wrong-direction numbers, high inflation, high rates of illegal immigration, high crime rates, and a record drop in school test scores. Overcoming all of that requires remarkably charismatic and skilled candidates — and as I warned last month, Democrats have their own share of significantly flawed candidates. It turns out that Fetterman really couldn’t debate, Katie Hobbs won’t debate, and Mandela Barnes is far too liberal a candidate to beat a two-term incumbent in a purple state. The fact that Democrats didn’t want to hear it didn’t make it any less true.

Now, with just days until the election, the evidence is mounting that not only are we not going to see a surprising Democratic comeback, but we’re in for the kind of wave year where usually safe Democratic incumbents who looked okay find themselves defeated. All around, you can see big-picture roundups in mainstream publications, warning readers to brace themselves for a large-scale red wave.

The New York Times:

In the first major election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the debate over abortion rights has not emerged as a political silver bullet for Democrats, who have largely abandoned hopes that a surge of voter outrage over the decision alone would lift them over obstacles they face in the midterms.

The Washington Post:

Democrats across the country scrambled Thursday to bolster candidates in places President Biden carried safely in 2020, the latest sign of panic that they could face major losses in next week’s midterm elections. Vice President Harris and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton held a joint rally in an effort to rescue New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who faces a close race in a state Republicans haven’t won in two decades.

Politico:

The battle for control of the House has been spreading into bluer and bluer turf as Election Day creeps nearer, with more than 60 percent of ad spending the past two months flowing into districts President Joe Biden won by 5 or more points just two years ago.

The spending landscape illustrates the challenging pattern for Democrats and their slim majority: Many of their most vulnerable seats have already slid off the edge of the map, and Republicans are pushing them back even further, forcing an expensive defense of many seats that they and Biden both carried in the last election.

Our old friend Tim Alberta, writing in The Atlantic, laid out how Democrats are losing their traditional advantage among Hispanic voters. At The American Prospect, Democratic pollster and consultant Stanley Greenberg warns his party that it has completely mishandled the issue of crime, even alienating a chunk of its own base voters:

While Democrats were still competitive in the congressional ballot throughout the fall, they trailed Republicans by 13 points on which party would do better on crime. A quarter of Democrats in October said Republicans would do a better job. That included a quarter of Blacks and a stunning half of Hispanics and Asian Americans.

Vox notices that Democratic governors seeking reelection are conceding ground on school-choice issues:

While Republicans have led on the ‘parents’ rights’ mantra — and have been interweaving their rights rhetoric with plans to promote private school vouchers — even Democrats have been leaning in, including Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who recently formed a new “parents’ council” to advise lawmakers on education policy. Democratic gubernatorial candidates Josh Shapiro and J.B. Pritzker also recently came out to back private school voucher programs, among other entreaties to parents.”

Again, your mileage may vary, but I look at the tone of the coverage in recent days and see a subtext of, “Dear readers, it turns out that that big Democratic comeback isn’t going to happen after all. Sorry for getting your hopes up. Better luck next time.”

It’s not just me; this morning, longtime GOP strategist Brad Todd writes that, “Lots of ink being spilled about polls turning in Republican favor, as if it is a surprise shift — it was not. The fundamentals have not changed — but the wish-casting of the journalists & media pollsters reading the data has eroded.”

The only minor downside to your party enjoying a wave year is that it often wins at least a couple, and sometimes a bunch, of seats that it would never win in regular circumstances. For a new senator, they’ve got six years to ingratiate themselves to an electorate in a state that rarely favors their party. But for a new representative, the clock is ticking, and it’s likely that in 2024, Republicans will have a lot of freshman representatives trying to hang on in usually blue districts in a year with presidential-election-level turnout. Still, political parties would rather have the problem of too many seats to defend than too few.

ADDENDUM: You’re going to hear a lot of Democrats who are very excited about Oprah Winfrey endorsing John Fetterman — and effectively turning her back on her old friend Mehmet Oz.

It’s entirely possible Oz falls short; Pennsylvania is not the easiest state for a Republican to win, and Fetterman has the fourth-best fundraising of any Senate candidate this cycle at $56 million. Oz isn’t too far behind, ranking seventh at $40 million.

But if there’s any race in which it would not surprise me to see the final numbers dramatically different than the polls, it’s this one. It could well be that Pennsylvanians watched the debate — or more likely, the coverage of the debate — and came away not with sympathy for Fetterman, but instead with a sense that he and his campaign had misled everyone about the progress of his recovery from a stroke.

But I could also see Pennsylvanians not wanting to tell a pollster or anyone else that they’re voting for Oz and against Fetterman, lest others think of them as being mean or unsympathetic by voting against the guy who’s still recovering from a stroke.

On the menu today: Last night, President Biden offered this closing message: In order to preserve your right to vote for the candidate of your choice, you have no other option but to vote for the candidate of his choice. Biden’s speech began by focusing on the recent break-in and assault upon Paul Pelosi, the husband of House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and contended that the attack by a disturbed man was an extension of the events of January 6. That interpretation of the crime, however, conveniently ignores the multiple ways that government agencies who have the responsibility to prevent, deter, or quickly intervene in crimes such as this failed in their duties. Once again, agents of the state fail at their jobs, and all of this is somehow your fault.

A Failure in the System

The man who attacked Paul Pelosi overstayed his visa and had resided illegally in the U.S. for many years, perhaps by as much as two decades. In the indictment of the intruder, the FBI declared that it had searched where the intruder had been living for two years, the garage of a residence on Shasta Street in Richmond, Calif., and found evidence that he had “lived in the garage, including DMV paperwork, IRS letters, and Paypal credit cards.”

In other words, he was on the radar of the Internal Revenue Service, but not that of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You see, Richmond, Calif., is not merely a “sanctuary city” that bars local police from reporting the immigration status of individuals and ignores requests by ICE to detain undocumented immigrants whom local agents apprehend for misdemeanor crimes or investigations. Back in 2018, the city council went even further, expanding its sanctuary protections by blocking contracts with companies that provide data or “extreme vetting services” to federal immigration authorities — despite objections from the city’s mayor and city police.

The man* who attacked Paul Pelosi was severely mentally unwell and exhibited a malevolent, sadistic desire to hurt people.

His ex-girlfriend — who is currently serving a prison sentence after being convicted on 20 counts, including felony charges of stalking, dissuading a witness, and attempted child abduction — told the San Francisco ABC affiliate, “He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time.” She described him as having disappeared for a year and said that “he came back in very bad shape. He thought he was Jesus. He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.” A neighbor told the Wall Street Journal, “The conversations that come out of that house late, late at night are kind off the wall crazy, like religion that leaves the aliens.”

A week before the incident, the intruder wrote on his blog that “an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird.”

According to the indictment, the intruder told Paul Pelosi that if the speaker arrived and told “the truth,” he would let her go, but if she lied, he would “break her kneecaps.” He told police that Speaker Pelosi was the “leader of the pack” of lies told by the Democratic Party. The attacker “later explained that by breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other Members of Congress there were consequences to actions.” After being arrested, the intruder “explained that he did not leave after Pelosi’s call to 9-1-1 because, much like the American founding fathers with the British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender.”

The San Francisco area and the State of California expend considerable resources designed to help those with severe mental-health problems. Last year’s state budget included about $1.4 billion for four major proposals intended to address various behavioral-health-related needs in the state. Back in June, California governor Gavin Newsom announced another “$518.5 million in grants to help provide services and housing options to those with severe mental illness or substance abuse problems, including for those who are living on the streets.”

But as far as we know, after several days of reporters digging into the intruder’s background, the man who attacked Paul Pelosi never entered any state-run, city-run, or private mental-health-treatment program. Apparently, all those programs missed this guy.

The man who attacked Paul Pelosi broke into a house that has U.S. Capitol Police cameras watching every entrance, but those images were not “actively monitored” on the night of the attack, because the speaker was in Washington at the time. Yesterday, the U.S. Capitol Police promised it would conduct an internal review after its officers failed to notice surveillance-camera images of an intruder breaking into the home.

There was nothing that you or I could have done to prevent that abominable attack on an innocent elderly man. Now, if there were better enforcement of immigration laws, the attacker might have been deported back to Canada years ago. If the city and state had quicker and more widespread intervention for those with severe mental-health issues, he might have been in treatment, on medication, or locked up for his own safety and that of others. If U.S. Capitol Police had been watching the surveillance monitors, local police might have been on-scene quicker. The assault on Paul Pelosi is the story of a dangerous, disturbed man and the government agencies that failed in their responsibility to protect the public from him.

But President Biden took a different lesson from all of this. The president told us last night, in a national address, that he saw the attack — committed by a man who tried to warn others about malevolent, invisible fairies — as an extension of the awful events of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot:

The assailant ended up using a hammer to smash Paul’s skull. Thankfully, by the grace of God, Paul survived. All this happened after the assault, and it just — it’s hard to even say. It’s hard to even say. After the assailant entered the home asking: “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?” Those are the very same words used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January the 6th, when they broke windows, kicked in the doors, brutally attacked law enforcement, roamed the corridors hunting for officials and erected gallows to hang the former vice president, Mike Pence.

The lesson Biden took from the assault on Paul Pelosi is that you must vote for his party on Tuesday, or else American democracy ends:

Recent polls have shown an overwhelming majority of Americans believe our democracy is at risk, that our democracy is under threat. They too see that democracy is on the ballot this year, and they’re deeply concerned about it.

So today, I appeal to all Americans, regardless of party, to meet this moment of national and generational importance. We must vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment, but institutions that have held us together as we’ve sought a more perfect union are also at stake. We must vote knowing who we have been, what we’re at risk of becoming.

According to Politico’s Playbook newsletter, last night’s speech was a mulligan on what I called Biden’s “blood red” speech at Independence Hall two months ago:

Biden had already delivered a grand address on the issue, on Sept. 1 in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. But aides and allies said this week that Biden has become increasingly dismayed as more election deniers emerged from Republican primaries to wage competitive general election campaigns. And, as evidence emerged that democracy had moved up the list of voter concerns, he wanted to take another crack at it.

If Biden were genuinely dismayed that “election deniers” emerged from Republican primaries, he could have spoken out against his fellow Democrats spending $53 million in 13 GOP Senate, House, and gubernatorial primaries to help those election deniers.

In the New York Times, White House correspondent Peter Baker characterized the speech as amounted to the president arguing with the American people that they aren’t prioritizing the right issues:

Either way, voters were far likelier to identify inflation and the economy as well as other issues as their top priorities over the future of democracy. In fact, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, more than a third of independent voters and even 12 percent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Mr. Biden seemed almost to be arguing with those voters who were not, in his view, prioritizing election legitimacy highly enough. Medicare, Social Security and the other issues were important, he said, “but there’s something else at stake: democracy itself.” He added: “We can’t pretend it’s just going to solve itself.”

A contradiction that Biden and his fellow Democrats are never truly willing to address is that their solution to the threat to democracy — voting for Democrats — is the same message they would be delivering in any other ordinary election circumstance. Biden would never stick his neck out for the reelection of Georgia governor Brian Kemp, even though Kemp stood up to Trump’s nonsensical conspiracy theories and is running against a literal election denier.

We live in a world where Stacey Abrams contended that she won the 2018 governor’s election many times, Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that “Brian Kemp stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams,” and New Jersey senator Cory Booker asserted that “Stacey Abrams’s election is being stolen from her.” Biden would never dare suggest that those remarks were irresponsible lies or a threat to democracy. If he ever did, we might look at him as a braver and more honest man than he is.

Every cycle, you can find some usually little-noticed candidate insisting that they lost a close race because of shenanigans. What was different about 2020 was that the president of the United States was that candidate, and that he threw a toddler-esque temper tantrum that inspired a few thousand of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol Building and attack cops.

The events of January 6, 2021, were absolutely awful and unforgivable, but they don’t retroactively make Stacey Abrams’s claims reasonable, or Hillary Clinton’s claim that Trump was an “illegitimate president” correct, or John Kerry’s comments about Diebold machines sane, or Al and Tipper Gore’s claim that George W. Bush was not the true winner of the 2000 presidential election. If Republicans and/or Americans as a whole seem too blasé about the phenomenon of candidates denying the election results, it’s probably because they’ve been seeing this sort of thing for a long, long time.

*I try not to use the names of those who commit heinous crimes, so as to avert their desired goal of fame and notoriety.

ADDENDUM: It has been a little while since I have thanked those who are kind enough to leave Amazon reviews for the thriller series.

Kenneth writes of Between Two Scorpions, “A fun, fast-paced read with likable characters and believable villains, described in well-written style. All coupled with a hint of Greater Forces.”

B. Johnson writes, “Very fun to read. Mr. Geraghty has an incredible creative mind when it comes to imagining real world threats. Look forward to reading the next.”

Samuel writes of Hunting Four Horsemen:

The Dangerous Clique gang is back in a new adventure in a post-Covid world. The group gets a tip that someone calling Hell Summoner is shopping around a virus that can target a specific gene and therefore an ethnic group. Will some rogue government or hate group pay their price? They go after a list of suspects, all of whom are really loathsome characters, leading to an exciting conclusion. Another great story from this author.

And J. K. writes of Gathering Five Storms:

Highly recommend. Fast-paced but easy to follow. I look forward to future adventures. Great continuation to the previous two books in the series.

Thanks to all; Amazon reviews are a great way to support your favorite authors.

On the menu today: With the midterm elections now less than a week away, we’re seeing some odd final arguments from Democrats and their allies. Biden is pledging that “Democratic election wins will bring a ‘fundamental shift’ on economy,” which is an odd argument from a president whose party has controlled Congress for the past two years. The Nation laments that the country is in a “polycrisis,” which doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of the party that’s been running things since January 2021. Democratic officeholders do realize that they’re the incumbents this cycle, right?

All the Problems That Biden and the Democrats Didn’t Inherit

One of the problems facing the Democratic Party in the 2022 midterm cycle is that it is the incumbent party, but it acts and sounds as if it doesn’t want to believe that it is the incumbent party.

Today in the Washington Post, the headline is, “Biden says Democratic election wins will bring ‘fundamental shift’ on economy.” But the Democrats already are in the White House and enjoy majorities in the House of Representatives and a de facto majority the Senate. You could argue that the reason they’re in so much trouble as the midterm elections approach is because they’ve already brought about a “fundamental shift on the economy.” Democrats passed, with few or no Republican votes, the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Over in the Nation, the headline on Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column is, “In This Time of ‘Polycrisis,’ the Midterms Are More Critical Than Ever.” She explains that “polycrisis” is “the word historian Adam Tooze uses to describe multiple, simultaneous systemic crises that intensify as they collide, resulting in dire and deadly disruptions.” She lists off high food prices, climate change, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Covid-19, and inflation as elements of the “polycrisis.”

I wasn’t familiar with the term “polycrisis” until I read her column, but I figure that if you’re the incumbent party, you really don’t want to preside over one of those. In fact, you might say that the whole point of government is to avoid a polycrisis. The argument in the Nation is that things under this administration and these Democrats in Congress have never been worse, which is why they need to stay in power.

Right around now, some Democrats will argue that Biden inherited a bunch of problems when he was sworn into office — and that the direst one at the time of his election, the Covid-19 pandemic, is largely resolved.

But even the simple argument that “Biden and his team helped end the Covid-19 pandemic” is complicated by the president’s own words and policies.

Appearing on 60 Minutes in September, Biden boasted that, “The pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” The secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, issued a statement declaring that, “The president is right,” and yet six weeks later, Becerra renewed the declaration of a public-health emergency. As Charlie Cooke observed, the memo that the Biden administration released to justify Biden’s student-loan-relief order rested entirely upon the pandemic being an ongoing emergency; therefore, it is significant when the president declares that the pandemic is over. Finally, in late October, while encouraging Americans to get boosters, Biden lamented, “Let me be as plain as I can. We still have hundreds of people dying each day from COVID in this country — hundreds. That number is likely to rise this winter.”

So, is the pandemic over or not? The Biden administration’s perspective of the pandemic swings dramatically depending upon its political needs of the moment — “Schrödinger’s Pandemic.”

Quite a few severe national problems arose well after Biden was sworn into office. Inflation passed 4 percent in April 2021, 5 percent the following month, 6 percent in October 2021, 7 percent two months later, 8 percent in March of this year, and 9 percent in June. Biden didn’t inherit high inflation; he and his policies helped create it — or, at minimum, exacerbate it.

Biden didn’t inherit high gas prices, but he and his policies helped create them — or at minimum, exacerbate them. The national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline on Inauguration Day 2021 was $2.39 per gallon. In mid June, the national average hit $5.01, and this morning, it is at $3.79 per gallon. Biden recently boasted that, “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 — down from over $5 when I took office.” The fact-checkers indeed took him to task for that one.

You may have noticed that the administration is now referring to “the most common price of gas,” instead of the average price. As a good Wall Street Journal column from Josh Zumbrun laid out last week, this is a bit of numerical sleight-of-hand designed to make gas prices look about 50 cents cheaper than the prices you’re used to hearing discussed.

If you’ll pardon a brief, traumatic flashback to math class, this comes back to the concepts of mean, median, and mode. As the invaluable Khan Academy summarizes, “The mean (average) of a data set is found by adding all numbers in the data set and then dividing by the number of values in the set. The median is the middle value when a data set is ordered from least to greatest. The mode is the number that occurs most often in a data set.” In the set of numbers ten, nine, four, three, two, one, and one, the mean is 4.2, the median is three, and the mode is one.

As Zumbrun noted, on “Oct. 3, GasBuddy pegged the [national] average at $3.78 while AAA said $3.79. Not an interesting difference. More interesting was the median reported by GasBuddy, at $3.49, and the mode, at $3.29.” By choosing to measure gas prices by “the most common price of gas,” instead of the average, Biden can make gas prices seem significantly lower.

Biden didn’t inherit high rates of illegal immigration, he and his policies helped create it — or at minimum, exacerbate them. In January 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered about 78,000 migrants at the southern border with Mexico. Within two months, that number had jumped past 170,000, and it has remained between 164,000 and 241,000 in every month since. It was about 227,000 in September 2022, the most recent month that CBP has data.

Biden didn’t inherit a Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fact, Biden explicitly boasted on the campaign trail that, “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny, and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe, are over.” The record of the past two years indicates that Biden entered office with a wildly exaggerated sense of his own persuasiveness, leverage, and ability to intimidate hostile foreign leaders. The Biden administration couldn’t deter Putin from invading Ukraine or for committing heinous war crimes, month after month. This morning, the New York Times reports that, “Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine.” That’s about as ominous as it gets, but the Biden response to Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling has been to offer an off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness soliloquy about the potential for “Armageddon” at a Democratic Party fundraiser.

Then there’s the lingering high crime rates and the general sense of dangerous anarchy in America’s biggest cities, accompanied by a seeming explosion of homelessness, the ongoing baby-formula shortage, the rapid rise in interest rates and its effect on the housing market, and the lingering problems in American supply chains. Even if a new president and his team inherit a crisis, the American people have a right to expect some significant progress in resolving that crisis.

And then on top of all that, there are the administration’s self-created problems — choosing to attempt to fire employees who wouldn’t get a Covid-19 vaccine, the embarrassing fist-bump with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, endless outreach to a hostile Iranian regime that never generates any worthwhile results. One of the consequences of a united government is that the party in power gets just about all of the credit for what’s going right, and just about all of the blame for what’s going wrong. Unfortunately for Democrats, the electorate feels as if things have gone badly for much of the past two years, and are still going badly today.

As noted yesterday, Gallup found that Americans are the most frustrated, sour, and disappointed about the state of the country as they’ve ever been around a midterm election. To hear Biden and the Democrats tell it though, it’s all just bad luck. Don’t blame them. They just work here.

ADDENDUM: As noted in the Corner yesterday afternoon, when all is said and done, Beto O’Rourke will likely have raised over $80 million this cycle and Stacey Abrams may have raised more than $90 million. Democratic donors will have given at least $161 million (and possibly up to around $170 million) to two progressive Democrats who mounted fairly long-shot bids to unseat Republican incumbents in traditionally GOP-leaning southern states.

Around here, a conservative usually chuckles and thanks Democratic donors for giving to O’Rourke and Abrams instead of to Democrats running in more competitive races. But when all is said and done in this midterm cycle, I don’t think there are that many Democrats who will be able to plausibly argue that those candidates were just a few more donations away from winning. Most candidates in competitive races are awash in funding, and the airwaves in their local markets are deluged with attack ads.

On the menu today: Gallup unveils new polling numbers which find that the public assessment of the U.S. economy and national satisfaction are the lowest they have measured at the time of a midterm election; a new Wall Street Journal survey finds that white suburban women shifted 26 percentage points away from Democrats since August; Democrats are spending six-figure sums on television advertising to defend multiple House members in districts that Joe Biden won by at least 20 points in 2020 — and yet, we’re still seeing coverage suggesting that a late push on the issue of January 6 could save the midterms for Democrats.

Gallup: The National Mood Is As Dark As It Has Ever Been Going Into a Midterm Election

It’s another “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills” morning.

The 2022 midterms are less than a week away. We don’t know precisely how the midterms will shake out, but Republicans entered the cycle needing to add six more seats to win control of the House of Representatives, and a pickup of one seat to control the Senate. The president’s approval rating is 42 percent, and he is making, in the words of the New York Times, a “remarkably low-key campaign effort” to support Democratic candidates this fall, although he will be attending two events today to support Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist, and Senate candidate, Val Demings.

Unemployment is low by historical standards (3.5 percent), but inflation is 8.1 percent and has been above 6 percent year-over-year for twelve months now. Grocery prices are 13 percent higher than a year ago. The national average for a gallon of unleaded gasoline is $3.75, and has been above $3 per gallon since May of last year.

About 67 percent of Americans tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong track; some surveys put that number above 70 percent. In the RealClearPolitics average, Republicans currently enjoy a 2.9 percent lead on the generic ballot.

This morning, Gallup unveiled a new batch of national numbers, and it concluded that, “The Democrats are especially vulnerable this year because the national mood is as bad, if not worse, than it has been in any recent midterm election year”:

Heading into Election Day, 40 percent of Americans approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president, 17 percent are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S., 49 percent describe the health of the economy as poor (compared with 14 percent saying it is excellent or good), and 21 percent approve of the job the Democratically led Congress is doing.

Current ratings of the U.S. economy and national satisfaction are the lowest Gallup has measured at the time of a midterm election over the life of these polling trends, starting in 1994 and 1982, respectively. Congressional and presidential job approval are near their historical low marks.

Back in the day at RedState, Moe Lane used to look at numbers like that and declare, “DOOM.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal unveiled the results of its latest survey this morning, and the numbers indicate that the suburbs, which turned away from the GOP during the Trump years — and particularly in the 2018 midterms — have dramatically snapped back:

The GOP has seen a shift in its favor among several voter groups, including Latino voters and women, and particularly white suburban women. That group, which the pollsters said makes up 20 percent of the electorate, shifted 26 percentage points away from Democrats since the Journal’s August poll and now favors the GOP by 15 percentage points.

Even if you reject all polling data as unreliable, we know which districts and states the parties think are competitive by where they choose to spend money.

In the House, Democrats are spending $275,000 on television advertising to protect Representative Joe Morelle in New York’s 25th district, which includes Rochester. In 2020, Biden won this district, 60 percent to 37 percent, and Morelle won reelection, 59 percent to 39 percent.

NBC News reported on Sunday that in California, “Rep. Julia Brownley is making personal appeals to Democratic colleagues to send her campaign cash as her internal polls show a neck-and-neck race with her GOP challenger,” Matt Jacobs. This is in the state’s 26th congressional district, most of Ventura County, where Biden won, 61 percent to 36 percent, and Brownley won, 60 percent to 39 percent in 2020.

NBC also reported that, “Democrats have spent millions of dollars, raised from party entities and outside groups, to protect Rep. Jahana Hayes, the former Connecticut Teacher of the Year who cruised to decisive victories in 2018 and 2020.” This is Connecticut’s fifth congressional district, where Biden won, 55 percent to 44 percent, and Hayes won, 55 percent to 43 percent in 2020.

Axios reported Sunday that the National Republican Congressional Committee is making a six-figure buy in television advertising for Pennsylvania’s twelfth district, where Democrat Mike Doyle is retiring, and the Republican nominee is named . . . er, Mike Doyle. (Yes, fate brought about a version of The Distinguished Gentleman campaign. “Jeff Johnson, the name you know.”) Under the old district lines, the Democratic Doyle won with 67 percent of the vote in 2020.

The dynamics of campaign spending work in the other direction, too. In California’s 25th district, which covers northern Los Angeles County, Republican representative Mike Garcia should be high on any Democratic list of potentially vulnerable incumbents. Biden won here in 2020, 54 percent to 44 percent, while Garcia just barely eked out a win over Kristy Smith, 50.05 percent to 49.95 percent. But, as Politico reported, “Democrats have barely spent a dime on TV to take [Garcia] down.” There are just too many vulnerable incumbents elsewhere.

You see similar unusual spending in gubernatorial and senatorial races, too. For example, Democrats are rushing to save Governor Kathy Hochul in New York. Back in 2018, Andrew Cuomo won the New York governorship 59.6 percent to 36.2 percent.

Emily’s List spent $2.4 million in Washington State to help protect Democratic senator Patty Murray. The last three polls have put Murray ahead of Republican Tiffany Smiley by eight points, then six points, then one point. Back in 2016, Murray won 58 percent to 40 percent; back in 2010, she won 52 percent to 47 percent.

Campaign expenditures are a useful indicator, because a national party committee or like-minded super PAC isn’t going to spend $275,000 unless it feels like it really needs to do so. When Democrats and allied groups are spending six-figure sums in late October in districts where the incumbent Democrat usually wins by 20 points, that is a sign of a giant wave coming.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans will necessarily win those Biden-by-20-point districts; GOP candidates may well fall short in all of them. But if the national political environment is so bad for Democratic incumbents that Republicans have a shot in D+20 districts, then the GOP is in position to pull upsets in D+10 districts, and it should win a whole lot of D+5 and sweep the even districts.

You can even get a sense of the scale of the wave in Senator Chuck Schumer’s reelection numbers. Don’t get me wrong, Schumer’s going to win reelection without breaking a sweat, but the last four polls had him ahead by twelve to 14 points over Republican Joe Pinion, with Schumer polling in the low 50s and Pinion between 38 and 42 percent. Back in 2016 — admittedly, a year with presidential election-level turnout — Schumer won 70.6 percent to 27.2 percent. Six years before that, Schumer won 66 percent to 32 percent. This cycle, Schumer has spent $35 million on his reelection campaign; Pinion has spent $432,193. (No, I did not miss a decimal point in there; Pinion has spent less than half a million dollars.) No offense to Pinion, but he’s nothing special as a candidate. He’s running way, way better than the average Republican because the electorate is unhappy with the way Schumer and Democrats as a whole are doing their jobs. It is not crazy to envision Republicans running eight to ten percentage points higher than they usually do, across the board.

Now, with all of this in mind . . . do you feel as if most of the mainstream-media coverage of the midterms is giving you a sense of just how big of a GOP wave is gathering?

I don’t either. Thus, the sensation of “crazy pills.”

A week ago, on October 25, Nate Cohn of the New York Times wrote, “Let’s imagine that the polls are exactly right about the national political environment. If so, the race is in a very delicate spot. Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total Republican rout becomes imaginable.” (Less than a month ago, on October 3, Cohn wrote, “It’s Time to Take Democrats’ Chances in the House Seriously.”)

If Democrats are spending money to defend D+20 seats, is a Democratic House majority really imaginable?

Cohn’s colleague, Blake Hounshell, offered an assessment yesterday that struck me as more clear-eyed:

[The Cook Political Report] also lists five open seats in its ‘likely Republican’ category, which it does not consider competitive. Democrats previously held four of those five seats, which suggests that Republicans will start the election night vote-counting needing just one pickup elsewhere in order to win the majority.

CNN started the week with this news:

With just over a week to go until Election Day, a collection of Democratic candidates and supportive groups are willing to try a strategy that several party strategists acknowledge has not been very successful so far. They’re hoping a late rush of targeted ads and direct door-to-door outreach focused on January 6, 2021, and the threat to democracy can anger and scare enough of their own base and peel off still undecided voters to counter the momentum they sense moving toward the GOP.

January 6? They really think that a last-minute push of ads focused on January 6 is going to change voter attitudes shaped by inflation, high grocery prices, high gas prices, high crime, and an open border?

A lot of the coverage in these final weeks has the tone or theme that “despite the historical pattern, Democrats are campaigning hard!” Yes, every candidate and every party campaigns hard, every cycle. But it’s exceptionally hard to defy politically gravity, particularly when “national satisfaction” is at an all-time low, as Gallup found.

Will the average news reader be surprised on election night? Will anybody be irked that the media coverage of the election led them to think Democrats had a decent chance to mitigate their losses?

ADDENDUM: At what point can we have a serious discussion about the need to enforce immigration law on those foreigners who overstay their visas?

This is on my mind because “David DePape, the suspect accused of beating Paul Pelosi in his home with a hammer after breaking in, is currently in the U.S. illegally as a ‘longtime’ visa overstay,” according to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin.

Happy Halloween! On the menu today: The New York Times unveils new surveys giving some hope to Democrats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania; assessing Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s open-mic comment that, “The state where we’re going downhill is Georgia”; and examining the theory that Stacey Abrams’s faltering gubernatorial bid is becoming a deadweight to Raphael Warnock’s Senate reelection bid.

Georgia and the Democrats’ Closed Systems

Late last week, campaign watchers received a new data point about how Democrats perceive their chances in the battle for the Senate when Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was caught on a hot mic on the tarmac of Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y. “The state where we’re going downhill is Georgia. It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker,” Schumer said of the Republican Senate nominee, adding, “But our vote, our early turnout in Georgia is huge, huge.”

As of October 29, more than 1.6 million Georgians had already cast their ballots, and state data indicate that 54 percent of those 1.6 million early voters were women, almost 30 percent were black, and only 14 percent were below the age of 40.

Schumer seemed more optimistic about John Fetterman’s chances in Pennsylvania: “It looks like the debate didn’t hurt us too much in Pennsylvania . . . so that’s good.” He also indicated that Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was “picking up steam” in Nevada; she’s been trailing by a small margin in most polls.

By a lot of measures, GOP Pennsylvania Senate nominee Mehmet Oz seemed to have evolved from the Ford Pinto into the Little Engine That Could, climbing in the polls to a tie, and last week’s debate appeared likely to provide that last surge of momentum to put him over the top . . . but this morning, a New York Times/Siena College poll puts Fetterman up by five percentage points. That poll was conducted from October 24 to 26, and the debate was the night of October 25. The Times elaborates:

The Pennsylvania poll was largely conducted before the debate, with only one night of interviews made afterward. In calls made on Wednesday, the night after the matchup, a plurality of voters said Mr. Fetterman was not healthy enough to do the job — though Mr. Fetterman still maintained a slight lead over Dr. Oz among all Wednesday respondents. That was a shift from the previous two evenings, when majorities rated him as sufficiently well to serve in the Senate.

Did Schumer know his comments could be overheard? He was in a public place, with reporters holding cameras and microphones standing nearby, talking to the president of the United States. Was it a performance for the cameras? After “It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker,” Schumer gave a somewhat disbelieving or exasperated head shake, which seems like the sort of reaction he would naturally have. Also, remember whom he’s talking to in that conversation. Does Joe Biden seem like the kind of guy who’s interested in, or capable of, an elaborate ruse to fool GOP campaigns or the public?

Also, if you’re Schumer, are your hopes for a continued Senate majority served better by being overheard saying that Democrats are winning, to build confidence, or saying that Democrats are losing, to ensure that your party doesn’t get complacent? The fact that Schumer is relaying a mix of good and bad news suggests he’s not trying to generate a particular reaction from anyone who could overhear him.

Occam’s Razor would suggest this is what Schumer genuinely thought at that moment, and much of the recent polling in Georgia backs up his assessment that Raphael Warnock’s chances at reelection are indeed going downhill:

• An Insider Advantage poll conducted last Thursday had Herschel Walker ahead by three percentage points.
• A Trafalgar poll conducted between October 21 and October 23 had Walker ahead by two percentage points.
• A co/efficient poll conducted on October 24 and 25 had Walker ahead by three and a half points.
• A Rasmussen Reports poll conducted on October 23 and 24 had Walker ahead by five percentage points.
• An internal Walker-campaign poll conducted October 22–25 had Walker ahead by four percentage points.

Keep in mind, a candidate must clear 50 percent of the vote to avoid a December 6 runoff, and none of these polls had Walker above that threshold.

No doubt, many Democrats believed that the allegations that Walker paid for a girlfriend’s abortion would wreck his chances. [Insert linebacker-trying-to-tackle-Walker-and-bouncing-off-him metaphor here.] But also note that latest New York Times survey is offering Democrats some hope, putting Warnock ahead, 47 percent to 44 percent.

Last night, Zaid Jilani offered an intriguing theory about the dynamics between the two statewide races in Georgia. “National press is missing what’s happening in this race. Walker isn’t dragging Kemp down. Abrams’ underperformance is threatening Warnock’s numbers and the chances of Dems holding the Senate.”

And there’s some evidence to support that theory. The Insider Advantage survey puts Kemp up by eight percentage points, Rasmussen and Data for Progress each put Kemp up by ten, and Trafalgar and East Carolina University each put Kemp up by seven. You notice you just don’t hear as much about Stacey Abrams lately; FiveThirtyEight calculates that Kemp has a 91 percent chance of winning reelection.

In fact, we might be witnessing a candidate meltdown, as Abrams declared during a debate with Kemp on Sunday night that 107 sheriffs had endorsed Kemp, because they “want to be able to take black people off the streets.” (Note that Warnock is running on his endorsements by certain sheriffs and touting his support for funding law enforcement.)

If you are not emotionally invested in the success of Stacey Abrams, you can take a cold-eyed look at her and conclude that she may well be a liability for her party in this year’s political environment. Yes, she came very close to winning in 2018, but she spoiled any lasting goodwill from that performance by insisting that she was the real winner of the race, and by claiming that Georgia’s voting machines “erased 100,000 votes in 2018.” (Abrams’s arguments were later cited by infamous Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.) Abrams has been crafting a public image and running a campaign ideal for the MSNBC audience, not for the Georgia electorate. She helped chase the Major League Baseball All-Star game away from Atlanta, supports reparations for slavery, wants to repeal Georgia’s permitless-carry law and its campus-carry law, opposes any limits of any kind on abortion, says that illegal immigrants should be eligible for state-funded scholarships, supports eliminating cash bail, served on the boards of organizations promoting “defund the police” . . . and then there was that infamous photo of her, maskless, surrounded by masked elementary-school kids. That is a really hard-left agenda for a candidate running in a state where Democrats didn’t win a statewide election between 2000 and 2018.

But declaring that Abrams is better suited to wowing New York-based glossy-magazine editors than Georgia voters is blasphemy in most Democratic circles, and only became acceptable to acknowledge in mainstream-media circles in the past month or so. (Politico, September 29: “[Abrams and Beto O’Rourke’s anointment as the future of the Democratic Party — young, dynamic and erudite — led to glossy magazine profiles and soft press coverage that may have burnished their national profiles but did little to advance their prospects among voters who weren’t already inclined to support them.”) Abrams is the same person she was three months ago, six months ago, a year ago, and two years ago. But it’s only okay to recognize that she’s extremely hard to elect now, after polls have shown her trailing all year long.

And if Jilani’s theory is right, she’s so difficult to elect that she may drag Raphael Warnock down with her.

There is a theory that every group of human beings – organizations, companies, political movements, nations — is either “open” or “closed.” That is, they either have free and open communication — including dissent and assessment of flaws or problems — or they stifle disagreement and internal criticism. Authoritarian regimes, cults, and companies run by tyrannical bosses are closed systems; hopefully, the organizations you belong to have leaders who will listen when someone says, “Hey, we’ve got a problem here.”

Closed systems often appear more stable and stronger in the short-term, but they’re brittle and vulnerable in the long-term. Real problems get downplayed, ignored, or denied; honest assessments and good ideas are never allowed to bubble up from the bottom. Jon Stewart recently lamented that, “The way to understand the American legislative process is that it’s so complex and arcane that nothing is possible. It’s a remarkably inefficient system that’s not agile, and I think it’s why democracy . . . is in some ways on the wane in the world. Ain’t nothing as agile as authoritarian regimes.”

Authoritarian regimes are “agile” in the sense that when the authoritarian orders a change, it is usually quickly carried out. But authoritarian regimes prioritize keeping the authoritarian in power over all other interests — which usually erodes the regime’s ability to address real problems. It is the end of October 2022, and the government of China is still locking workers inside of factories to control the spread of Covid. Vladimir Putin’s regime is “agile” in terms of its ability to send more troops to the front in Ukraine, but not so agile in analyzing the mounting costs and shrinking benefits of invading its neighbor.

In the end, the Democratic Party’s internal politics are a closed system, or at least an insufficiently open one. Leaders don’t like hearing that a candidate that they like is, at minimum, a poor match for the state they’re running in, and likely nowhere near as charming and charismatic as the party’s leaders want to believe. (As anyone who has criticized Donald Trump knows, the Democrats are not the only major political party that suffers from this dynamic.)

The people at the top wanted to believe that Stacey Abrams was a superstar, even a “superhero.” They didn’t want to hear that she was the wrong candidate to run in a GOP-leaning state in a GOP-leaning year. Beyond Warnock’s reelection bid, this year, Georgia elects seven other statewide officials, 14 U.S. House members, all 56 state senators, all 180 state representatives, and numerous candidates for local offices, as well as voting on various ballot measures, etc. If Abrams flops at the top of the ticket, it will have deleterious consequences for Democrats further down the ballot.

Democrats were warned about Abrams’s flaws as a candidate; they just didn’t want to listen.

ADDENDA: Some guy in the Washington Post writes that there’s a good chance that there’s a recession waiting for all of us on the other side of New Year’s Day, which will complicate life both for new GOP majorities in Congress and for President Biden.

Two of my colleagues/bosses who are best-known for their incisive writing and analysis have wicked senses of humor. Rich envisions future Biden ice-cream stops in the darkening second half of this administration, while over at Bloomberg, Ramesh channels all of the desperate campaign-fundraising emails you’ve been getting.

On the menu today: Let’s take a deep dive into the aspect of the midterms that seems to get glossed over, namely, the battle for the House of Representatives, and think about why House races never get as much attention as Senate or gubernatorial races.

That Less-Discussed GOP House Wave

You haven’t heard as much about the battle for the House of Representatives this cycle for a couple of reasons.

First, a GOP takeover of the House has been almost a foregone conclusion since the results of 2020 became clear — with 213 seats, just five short of a majority, and the president’s party usually losing House seats in a midterm election, Republicans just needed to not trip over their own shoelaces this cycle to win a small majority and make Kevin McCarthy the next speaker of the House.

Right now, Larry Sabato’s “Crystal Ball” — which is more rigorous and data-driven than the name makes it sound — assesses that 218 seats are rated at least “lean Republican.” In other words, for Democrats to keep the majority, they would need to keep every seat rated “lean Democrat” or better, win all of the 22 races rated “toss-up,” and then win at least one of the races leaning Republican.

Second, this is the first House election after a round of redistricting, so in a lot of states, the district lines have moved or at least shifted a bit, and our past sense of what is “normal” for a district is no longer quite so accurate. Redistricting has led to some fascinating incumbent-against-incumbent battles, but Democrats’ fears that redistricting would put them at a severe, decade-long disadvantage didn’t really pan out.

(I also suspect you hear less about House races because the average news viewer doesn’t know where any given district is. If I write, “Pennsylvania,” you probably picture the Liberty Bell, or Terrible Towels, or the Gettysburg battlefield. If I write, “Pennsylvania’s first congressional district,” only locals or House geeks will envision Bucks County.)

Third, there is no getting around the fact that polling numbers help shape narratives and perceptions of any given race, and it’s just more complicated and expensive to conduct polls of House races. Most pollsters use area codes to determine which numbers to call to conduct their poll. Area codes never cross state lines, but they do cross House-district lines, so the pollster must sort through the phone numbers and determine which numbers are in which district. This makes conducting the poll more time-consuming and expensive, and media companies, which often pay for public polls, aren’t as interested in the outcomes of individual House races.

With the Senate 50–50 and only 36 Senate seats up for grabs, the stakes of each individual Senate race are clear. Whether or not we have Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader could well come down to Pennsylvania or Arizona or Georgia, either on Election Day or in a runoff. Control of the House is unlikely to come down to one race, so if Republicans hear about a particular race taking a bad turn — e.g., the controversy surrounding J. R. Majewski in Ohio’s coastal ninth congressional district — they can shrug and know their hopes for a House majority are only slightly endangered by that bit of bad news.

Because of the issue with area codes, the House races that are easiest to poll are the at-large-district races — places where one congressional district covers the entire state: Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. Unfortunately, those five states all lean heavily toward one party or another.

Alaska is getting some attention, as it is currently represented by a Democrat, Mary Peltola, and uses that unusual ranked-choice system. Peltola stands out from your average Democratic House candidate — she’s the first Alaska Native woman elected to Congress, and the New York Times described her campaign as “centered on fish, freedom and family” — and for that reason, she’s likely to get more attention than the average Democratic House candidate. She also represents a rare bit of good news for Democrats in what is shaping up to be an overall terrible year for that party.

I was going to write, “No one is bothering to poll Delaware because it’s so deeply Democratic. Lisa Blunt Rochester is considered a shoo-in for reelection,” but it turns out that the University of Delaware conducted a poll last week and found Rochester leading Republican Lee Murphy, 50 percent to 33 percent.

In North Dakota, Democrats aren’t running a candidate, at least on paper; the top challenger to incumbent Republican Kelly Armstrong is independent Cara Lund, but I noticed that the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party conducted a poll on that race, showing Armstrong up by four percentage points. (The official full name of the North Dakota Democratic Party is the “North Dakota Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party,” formed by a merger of two parties back in 1956.) I would be genuinely surprised if Armstrong’s lead is that small; he won with 69 percent in 2020.

At the beginning of the month, the University of Vermont conducted a poll on that state’s House race;  it recorded Democrat Becca Balint in the lead with 57 percent to Republican nominee Liam Madden’s 19 percent and libertarian Ericka Redic’s 9 percent.

In Wyoming, there was interest in Harriet Hageman’s victory over Liz Cheney in the primary, but no one has bothered to conduct a public poll of Hageman’s general-election contest versus Democrat Lynette Grey Bull.

New Hampshire sees more polling of its two House districts than most other states, and for much of the year, the state’s two Democratic House members, Chris Pappas and Annie Kuster, looked relatively safe. But as Michael Graham of the New Hampshire Journal notes, a new survey shows the GOP challengers surging at the right time:

In the First Congressional District, newcomer Karoline Leavitt is in a margin-of-error race with two-term incumbent Chris Pappas, trailing him 48-44 percent. According to sources close to the Leavitt campaign, its internal polling shows she has already caught Pappas and continues to gain momentum.

And in the Second District, the poll found Bob Burns leading longtime Rep. Annie Kuster 44 — 43 percent, with 12 percent undecided.

Here and there, you can see signs of the GOP wave being on the larger side. In Rhode Island, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a poll showing a tie in the second district race between Republican Allan Fung and Democrat Seth Magaziner — which would represent an improvement for Magaziner! (I think Alan Fung is going to win, and I would love to see how a focus group would react to his spectacularly thick Rhode Island coastal accent.)

In fact, one of the under-reported stories of the cycle could be the resurrection of the GOP in New England. In addition to the party’s improved chances in New Hampshire and Rhode Island, a recent Emerson College poll of Connecticut’s fifth congressional district found Republican challenger George Logan narrowly besting incumbent Democrat Jahana Hayes, 48 percent to 47 percent.

The New York Times surveyed four swing districts — Kansas’s third district, Pennsylvania’s eighth district, Nevada’s first district, and New Mexico’s geographically massive second district. Only the Kansas district looks out of reach for Republicans; the best GOP pickup opportunities appear to be in Nevada, where Republican Mark Robertson and incumbent Democrat Dina Titus are tied at 47 percent each, and in New Mexico, where incumbent Democrat Gabriel Vasquez leads Republican Yvette Herrell, 48 percent to 47 percent.

All around the country, you can find GOP House challengers hanging around within a few points of their opponents, and Democratic incumbents languishing below 50 percent of the vote. That doesn’t mean the Republican is automatically going to win, but it means they’re in a position where they can win. Like I noted when discussing the cycle’s governor’s races a few days ago, in a year like this, a Republican challenger just needs to avoid last-minute mistakes, make sure their get-out-the-vote operation is a well-oiled machine, and hope the remaining undecideds vote against the incumbent.

In Virginia, the Christopher Newport University survey found Democratic representative Elaine Luria and Republican state senator Jen Kiggans deadlocked at 45 percent among likely voters in the state’s second congressional district race, with 8 percent undecided. In Minnesota’s second district, KTSP/Survey USA poll found Democratic incumbent Angie Craig ahead of her Republican challenger, Tyler Kistner, 46 percent to 45 percent. In Colorado’s new eighth congressional district, the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group found Republican state senator Barb Kirkmeyer leading Democratic state representative Yadira Caraveo 46 percent to 44 percent. In Texas’s 15th district, the Democratic firm Way to Win found Republican Monica De La Cruz and Democrat Michelle Vallejo tied at 45 percent. In Pennsylvania’s seventh district, a Morning Consult/Muhlenberg College poll found incumbent Democrat Susan Wild leading Republican Lisa Scheller, 47 percent to 46 percent.

Again, Republicans aren’t guaranteed to win any of these House races. But late in the cycle, GOP candidates are in a position where they could win any or all of them, if voters are sufficiently frustrated by the state of the country and take it out on their Democratic House members or candidates.

(Separately, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn wrote earlier this week, “Let’s imagine that the polls are exactly right about the national political environment. If so, the race is in a very delicate spot. Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total Republican rout becomes imaginable.” I don’t see how you can look at the current polling, sparse as it is, and envision a “narrow House majority” for Democrats. If Republicans are set to win, and perhaps crush, governor’s races in places such as Texas, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, and perhaps Arizona, just how different do you think the down-ticket races will go in those states? If Lee Zeldin is as surprisingly close in the New York governor’s race as he seems, how well do you think Democrats will do in the four to eight competitive House races in that state?)

Give the Republicans the 218 races that are “leaning Republican” and two-thirds of the toss-ups, and you end up with a GOP House majority of 232 seats to Democrats’ 203 seats. (Republicans could well win more than 14 out of those 22 toss-ups.) Republicans currently have 212 seats and a vacancy in the GOP-leaning Indiana district of the late Jackie Walorski. That would add up to a gain of 19 seats — a number that might seem a little unspectacular, but partially reflects the high floor that Republicans began with in this cycle.

ADDENDUM: If Colorado GOP Senate candidate Joe O’Dea pulls off the upset and beats Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet, remember the odd shift in Democratic messaging in mid-to-late October, including the absurd attempt to paint O’Dea as a Trump-aligned “MAGA Republican” at the exact time that Trump is denouncing him as a “RINO” and a “stupid person with a big mouth.” That line of attack is so incongruous, so sudden, so deliberately misleading about the glaring ideological and character differences between O’Dea and Trump, that it smells like panic in a race where the Democrat had been leading pretty comfortably so far.

If Bennet wins, forget I said anything.

On the menu today: Just what does President Biden get briefed on? Does he listen? What does he read? Biden apparently believes that the polls will turn around for Democrats between now and Election Day — never mind that more than 14 million Americans have already voted in the midterm elections — and that Democrats are “beating the tide.” We can never quite tell which Biden statements are spin, which ones are blind, naïve, optimism, and which ones represent his being completely out of touch with what’s going on. If Democrats are “beating the tide,” doesn’t he find it odd that he’s not appearing at any rallies with Democratic candidates in the final weeks of the cycle? Does he recognize that it is highly abnormal for a president to spend the final weekends before Election Day relaxing at his home in Delaware?

The Information Biden Is Missing

Yesterday, Politico ran a story with the headline, “Biden insists the polls will turn in his favor. Privately, the White House is anxious.” Sometime after I tweeted about it, the headline changed to “Election anxiety creeps inside the White House.”

I noted that it feels like every day we get some headline that is a version of, “Amidst a long run of bad news, President Biden insists good news is just around the corner.” Inflation is temporary, or it’s at zero percent, or it’s peaked, or it’s tapering off. The economy is “strong as hell.” The border is secure. There’s optimism, and then there’s blind denial.

That Politico article noted:

In the stretch run before the election, Biden has held far fewer events than his immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, did in the closing weeks of their own first midterm election season. The president is slated for a trip to upstate New York on Thursday but did not campaign last weekend — and he currently has no campaign events planned for this coming weekend, just 10 days before voters go to the polls. On both weekends, he has opted instead to remain at one of his Delaware homes.

As I have been metaphorically shouting all autumn, this is highly abnormal. Either Biden is too unpopular to be of any use to any Democrats other than in a handful of races, or as he approaches his 80th birthday he doesn’t have the stamina to handle the traditional late-campaign schedule, or both.

Recall that back in 2006, President George W. Bush was awfully unpopular, with a job-approval rating below 40 percent. And yet, Bush went out and held rallies with Republican candidates in then-solidly red states such as Indiana, Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Texas, and Nebraska. Obama campaigned all over the country in 2010 and 2014, even though his approval rating was lousy, and Trump did the same in 2018.

I remind you, Biden’s absence from the campaign trail and weekends at home was not the plan, as of a few months ago. In late August, Biden attended a traditional-style Democratic Party rally in Rockville, Md., and White House officials told the New York Times that Biden was “embracing the role as his party’s top campaigner.”

One of the few places it has been safe for President Biden to hold something akin to a traditional rally was literally inside the Democratic National Committee’s offices Monday. And once again, Biden stated he was seeing an imminent victory that no one else sees.

“Whether we maintain control of the Senate and the House is a big deal. And so far, we’re running against the tide, and we’re beating the tide!” Biden said.

Where? Where, in this political environment, are Democrats beating the tide?  The only group who has beaten a tide this autumn is the University of Tennessee football team.

Thankfully, Biden spared us the cliché, “The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day.” But he insisted that the polling was just too contradictory to be a useful measurement of the state of the electorate:

The polls have been all over the place. First of all, if you speak to most pollsters, they’re not sure anymore — not about the outcome, but about polling. No, I’m not being facetious. It’s awful hard to do it these days. It’s awful hard to do it these days. “Republicans ahead.” “Democrats ahead.” “Republicans ahead.” But it’s going to close, I think, with seeing one more shift: “Democrats ahead” in the closing days.

But the polls really aren’t vague or contradictory this fall. In the generic-ballot question, Republicans have led 15 of the last 18 public polls, and most people think Democrats need to be ahead by three or four percentage points to keep the House. Democrats got excited when the Politico/Morning Consult survey showed them ahead by four percentage points, but that was a poll of registered voters, not likely voters.

The polls aren’t just bad for Democrats; some of the results almost look too good for Republicans.

What are we to make of a Fox/Insider Advantage poll in Arizona that has Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake ahead of Democrat Katie Hobbs by eleven points? (By refusing to debate, Hobbs is going to be remembered as the Martha Coakley of this election cycle — an entitled, down-ticket state official with spectacularly bad instincts who fumbled away a race that, on paper, she had at least a decent shot of winning.)

What are we to make of Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm, finding Florida governor Ron DeSantis beating Charlie Crist by twelve points? Or the University of North Florida survey finding DeSantis ahead by 14 points?

What are we to make of the last bunch of surveys of likely voters in Texas putting Greg Abbott ahead by nine to eleven points?

If Republicans are winning the governor’s races by double-digit or near-double-digit margins, they will likely also enjoy sweeping down-ticket state legislative wins in Arizona, Florida, and Texas. FiveThirtyEight noted this week that Democrats could lose control of the state legislatures in Nevada, Maine, and Oregon. Republicans could win complete control of state legislatures in Alaska, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

Speaking of Wisconsin, that Politico article also mentioned, “Biden has voiced strong interest in seeing incumbent Republican Ron Johnson defeated in Wisconsin.” Johnson hasn’t trailed in a poll since early September. Has anyone told Biden how that Senate race is going for Mandela Barnes?

What is Biden being told about the outlook for Democrats in the midterms? Back in May, he publicly predicted that Democrats would add three more Senate seats to their current “majority” of 50 seats. This week’s confident “We’re beating the tide!” declaration is the inverse of his nuclear “Armageddon” warning at a Democratic fundraiser, which left the rest of the U.S. government, including the parts assigned the vital duty of watching Russia’s nuclear arsenal, scratching their heads and wondering what the president was talking about.

To whom is Biden listening? To whom is he talking? What is he reading? What is being discussed in his briefings? There’s this unnerving pattern in which the president regularly blurts out things that seem disconnected from reality or blatantly contradict his earlier statements.

Earlier this week, Biden did an event urging Americans to get their Covid-19 booster shots, and his off-the-cuff remarks veered into ominous doomsaying:

As we know, this virus is constantly changing. New variants have emerged here in the U.S. and around the world. We’ve seen cases and hospitalizations rise in Europe in recent weeks. Your old vaccine or your previous Covid infection will not give you maximum protection. Let me as plain as I — let me be as plain as I can. We still have hundreds of people dying each day from Covid in this country — hundreds. That number is likely to rise this winter.

That stern warning about the lingering threat is very hard to rectify with Biden’s statement from five weeks ago that, “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

It’s just the continuing adventures of President Mr. Magoo, making grandiose promises — “I’m going to shut down the virus!” “We’re gonna cure cancer!” — and stumbling and wandering and insisting everything is going great, you’ve never had it so good, and anything that is going wrong is somebody else’s fault. Infant formula is easier to find than it was a few months ago, but NPR reports this morning that the ability to find it in stores is hit and miss, depending upon where you live. “We are nowhere close to anywhere near being at a normal supply compared to May,” a pediatrician lamented.

A problem emerges, Biden insists he would have to be a mind reader to have seen the problem coming, he promises it will be solved soon, eventually some half-measures get started, and then he and his team forget about it and move on to the next problem. Lather, rinse, repeat.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to Christian Toto for an interview with some particularly thought-provoking questions about Gathering Five Storms, the Dangerous Clique series, and fiction-writing.

On the menu today: The entire Jenga-block tower of the John Fetterman campaign came crashing down last night, as it became painfully, abundantly clear that the Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania is still suffering severe effects of his stroke, and the past few months of the candidate’s making ten-to-twelve-minute appearances on the stump have been an elaborate effort to hide those lingering effects. The issue isn’t the stroke; the issue is the dishonesty — and for Pennsylvania Democrats, this is an entirely self-inflicted wound. If the state party had wanted to substitute one of Fetterman’s primary rivals, Representative Conor Lamb or state representative Malcolm Kenyatta, it could have done so.

Fetterman’s Fateful Debate

Pennsylvanians will not have a problem with John Fetterman because he had a stroke. They will have a problem with John Fetterman because he, his wife, his campaign, and his party were not honest with the state’s voters about his true condition and recovery until it could no longer be hidden last night. As I wrote yesterday, “Delivering a version of your stump speech before an adoring crowd is different, and easier, than answering questions with time limits.”

When Pennsylvania Democrats insist that a candidate who suffered a life-threatening stroke in May is recovering well and “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” that candidate must look and sound fine to prove they’re telling the truth. Last night, in the lone debate in the Pennsylvania Senate race, John Fetterman looked and sounded very, very far from fine. But you can judge for yourself by watching the whole debate here.

I expected Fetterman’s debate performance to be a Rorschach test, with Democrats insisting that he was fine and hand-waving away any problems, and Republicans pointing to every verbal misstep, pause, or oddly worded answer. But by the end of the hour, there was little debate, no pun intended. John Fetterman’s ability to hear, understand, process information, and speak appears to still be severely impacted by his stroke. Perhaps the worst moment of the night came when one of the moderators asked him about a statement he made in 2018 opposing fracking, and how he could square that past stance with his current claim that he always supported fracking. After a long pause, presumably from reading the moderator’s question from the monitor, Fetterman said, “I, I, I do support fracking and . . .” and then for a moment, Fetterman’s head shook, and his mouth moved, but no words came out. Then he picked up again: “I don’t . . . I don’t. I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.” With everyone watching likely mortified and embarrassed to watch Fetterman struggle to finish the sentence, the moderator mercifully moved on to the next question.

Joe Scarborough: “John Fetterman’s ability to communicate is seriously impaired. Pennsylvania voters will be talking about this obvious fact even if many in the media will not.”

Charlotte Alter, senior correspondent for Time magazine: “I spoke to Fetterman recently, and I expected him to be very bad tonight. But he was much, much worse than I expected (and much worse than in our one-on-one conversation.)”

Politico: “John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz sparred over abortion, fracking and other hot-button issues during their Senate debate Tuesday night, with the Democrat who suffered a stroke more than five months ago struggling at times to effectively communicate — missing words, pausing awkwardly and speaking haltingly.” Their Playbook newsletter’s first line this morning: “John Fetterman struggled to effectively communicate during his one and only Senate debate with Mehmet Oz Tuesday in Harrisburg. . . . Fetterman failed to meet even the low expectations his own campaign set for him Monday in a memo that predicted ‘awkward pauses, missing some words, and mushing other words together” as well as “temporary miscommunications at times.’”

An even more devastating assessment came a few lines farther down: “The plain fact is that Fetterman was not capable of debating Oz.”

Axios:

Multiple sources wondered why Fetterman agreed to debate when he clearly wasn’t ready. Fetterman struggled at times to respond to the moderators’ questions, even with the assistance of a closed captioning device. “Why the hell did Fetterman agree to this?” one Democratic lawmaker and Fetterman backer told Axios. “This will obviously raise more questions than answers about John’s health.”

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake:

It was a rough night. . . . Fetterman was halting, in keeping with his recent public performances, including an NBC News interview. He began by saying ‘Good night,’ rather than ‘Good evening.’ He often started a thought and shifted course without finishing it. He used the wrong words. He mostly tried to play it safe by sticking to boilerplate issue positions rather than going in-depth on policies. When it came to his health, he was given two chances to commit to releasing fuller medical records, and he demurred both times, arguing that his presence and his doctors’ say-so should be good enough for voters.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The former Braddock mayor and current lieutenant governor spoke haltingly at times, had difficulty stringing words together and mispronounced words in some instances during the hour-long, rapid-fire debate. Mr. Fetterman also said he wouldn’t release his full medical records for the sake of transparency, as Mr. Oz and other Republicans have demanded.

CNN:

The Fetterman campaign went to great lengths to avoid debating — until the criticism from editorial boards, the Oz campaign and others became too untenable to keep resisting. After watching the debate in Harrisburg, even though Fetterman’s speech has shown signs of considerable improvement with every passing week since his May stroke, it’s an open question whether it was a wise decision to put him on the stage with Oz. It was, at many points, difficult to watch. Most, if not all, Democrats will almost certainly give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s an open question whether voters will.

You may recall Chris Stirewalt from his old Fox News days, or his current work over at The Dispatch. He was in the studio as an analyst for NewsNation last night, and I think he spoke for many when he articulated a sense of anger at the people around John Fetterman:

“My heart really went out to John Fetterman as he struggled, watching as he tried to answer that question about his flip flop on fracking was heartbreaking,” Stirewalt said.

As he continued watching the debate, Stirewalt said he felt it was “irresponsible” for Democrats and Fetterman’s family to allow him to proceed in the general election.

“Democrats had another candidate. They had Conor Lamb, a congressman from western Pennsylvania, who I promise would be ahead in this race. They insisted that Fetterman had to march on. He had the stroke before the primary, that he had to stay in the primary, that he had to go through and do this. What made it even sadder for me was that the argument behind Fetterman’s whole candidacy was that Conor Lamb was too moderate, too squishy, not going to stand up for hardcore progressive principles. I watched John Fetterman struggle to try to flip flop,” Stirewalt said.

And this isn’t even getting to the assessments of the debate from Rich, Charlie, or Michael Brendan Dougherty.

Considering Fetterman’s struggling debate performance, what are we to make of that letter from Dr. Clifford Chen declaring that, “Overall, Lt. Gov. Fetterman is well and shows strong commitment to maintaining good fitness and health practices. He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office”? Is it that how a person looks in a doctor’s office — taking deep breaths and having their blood pressure measured — doesn’t reflect how they’ll look and sound on a debate stage, attempting to answer questions and lay out a policy agenda?

Allow me to offer a controversial theory: A lot of Democratic Party candidates and strategists have bad judgment because they’ve grown used to a usually friendly media bailing them out of the consequences of their bad decisions. In light of last night, the decision-making of Fetterman and his campaign seems absurd — as MBD aptly summarized, “John Fetterman should not have been on a debate stage tonight. He should be at home, recovering from his stroke.”

What we’re seeing in Pennsylvania is uncomfortably close to the concept of Weekend at Bernie’s, which was funny because it was imaginary; a real-life attempt to fool people into believing a corpse is alive would be horrifyingly macabre. Remember, Fetterman had his stroke the Friday before the primary election, and his first statement, issued Sunday, declared that, “The good news is I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.” His campaign has been lying about how well his recovery was going the whole time.

A campaign does not attempt to fool people into believing that a severe-stroke victim is fine unless it’s convinced that the overwhelming majority of media in the state will be its ally and abandon their traditional role as watchdogs. The people around Fetterman are off their rockers, stupid, or both.

Oh, by the way, remember last week, when some guy in the Washington Post pointed out that Democrats had their own share of subpar candidates who were likely to blow winnable races? Do Pennsylvania Democrats look wise for sticking with Fetterman right now, instead of switching to either of Fetterman’s rivals in the primary — Representative Conor Lamb or state representative Malcolm Kenyatta? How about Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs? Does she look shrewd for refusing to debate GOP rival Kari Lake? Does Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes look like a sensible choice to run for Senate in a purple-ish state in a GOP wave year? Does running Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams for governor in southern, GOP-leaning states again look astute, or are they sucking up grassroots donation money that could be more wisely spent elsewhere?

I don’t know that Democratic candidates or campaign strategists consciously think, “Oh, we’ll be fine, the media is on our side and will cover for us.” I think they just get used to having the consequences of every mistake and dumb decision mitigated by generous media coverage. They walk around with the wind constantly at their backs, convinced that they are wiser and better at their jobs than they really are. And when that wind at their backs stops blowing, they’re stunned — suddenly everything is much harder.

Lamb and Kenyatta should be spitting hot fire at the Pennsylvania state Democratic Party this morning.

ADDENDUM: Here’s a sign that we’re shifting from “red wave” territory to “red tsunami” territory, from Politico:

Democrats are adding millions in television spending to boost Sen. Patty Murray, a sign that the party is employing a take-no-chances approach even in solidly blue Washington state. . . .

The national political environment currently favors Republicans in the midterms, and the fact that Democrats are spending to shore up an incumbent in a solidly blue state is not a good sign for them.

On the menu today: Tonight is the first and only Senate debate night in Pennsylvania; former president Barack Obama has a curious way of helping out his old running mate; and progressive House Democrats write to President Biden, telling him it’s time to negotiate with Vladimir Putin and give Putin what he wants in exchange for ending the war in Ukraine.

Debate Night in Pennsylvania

For Pennsylvanians, tonight brings the lone debate between Senate candidates John Fetterman, the Democrat, and Mehmet Oz, the Republican. The debate begins at 8 p.m. from the WHTM studios in Harrisburg, and WHTM news anchor Dennis Owens and WPXI anchor Lisa Sylvester will serve as moderators. The Washington Post laid out the measures that will be in place to help with Fetterman’s auditory-processing issues:

According to ABC27, the local TV station hosting the debate, real-time captions will transcribe everything the moderators and Oz say, but they will not transcribe Fetterman’s words. ABC27 reporter Dennis Owens, who will be one of the moderators, aired a segment that showed two large TV screens that will hang over the moderators. The screens will features text of what’s being said in real time. Oz and Fetterman will be standing on a stage at the debate behind lecterns.

The candidates will have 60 seconds to answer questions, 30 seconds for rebuttals and 15 seconds for any clarification, according to a person familiar with the debate rules who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the details. The candidates are allowed to have with them one 8 x 10 notebook, a black ballpoint pen and water. If a candidate is attacked, the moderator will decide whether to allow him the chance to respond.

The past months have shown that Fetterman is capable of getting through a speech with minimal stumbles. C-SPAN aired this “Women for Fetterman” rally in Blue Bell, Pa., on September 11; Fetterman spoke for about eleven or twelve minutes. (This is the “My name is John Fetterwoman” rally.) He’ll pause every now and then while speaking a sentence, or say something like, “I hope you don’t have a doctor in your life who’s telling you that you’re not fit to be serve.” But minor errors like those probably won’t be enough to persuade a majority of Pennsylvania voters that Fetterman is physically incapable of serving as a U.S. senator.

But delivering a version of your stump speech before an adoring crowd is different, and easier, than answering questions with time limits. Oz’s big-time television career began with Oprah Winfrey in 2004, and he’s probably as comfortable in front of the camera as any person alive. The challenge for Oz will be to try to provoke missteps by Fetterman, without looking like he’s trying to provoke missteps by Fetterman.

The challenge for the Democratic nominee may be stamina; tonight’s debate is an hour long. Also, if an ordinary candidate gets tongue-tied, mixes up words, or verbally missteps, it’s just an off night. For Fetterman, if the bad moments add up over the course of the hour, voters at home may conclude that he and his campaign have continued to hide how slowly he’s recovering from his stroke — and his campaign didn’t agree to another debate to undo any damage from a bad performance; his campaign put all its eggs into the basket of tonight. Then again, some may suspect that the Fetterman campaign had good reason to agree to only one debate so late in the campaign.

As of yesterday, 556,441 Pennsylvanians had already cast ballots in the 2022 elections. At last count, 407,007 are registered Democrats, 107,039 are registered Republicans, and 42,395 are registered with other or no parties. My guess is that registered Democrats are likely to give Fetterman every benefit of the doubt on his recovery, so I doubt you will find many Pennsylvanians who watch the debate tonight and regret casting their vote early.

Someone dropped a detailed summary of political-ad spending nationwide as of Friday, October 21, in my hands, and that summary reveals Pennsylvania is the state that has seen and will see the most spending on advertising this cycle, with an astounding $162 million either spent so far or slated to be spent on ads between now and Election Day. Since the end of the primaries, Democrats have accounted for $67.6 million of that total and Republicans have accounted for $54.6 million. In the month of October, Democrats are set to outspend Republicans $48 million to $32 million. In the month of October, Democrats are slated to outspend Republicans $48 million to $32 million.

And yet, the race is getting closer, instead of Fetterman pulling away. You figure that at some point, the airwaves get saturated with ads, and voters start to tune them out during the commercial breaks. After a while, it’s all the same gravelly voiced announcers, unflattering black-and-white photos of the opposition, scary stock photos, and stock footage of small-town America. In most cases, earned media, in the form of news coverage about the candidate, outweighs paid media, in the form of commercials and advertisements. And one way or another, tonight will generate a lot of earned media.

Former President Obama Is Helping . . . Someone

If you don’t watch Monday Night Football, ESPN runs the “ManningCast,” a game simulcast hosted by brothers and former NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning, with a rotating cast of guests and a lot of jokes and stories and varying amounts of attention paid to the game in front of them. Last night, as the Chicago Bears crushed the New England Patriots, former president Barack Obama was the guest — and as expected, he made a get-out-the-vote pitch, but some of the points he chose to emphasize were a little curious.

“Don’t pass up your opportunity to participate, because if you’re unhappy with the way things are, the good news is, the way our system is set up, you can actually bring about some change,” Obama said. He also said that, “Every election is important in a democracy. . . . You’ve got all kinds of issues from jobs, the economy, climate change . . . that is essentially on the ballot because you’re deciding who’s going to speak for you, and you should make sure that somebody actually cares about you.”

First, I’m not sure the DNC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee want Obama going on national television and telling people that if they’re unhappy with the way things are, they should go cast ballots for change. Second, in a year when Democratic candidates are emphasizing abortion, January 6, and Donald Trump, I wonder how they feel about Obama listing off “jobs and the economy” as the first issue atop his mind.

There have always been signs that the Obama–Biden relationship was a little more complicated and prickly than either man pretended it was in public, with stories indicating that each one felt the other had been insufficiently respectful or deferential at times. It is difficult to believe that Obama’s “change”/”economy” messaging when reminding people to vote in the midterms was entirely accidental.

Progressives Suddenly Aren’t So Supportive of Fighting Russia in Ukraine

Hey, remember from 2016 to 2020, when just about every Democrat saw Vladimir Putin as the root of all evil, almost every Republican was accused of being in cahoots with the Russian government, and even staid establishment voices like the Brookings Institution warned that “the GOP became the party of Putin”? Remember how that overwhelming wave of (largely justified) hostility to the Putin regime started just four years after Obama’s “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back” attack on Mitt Romney?

You’re going to need a neck brace for whiplash again, because 30 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, have written to Biden, saying, “We urge you to make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America’s chief priority.”

Of course, any negotiated settlement will allow Russia to keep the territory it has annexed. There is no way that Putin fought this war, with perhaps 68,000 Russian soldiers killed and another 205,000 wounded, just so he could give back all the territory his forces conquered. And there is no “new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine.” You might as well wish for a demilitarized zone enforced by peacekeeping elves and dwarves mounted on unicorns. Putin has made his position clear; in fact, he can’t make it much clearer. These House progressives are imagining a much more reasonable, conciliatory, and nicer Putin who’s willing to let bygones be bygones and who earnestly wants peace — a Putin who doesn’t exist.

Anyway, after four years of every wing of the Democratic Party denouncing Putin in the most furious terms . . . now, after he’s invaded a sovereign neighbor and slaughtered God knows how many innocent civilians, now the progressives want to sit down and negotiate with him?

Shortly after the letter was released, some of the House Democrats ran away from the letter they had signed. Marc Pocan of Wisconsin said it was outdated: “Not sure why it’s dated 10/24 as it was from July.” (Er, it’s not like Putin was a nicer, more trustworthy, or less barbaric guy in July.) Over in Politico’s Playbook newsletter, one member of the House Democratic leadership fumed, “Vladimir Putin would have signed that letter if asked. That bone-headed letter just put Dems in the same league as Kevin McCarthy, who said in the same week that Ukraine funding could be in jeopardy.”

If you’re calling for negotiations with Putin now, over the objections of the Ukrainians, you don’t get to call anyone else “soft on Russia.”

ADDENDUM: Even by the standards this president established in his first year and a half in office, he’s generated some eye-poppingly odd statements in the past few weeks. The economy is “strong as hell,” his student-loan bailout was passed by Congress, “Armageddon,” he’s brought down the cost of energy, and Gisele Fetterman will make “a great lady in the Senate.”

And as Dan McLaughlin notes, with less than two weeks before the midterm elections, Biden is maintaining the schedule of a semi-retired man.

We will see if, after the midterms, Democrats inside and outside of the White House can speak more openly and honestly about Biden’s physical and mental health. If they suddenly tell you that at age 80 he can no longer be president, remember who insisted that he had so much energy that not even White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre could keep up with him. And remember who was pointing out that his long absences during the collapse of Afghanistan were a sign that something was terribly wrong.

On the menu today: After four straight weeks, a Monday morning joke about the New York Jets’ winning isn’t even surprising anymore, so let’s just jump directly to this weekend’s sign of the Biden administration panicking about the midterms. White House chief of staff Ron Klain lashed out against a CNN reporter for the utterly mundane and accurate observation that people are worried about the state of the economy, and that “dismissing people’s real concerns isn’t a way to win them over.” When uttering an inconvenient truth like that is enough to get a top Biden administration official to react like George Brett after being accused of using pine tar, it’s a sign that nerves are fraying over there in the West Wing.

Coming Soon: The ‘Voters Are Stupid’ Excuse

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski is about as far as you can get from a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, and yet somehow, progressives and some Biden administration officials decided he should be this weekend’s piñata, all because he dared to point out an obvious truth that they didn’t want to hear.

Tom Nichols, irked that Republicans are on pace for big gains in the midterm elections, fumed early Sunday morning that, “The United States is facing the greatest danger to its constitutional system since at least the 1950s, if not the *18*50s, and millions of people are like: Yeah, but gas, man.”

This seems like a good time to observe that not only is unleaded gas is averaging $3.79 per gallon nationally this morning, the national average has been above $3.50 per gallon since the third week of February. The American electorate’s complaint isn’t that gas is expensive right now, it’s that gas has been expensive all year. Ron Klain keeps pointing to any decline over any time period as some sort of major victory, but people don’t feel good about gas prices being a few cents lower than the high price last week. People will feel good about gas prices when they’re back in the $2–$3 per gallon range..

Kaczynski responded to Nichols with the entirely accurate, maybe even tame, observation that, “It’s a midterm year and the party in power typically loses seats and people are more concerned right now about crime, inflation, the economy. Dismissing people’s real concerns isn’t a way to win them over.”

Now, Tom Nichols is a staff writer at the Atlantic, not an elected Democrat or a Democratic candidate for office or a consultant for the DNC, DSCC, or DCCC. If he wants to say the electorate is stupid for worrying about gas prices, he’s free to do that. If, as I suspect, we are in the territory of a red wave and approaching a red tsunami, you’re going to hear a lot of Democrats making that complaint. Because the lousy and pessimistic mood of the country could never be the fault of the Democrats in office, right?

What happened next is what’s particularly intriguing: Both Klain and progressive economist Dean Baker raged at Kaczynski, “It really takes some gall for the media to tell us that an economy with 3.5 percent unemployment is a disaster” — which is an exaggeration of what Kaczynski said, but hey, no one ever hires a progressive economist who’s active on Twitter for accuracy.

I support many methods of entitlement reform, but perhaps none more strongly than reforming Ron Klain’s sense of entitlement, especially his belief that he and Biden deserve the most generous and supportive media coverage imaginable. When voters think that the economy is lousy under a Democratic administration, that administration thinks the media’s job is to argue with voters and convince them that they’re wrong.

Klain and company really believe that an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent is an all-purpose magic wand and shield against any complaints about any aspect of the economy.

The problem for them is that people’s perceptions of the economy are shaped by a lot more than the unemployment rate. (Let’s also keep in mind that the unemployment rate in the month that Biden became president was 6.4 percent, which sounds bad compared to the current rate, but it had declined from 14.7 percent in April 2020, when Covid-19 effectively shut down the economy. America was hiring, and the unemployment rate was headed in the right direction on Inauguration Day.)

It’s just an objective fact that Americans are deeply concerned about the economy — every poll indicates this — and the right track/wrong direction numbers tell a similar story of widespread pessimism. What’s more, there’s some indication that the minority of respondents who tell pollsters that they think the economy is doing well are displaying motivated reasoning, as a PBS poll in September laid out: “A majority of Democrats and Biden’s 2020 voters don’t see a recession; everybody else seems to disagree. Most Republicans and independents say U.S. economic growth has slumped, and that impression holds for a majority of people in nearly every other demographic group. Comparable levels of economic pessimism haven’t been seen since March 2013 under the Obama administration.” Self-identified Republicans might be motivated to judge the state of the economy more harshly, but independents likely aren’t.

There’s been a little bit of a rebound in the perception of the economy in Gallup’s poll, which aligns with the decline of gas prices from their all-time peak in mid June. But the likes of Ron Klain don’t like hearing that slightly less bad gas prices are not the same thing as good gas prices. As I’ve mentioned before, gas prices probably have an outsized role in shaping perceptions of the economy, because the price for a gallon of unleaded gas is posted on giant signs near every major intersection, road, and highway across the country, and the price for a gallon of milk or a dozen eggs or a pound of hamburger meat just isn’t displayed the same way.

Of course, the news on grocery prices has been particularly bad this year, too. Gas prices generate the biggest headlines, but food prices are still rising in ways that make your eyeballs pop out of your head:

Prices at the grocery store continued to soar last month, adding even more pressure to shoppers’ wallets.

The food at home index, a proxy for grocery store prices, increased 0.7 percent in September from the month prior and a stunning 13 percent over the last year, according to new government data released Thursday.

Just about everything got more expensive in September.

A 13 percent increase in grocery prices in a year! In that light, it’s galling that Klain is offended that someone else thinks the economy is bad.

People buy groceries about once a week. (Or, if you’re like my household, they buy groceries on the weekend and inevitably end up running to the store during the week because they forgot something or didn’t realize they were low on something. Once you have teenagers, if you’re trying to get them to drink milk, you might as well buy a cow.) People remember roughly how much last week’s grocery bill was, and the week before, and the week before that. People know when they’re paying a lot more than they used to for food, and you can’t spin, sweet-talk, or Jedi-mind-trick them out of recognizing that.

Also, many households may be able to put off buying a new car or choose not to move into a new house or delay other non-vital purchases. But people need to eat. As Logan Dobson observed, “I wonder if it occurred to [Biden administration officials] that the unemployment rate being so low and people still not feeling like they can afford everyday items actually makes them feel worse, not better.”

For a long time, progressives argued that the average American needed to relate more to the problems of the working poor. Well, now, the average American does.

Beyond grocery and gas prices, I think the performance of the stock markets influences people’s perceptions of the economy, but not so much the day-to-day movement or even the big jumps or steep plunges. About 60 million Americans have 401(k) retirement accounts and about 62 million Americans have Individual Retirement Accounts. The older you are, the more you worry about how those accounts are doing, and some retirees are counting on dividends to supplement Social Security. The markets’ performance under Biden has been lousy, and I suspect that as Americans are feeling squeezed, paying more for gas and groceries, noticing their wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, finding that buying a new car has never been more expensive . . . and then they open up their quarterly statement for their 401(k) and see that it’s actually worse than the last quarter, then they feel like everything has gone completely wrong under this president and Congress. If the U.S. economy is doing as great as Ron Klain and progressive economists insist, why do so few Americans feel any of that prosperity?

Finally, in a desperate (and so far, not very effective) effort to control inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates. This makes it more difficult to get a loan or mortgage; the 30-year fixed rate is just under 7 percent, which is the highest it’s been in 20 years, and mortgage applications are the lowest ebb since 1997. While at any given moment, only a small percentage of Americans are looking to buy or sell a house, the higher rates are effectively crushing the U.S. housing market — sales are down 24 percent year-over-year and new housing construction is down 8 percent in a month. God knows how many Americans are putting off big life decisions because they can’t buy a house, sell a house, or afford to move.

A recent New York Times letters-to-the-editor page featured lots of readers beside themselves with disbelief and anguish that a decisive portion of the electorate could be unhappy with the economy, and blame President Biden and the Democrats for its condition. “The economy goes up and down; our threatened democracy may not be so resilient,” warned one letter.

That kind of easy-come, easy-go attitude toward the economy is only possible if you have a sufficient cushion to handle the higher grocery bills, higher gas bills, higher home-heating bills, higher rent, higher mortgage payments, and God knows what other sudden expenses come your way — car repairs, your child needing braces, or your home’s hot-water heater decided to quit at the worst possible time. (I wonder how many of those letter-writers have ever piously lectured others to “check your privilege.”)

There are some problems that are so big, you just can’t spin them away. If the administration had put as much effort into solving problems as it does into denying that the problems are problems, maybe it wouldn’t be staring a coast-to-coast midterm shellacking in the face right now.

ADDENDUM: If I were in the “hot take” business, instead of the “well-reasoned lukewarm take” business, I would argue that the Kansas referendum on abortion doomed the Democrats. That said, I do think there’s mounting evidence that the Democrats forgot that there’s a substantial difference between a referendum and a head-to-head election:

The second major miscalculation by the Democrats was on abortion, and I think it’s hard to overstate how elated Democrats were when they saw an overwhelming majority of Kansas voters defeat a referendum that would have added language to the state constitution declaring that the state’s basic law “does not create or secure a right to abortion.” And it’s understandable — it’s heavily Republican Kansas! The heartland! If there were a motivated pro-choice majority in that state, imagine what Democrats could do with that issue in every other state.

Kansas convinced Democrats that the abortion issue was a magic wand that could and would overcome, or at least mitigate, all other problems and issues. In a sign that Democrats were learning the wrong lesson from Kansas, they failed to notice that the state’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, was “very much not centering her campaign on abortion.” Kansans had too many other issues of concern. Kelly told CNN, “What they want me as governor to do is to focus on the kitchen table issues. You know, they want me to focus on the economy. And we have done that.”

Democrats also seemed to overlook that the big win on abortion was a referendum, not a race between two candidates. Campaigns for public office are between two or more candidates, and electorates decide whom they want to elect based on the person, not just their stances. If every race were a choice between two crash-test dummies with big PRO-LIFE or PRO-CHOICE labels on them, maybe Democrats would be in better shape. Unfortunately, they’re running flesh-and-blood human beings with their own quirks and flaws.

On the menu today: A strange report indicates that the U.S. government is eyeing the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, warily and contemplating action to interrupt his purchase of Twitter — with all kinds of objections about foreign investors that don’t make much sense; a recent proposal to have the U.S. government seize SpaceX’s satellite-based Internet system, Starlink, ignores some glaring obstacles; as Election Day approaches, Democrats have belatedly realized that some of their big statewide candidates turned out to be a bunch of lemons; and a particularly bizarre scandal involving state attorneys general erupts.

Elon Musk: Person of Interest

Bloomberg:

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Elon Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

Wait, they’re worried about Musk’s stances on Russia, but not his stances on China?

Back when the news of Musk’s interest in purchasing Twitter broke in April, a whole bunch of folks on the left reacted like he was the devil, and a whole bunch of folks on the right greeted him like he was an angel sent from above. But the whole truth about Musk was always more complicated. Back then I wrote:

There’s a lot to like about his fearless, innovative, Tony Stark-in-real-life style, particularly his view on the First Amendment and his opposition to cancel culture; he asked recently, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” But Musk is also way too friendly with the Chinese government, his businesses are built in part on government contracts and subsidies, and he can be erratic in his decision-making at times. He’s a really intriguing, bold, and imaginative guy, but he’s not Tech Jesus.

Lately, Musk’s been spit-balling some proposals for international diplomacy in his trademark frenetic, casual style. As the world’s richest man, with business interests all over the globe – including in some geopolitically consequential places — I’m sure Musk is eager to help and is certain his keen mind can find the answer.

But you’ll notice that Musk tends to look at longstanding, complicated, tense, international border disputes like the managerial engineer that he is, coming up with ideas that probably won’t work because they involve flesh-and-blood human beings with longstanding historical grievances and sometimes illogical or irrational stances. He also expects autocratic regimes with long histories of breaking promises to keep their word.

From where I sit, I think Musk means well, but it is not particularly good to see him floating proposals such as creating a Chinese “special administrative zone” for Taiwan, an idea that was immediately endorsed by the Chinese ambassador to the United States and furiously rejected by his Taiwanese counterpart. A few weeks ago, Musk suggested that the war in Ukraine could be resolved by plebiscites in Ukrainian territories that have been annexed by Russia, assurances of fresh water supplies to Russian-occupied Crimea, and a Ukrainian pledge to remain neutral. This, of course, rewards Russia for its unprovoked aggression and gives Russia a de facto veto over Ukrainian alliances — with no guarantee that Putin or some other Russian leader won’t come back for another round of conquest in a few years with a rebuilt military.

Musk may think he’s coming up with a reasonable compromise between two sides in conflict, but his proposals would reward aggressive, autocratic regimes with half a loaf, and leave Taiwan and Ukraine hoping those regimes don’t come back for more somewhere down the line.

None of that, however, points to Musk being a Chinese or Russian agent of influence. He’s just a spectacularly successful businessman who’s worked with the Chinese and Russian regimes in a business context and thinks those regimes will be similarly reasonable and trustworthy in matters of war, peace, and national ambition.

Bloomberg reports that:

One element of the $44 billion Twitter deal that could trigger a [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] review is the presence of foreign investors in Musk’s consortium. The group includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, Binance Holdings Ltd. — a digital-asset exchange founded and run by a Chinese native — and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

Wait, now we’re worried about a U.S. company’s being partially or wholly owned by powerful Saudi, Chinese, or Qatari investors? This isn’t just closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted; this is thinking about closing the barn door after the horse left the barn, ran away, went on to live a long and fulfilling life, and now it’s in the horse retirement home awaiting visits from its grand-foals.

The notion that the U.S. government is suspicious of the foreign investors in Musk’s consortium doesn’t make a lot of sense, because Prince al-Waleed bin Talal is already a major shareholder of Twitter.

Al-Waleed bin Talal is a fascinating figure: part of the House of Saud, and once nicknamed the “Warren Buffett of Saudi Arabia.” He’s one of the wealthy Saudis who was detained for several months as part of what officials called an “anti-corruption” probe, but what many outsiders saw as an internal power struggle within the kingdom, driven by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

You know what else al-Waleed bin Talal currently has considerable investments in? Citigroup, The Four Seasons and Fairmont hotel chains, Uber, and Lyft. In his long career, he’s owned considerable chunks of Apple, Coca-Cola, Compaq, Ford, Hewlett Packard, McDonalds, Pepsi, Procter and Gamble, Marvel Comics, and Disney.

If I wanted to make readers on the right suspicious of him, I’d point to his criticism of Trump and his financing of Islamic-studies departments at Georgetown and Harvard. If I wanted to make readers on the left suspicious of him, I’d point to his former ownership of Fox, the parent company of Fox News.

Are there reasons to be wary of al-Waleed bin Talal? Sure. Among other things, his firm “invested more than $500 million in Russian firms in the days around Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.” But after this extraordinarily wealthy Saudi invested in so many American companies for so long, it’s a little odd to see the U.S. government suddenly decide it thinks his investments in those companies represent some sort of unacceptable national-security risk.

Perhaps the argument is that al-Waleed bin Talal or Musk, because of their past and current business ties to Russia, are now de facto agents of a hostile foreign state. That’s not too far from the perspective of David Frum, who a few days ago contended that:

It was always unreasonable, and is becoming unwise, to expect Elon Musk to provide Internet to Ukraine for free forever. Western allies should pay. And US should have a plan ready to nationalize Starlink fast if Musk cuts off Ukraine’s connection to advance his political agenda. There’s abundant precedent for US government seizure of critical infrastructure during wars or national emergencies. Of course, reasonable compensation must be paid, per the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution.

First, to “nationalize” means to take over and run; Elon Musk and SpaceX built Starlink, and in Frum’s vision, the federal government would just say, “Hey, nice satellite-based Internet access system you’ve got there, we’re just going to take it from you and pay whatever the court determines is ‘reasonable compensation.’” (That compensation would be a pretty penny. Starlink involves nearly 3,000 small satellites in low-earth orbit, and the company could be valued at $100 billion if it goes public. For perspective, the budget of the U.S. State Department is $84 billion, and the budget for NASA is $30 billion.)

Second, what “war” is the United States currently fighting in this context? Oh, you mean the one in which the Ukrainians are fighting the Russians?

Didn’t President Biden explicitly say, “We will not fight the third World War in Ukraine” back in March?

If the U.S. government is going to start seizing vast networks of satellites and entire businesses in the name of fighting a war, is it too much to ask that there be an actual declaration of war, or at least an authorization of military force?

ADDENDA: Over in the Washington Post, some guy notices that while you heard a great deal about the flaws of GOP candidates in the past year, you didn’t hear much at all about whether Democrats had their own deeply flawed candidates winning competitive primaries in key states. Now, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs won’t debate, Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman didn’t reveal the full extent of his health problems until after the primary, Mandela Barnes looks far too radical to get elected in a purple state, and Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke are sucking up vast fortunes in grassroots donations that could be better spent elsewhere. Democratic-leaning readers are greeting this assessment with all of the thoughtful contemplation you would expect.

Meanwhile, in the long and sordid history of state-government scandals, this one stands out:

An investigation by CBS News Colorado reveals how state attorneys general, including Colorado AG Phil Weiser, are attending lavish events funded, in part, by companies they’re suing and investigating.

An organization called the Attorney General Alliance — made up of 48 attorneys general — is at the center of it all. Weiser is Chair the organization.

It’s a private club that corporations and lobbyist organizations pay tens of thousands of dollars to belong to. Their membership buys them access to extravagant events where they can schmooze the top legal officers for state government, individuals who have sole discretion over whether to sue, settle, or investigate them.

CBS News Colorado received video of the group’s 2021 annual conference in Maui from a Republican group. While its motives are political, the events in question include AGs from both parties.

The video shows Weiser and other AGs at the Grand Wailea Resort, a place billed as a “tropical oceanfront paradise” with “luxurious accommodations” that start at a thousand dollars a night, but AGs didn’t have to pay a dime.

Did we need to write down a rule which says, “Don’t party on the dime of someone you’re suing or investigating?”

On the menu today: Yes, history, particularly over the past decade or two, has given us midterm elections in which the president’s party got its butt kicked from coast to coast. Could it be that the strategies presidents pursue in attempting to mitigate their midterm losses end up exacerbating them? A lot of White Houses frontload their agenda with their most ambitious and controversial proposals — and along the way, antagonize the opposition and alienate independents. Meanwhile, a Republican strategist contends that the conditions for a GOP landslide are coming together.

Are Midterm Wipeouts Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?

The other day, the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker offered the unnerving but accurate observation that America’s now-durable tradition of a midterm wipeout for the president’s party doesn’t necessarily lead to a presidential course correction. To find a president who really adjusted his approach to the job in response to a midterm shellacking, you probably have to go back to 1994, when Bill Clinton brought on Dick Morris for weekly strategy meetings to steer him back to the center in time for the 1996 presidential election.

In particular, the last three midterms had little effect on how Barack Obama or Donald Trump pursued their goals. Those two men weren’t going to let a little thing like losing a House or Senate majority make them alter their style, priorities, or policies.

One reason opposition parties usually gain ground in a midterm election is that the president and his party came into office in a wave, and that wave helped elect subpar House candidates who would never have won in ordinary circumstances. This year is a little different: In 2020 Biden gained the White House as the GOP gained 14 House seats. With a total of 212 House seats and one vacancy in a GOP-leaning district, Republicans began this cycle with just about all the lowest-hanging fruit already picked.

Normally, a new president and a new Congress begin with the knowledge that some of their weakest members — those in the least secure districts — are politically living on borrowed time. Because midterm wipeouts are part of a historical pattern, a new administration feels pressure to get as much done in these first two years as possible. No politically controversial part of the president’s and his congressional allies’ agenda can wait until year three or four. As a result, the presidential agenda gets front-loaded with the most ambitious, most partisan, and often least popular proposals.

Unsurprisingly, the passage of those controversial proposals — such as Obamacare, the Trump tax cuts, or any part of the Biden spending spree other than the somewhat bipartisan infrastructure bill — alienates the opposition and fires up the grassroots of the other party. Independents tend to quickly notice that the new president’s agenda is more partisan and ideologically extreme than the one they thought they were voting for in November. Meanwhile, grassroots members of the president’s party get a good look at how the sausage gets made — recall the “Cornhusker Kickback”! — and find themselves frustrated with half measures and the compromises struck to get bills passed. By the end of year two, almost everyone on the political spectrum finds something in the young administration that disappoints or frustrates them.

Meanwhile, as the new president settles in, he almost always learns that life as commander in chief is a lot harder than it looked on the campaign trail. As a candidate, the president was judged on promises and potential. Now that he’s sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, he’s getting judged on results. And he learns, time and again, that he wildly underestimated the challenges he would face. It turns out that building consensus on Capitol Hill is hard. The global scene interrupts with unexpected crises. Scandals pop up, and cabinet members screw up.

Since taking office, Biden’s had plenty of warnings that his policies and approach to the job were steering his party toward a midterm debacle, from the 2021 off-year elections to his historically low job-approval rating and persistently terrible numbers on the right track/wrong track direction-of-the-country question. As far as we can tell, Biden has ignored these warning signs, convinced that, somehow, he’ll find a way to excite the Democratic base enough to mitigate all of those irked independents and Republicans.

Or maybe Biden intermittently notices he’s not as popular as he thought he would be, but the people around him ensure he doesn’t change course in a significant way. Intriguingly, some anecdotes suggest Biden’s staff is nudging him in a more leftward direction than his instincts would prefer. Remember, the president initially resisted the idea of a sweeping plan to cancel student-loan debt: “The idea that I say to a community, ‘I’m going to forgive the debt…’ — the billions of dollars in debt for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn and schools my children — I went to a great school. I went to a state school. But is that going to be forgiven, rather than use that money to provide for early education for young children who are — come from disadvantaged circumstances?” But Biden eventually signed on to a $500 billion or so plan, helping out single people making $125,000 or less and married couples making $250,000 or less.

Biden didn’t want to go to Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, resisting his staff’s recommendation that he do so for months before finally giving in. That meeting led to the humiliating fist-bump photo and later turned into a debacle when Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ members snubbed Biden, announcing a bigger reduction in oil production than the U.S. expected — a cut that would help Russia and hurt American consumers. Now Biden, having been made to look like a sucker, is stuck looking for “consequences” to inflict on the Saudis.

But more often, once Biden makes a decision, he subsequently rejects all evidence that he’s made a mistake. In fact, there’s something cyclical about Biden’s bad decision-making. Because he sees adjusting course as a de facto admission that his earlier decision was wrong, he tends to stick with the bad decision or the unconvincing spin, hoping the situation will get better by itself. Inflation is transitory. The border is secure. “Shelves are not empty.” Afghanistan is stable. This weekend, after yet another month of inflation near the 40-year high, he insisted that the economy is “strong as hell.”

So, this coming November, Republicans may well win back the House and Senate and a slew of governorships, with big implications down-ticket, and Biden may still not change course much; he may genuinely believe that “it’s fair to say we’ve got more done in the first two years than — than any president in the past has.” (George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and maybe even George W. Bush and Barack Obama would like a word. And in terms of greatest challenges faced in their first two years, I think Abraham Lincoln takes the gold, with Bush having a strong case for the medals podium.)

One other reason losing control of Congress may not faze Biden much is that, for much of his presidency, he has simply enacted the policies he wanted and dared the courts to stop him. As our Dan McLaughlin summarized:

He did not have the power to make national housing laws, yet he decreed that landlords could not evict deadbeat tenants. He did not have the power to make national medical decisions, yet he ordered every workplace to mandate vaccinations. He did not have the power to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off college debts, but he did that, too. The courts have struck down the first two of those flagrant violations of his oath, and only the search for a proper party with standing to sue presents any real risk that they will not strike down the third.

Heck, if Republicans win control of Congress, will Biden even notice?

Today’s Midterm-Election Observations

I notice we don’t hear Democrats talking about the North Carolina Senate race much. This is a state Trump narrowly won and Obama won once, where Thom Tillis won reelection by a narrow margin, and where John Edwards and Kay Hagan won Senate seats.

If Tim Ryan still has a shot in the Ohio Senate race, why aren’t national Democrats willing to spend money on him?

Ryan and his allies . . . complain that national party strategists involved with funding decisions are failing to adequately fund his unexpectedly competitive campaign against Republican J. D. Vance for a seat the GOP is hoping to hold onto in November.

“National Democrats have been known not to make very good strategic decisions over the years,” said Ryan in an interview with The Washington Post. “There’s a frustration among the rank-and-file Democrats that the leadership doesn’t quite understand where we want this party to be.”

A Trafalgar/Daily Wire poll has Blake Masters within one point of Mark Kelly in Arizona’s Senate race.

A veteran Republican strategist — not Obi-Wan — reached out and gave me his perspective:

Democrats still don’t comprehend how bad it is for them. And there’s nothing they can do about it now. Democrats are running on abortion. I’ve said for years that the dirty secret of the Democratic Party is their fear of Roe being overturned, not because they are pro-abortion but because they know abortion will (sadly) remain legal and accessible in almost every state in the nation. The Democratic Party’s greatest fear has been that white, college-educated suburban women would wake up the day after Roe was overturned and realize abortion was still legal in their states. That allows those women voters to focus on dinner table issues — the economy, crime, schools — and drop abortion from first to off the table altogether. That’s exactly what has happened. . . .

Inflation is at Jimmy Carter levels — gas, meat, milk. Crime in cities and suburbs is soaring. Parents have discovered that their public schools are a disaster, even in their high-tax liberal suburbs. “But Trump and abortion!” are not issues being talked about at high school football games.

I don’t want to overhype the odds of a Republican tsunami, but there is this odd disconnect between how much Democratic candidates are emphasizing abortion and how low abortion scores in surveys of voter priorities. And you figure that the overwhelming majority of voters who prioritize abortion in this economic environment already lean heavily Democratic. So the Democrats’ strategy is to try to get enough of their grassroots motivated to vote, to balance out those independents and the motivated Republican grassroots.

An approach like that might save Kathy Hochul in New York or Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, but is it going to save Senate or gubernatorial candidates in places such as Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania? Are there enough Democrats in purple states for the party to just concede independents and voters driven by economic issues? Feels like a really big gamble.

ADDENDUM: Breaking just as I send off this newsletter . . . If you were procrastinating on writing a big profile of United Kingdom prime minister Liz Truss, apparently you missed your window of opportunity.

On the menu today: As President Joe Biden pledges that his party will eliminate the filibuster if Democrats win 52 Senate seats, there’s a whiff of Democratic panic in the air, as the midterm elections are now less than three weeks away. A new poll offers more signs of a strengthening GOP wave, and Politico moves a bunch of House races into the likely Republican pile. Meanwhile, new state polls put Mehmet Oz within two percentage points of John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in a tie with Raphael Warnock in Georgia. Finally, you can see a new narrative of excuses and scapegoats for Stacey Abrams taking shape, and Democrats are going to kick themselves over their decision to help Kari Lake in the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary. Not quite everything is breaking Republicans’ way in the final weeks . . . but quite a lot is.

The Distinct Scent of Democratic Panic in the Air

President Biden, speaking at the Howard Theater in Washington yesterday:

In these midterm elections, it’s so critical to elect more Democratic senators to the United States Senate and more Democrats to keep control of the House of Representatives. And, folks, if we do that, here is the promise I make to you and the American people: The first bill that I will send to the Congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade. (Applause.) And when Congress passes it, I’ll sign it in January, 50 years after Roe was first decided the law of the land.

Because it is likely that every Republican senator would oppose that legislation, the only way to pass a bill codifying Roe v. Wade would be to eliminate the filibuster. Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose ending the filibuster and are unlikely to change their minds anytime soon, so Democrats would need at least two more Senate candidates willing to support such a move to win in November to have a chance of fulfilling Biden’s pledge.

Biden is effectively raising the stakes in a year when his party is not expected to do well. This is not the move of a president who feels confident that his party will perform adequately in the upcoming elections.

And perhaps the White House should be panicking. This morning, Politico unveiled new national polling numbers that are just about what the Republicans wanted to see, and they largely align with the numbers in the New York Times survey that came out last weekend. The economy and inflation are, by far, the biggest issues on voters’ minds, with 80 percent saying they’ll play a major role in their vote choice. Crime was the second-most important issue on voters’ minds at 64 percent, and abortion was at 59 percent. Voters trust Republicans more on the economy, and more than 60 percent of respondents said inflation was getting worse.

In Politico’s separate Election Forecast, ten of the twelve races were updated and moved in the Republicans’ direction: “The two House districts moving into the ‘Toss Up’ category, California’s 13th District and Oregon’s 6th District, are in places Biden carried by large margins.”

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes with alarm this morning that the Democratic message that Republicans represent a threat to democracy has flopped:

Independents are significantly more likely to view Democrats as a major threat than Republicans. Although more than 6 in 10 view each party as at least a minor threat, just 23 percent view the GOP as a major threat, while 31 percent say the same of Democrats. Independents are actually more likely to view voting by mail as a major threat to democracy (31 percent) than the GOP.

In late summer, Biden and the Democrats pushed all of their chips to the center of the table and bet that they could mitigate their losses in the midterms by emphasizing abortion, January 6, and the menace of Donald Trump. In normal economic and political circumstances, that might have worked. It does not work when inflation is 8.2 percent, gas prices are spiking, crime is high, the border is insecure, and large majorities of the electorate think the country is on the wrong track. Over in The Guardian, there’s a roundtable of contributors who are effectively already writing the post-mortem on the Democrats’ messaging efforts for the year.

I’m sure there’s not a lot that Liza Featherstone and I agree on, but she sure seems to nail the Democrats on not focusing on what worries the electorate as a whole:

Democratic leaders have sometimes seemed dismissive of inflation. The White House has repeatedly shrugged it off, and this summer, the Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman mocked a campaign video featuring his opponent in a grocery store discussing high food prices.

Worse, national Democratic leaders have been partying with wealthy donors, from the billionaire James Murdoch in Manhattan to real estate moguls in Los Angeles. No wonder they seem out of touch with people visiting food pantries or struggling to make rent.

If the Democrats can’t deliver a better economic message, many Americans may conclude that like the repeal of Roe v Wade, inflation is what happens when you vote.

Speaking of Pennsylvania. . . .

With Three Weeks Remaining, What Would You Rather Have, a Shrinking Lead or Momentum?

You can’t say Mehmet Oz is leading in Pennsylvania, but right now, he appears to have all the momentum:

Republican Mehmet Oz has narrowed Democrat John Fetterman’s lead in Pennsylvania’s bare-knuckle Senate election, and the two candidates are now polling inside the margin of error, according to a new survey shared exclusively with POLITICO.

Fetterman is slightly ahead with 48 percent of likely voters, while Oz has 46 percent, the poll by AARP found. That’s a shift in Oz’s direction since June, when Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, was leading by six percentage points in the AARP survey.

No doubt this is a combination of Oz’s hard-hitting ads focusing on Fetterman’s record and stances on crime, and the fact that Fetterman can’t do the usual interviews and campaign appearances that a healthy candidate would do. Clearly, Fetterman still has a long recovery ahead of him, and the lack of specificity about his condition makes some people suspect they’re not being told the whole story. You can see the media dancing around the topic, as in Philip Elliott’s recent column in Time magazine:

No candidate likes to be poked and prodded. Even the most transparent politicians expect — often unrealistically — some level of privacy. Fetterman has insisted that the public was made aware of his stroke when it happened, so there’s no need for him to make his medical records or doctors accessible to reporters. That puts voters in a frankly unfair position. In the absence of hard facts from medical professionals, they can’t help but make their own amateur assessments based on whatever clues they can glean from his public appearances. It might not be to Fetterman’s advantage. . . .

The lack of transparency is the issue here, and it’s not entirely clear why Fetterman is thinking this is not going to be a problem. Oz released his records, after all. . . .

The Fetterman campaign’s posture just isn’t cutting it given his current situation. They seem to be asking everyone to just trust them. A lot of Democrats in Washington, and possibly more than a few voters in Pennsylvania, are responding: not so much.

By the way, the public was not made aware of Fetterman’s stroke until two days after it occurred, and wasn’t informed of his surgery until five hours before the polls closed on primary day.

And It All Might Come Down to Georgia . . . Again

Remember, if neither of Georgia’s two major-party Senate candidates reaches 50 percent, the race goes to a runoff which will be held December 6. There is a Libertarian candidate named Chase Oliver in the race, and he’s getting three to four percent in the most recent surveys.

(One more reason to be wary of that Quinnipiac poll that put Warnock at 52 percent: The survey question asked, “If the election for United States Senator were being held today, and the candidates were Raphael Warnock the Democrat and Herschel Walker the Republican, for whom would you vote?” Those voting for the Libertarian had to volunteer that option, unprompted. But that’s not what the ballot in Georgia is going to look like! If there are three candidates on the ballot, why are you only asking about two?)

Also note that under Georgia law, votes for write-in candidates only count if those candidates have “given proper notice of intent to be write-in candidates.” So a write-in vote for Donald Trump or Kirby Smart will not count toward the total of legitimately cast votes.

Right now, very few polls have either candidate at or above 50 percent, and Warnock has come in at 46 percent in the last three polls. In a strange way, all Walker really needs to do is keep Warnock below 50 percent, and then refocus for a 30-day sprint — perhaps with control of the Senate at stake and all of the remaining resources of the national parties diverted to Georgia. He’s a football player; he’s used to games going into overtime.

Perhaps most ominously for Democrats, a Landmark Communications survey, conducted entirely after Friday night’s Senate debate, shows an effective tie — Warnock at 46.1 percent and Walker at 46 percent. The accusations that Walker paid for a mistress’s abortion were not a knockout blow, and neither was the (likely) lone debate. The Hill writes that Warnock “is signaling that he’s ready to ditch his typically restrained persona in favor of more direct attacks on his Republican opponent.”

I have a hard time believing that the reason the race is tied is because Herschel Walker hasn’t been attacked enough, or because Warnock is just too nice.

Elsewhere in Georgia, notice this curious recurring theme in coverage of the governor’s race:

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 22: “Stacey Abrams has a surprising problem with Black voters”

The Washington Post, October 10: “Stacey Abrams faces challenges in governor’s race. Is Black voter turnout one of them?

The Hill, October 11: “Democratic group steps in to boost Abrams among Black male voters”

Bloomberg, October 11: “Stacey Abrams Struggles With Black Male Voters in Georgia While Wielding National Clout”

NewsNation, October 12: “Polls show Black men could be breaking from Abrams”

USA Today, October 15: “In the tight race for Georgia governor, Black men emerge as Stacey Abrams’ key voters”

Do you ever feel like you’re seeing a narrative built before your eyes? For the past four years, we’ve been told that Stacey Abrams is “a real superhero,” complete with a cape and a cloud of smoke. Winning the vote among African-American men by a wide margin is supposed to be easy for normal Democrats, never mind the heavily hyped ones.

Back in early September, a New York Times article about the governor’s race offered this curious, preemptive excuse: “Ms. Abrams’s allies said the comparisons between her and Mr. Warnock overlooked stark differences. Ms. Abrams is a Black woman contending with sexist stereotypes about leadership, they note.”

You can see it coming, right? If, and likely when, Brian Kemp wins reelection in the governor’s race, the excuse will be, “Too many black men were too sexist to vote for Stacey Abrams.” It couldn’t possibly be that her skills and instincts as a candidate were overhyped.

How could a candidate like the woman you see above possibly fall short, right?

ADDENDUM: Gee, if only someone had warned Democrats that meddling in Republican primaries could end up backfiring on them.

On the menu today: The short-attention-span theater of our modern media environment works in Joe Biden’s favor once again, as most people simply forget that a week and a half ago, the president warned that the world “faced the prospect of Armageddon.” Eleven days later, we can now be clear that Biden’s shocking comment wasn’t in response to some new intelligence or a subtle message to the Russians. It was just Joe being Joe, blurting out whatever is on his mind at any given moment, blindsiding the rest of the government while remaining oblivious to the consequences. Meanwhile, the U.S. policy toward the Russian invasion appears to be to arm the Ukrainians piecemeal and hope for the best.

Hey, Weren’t We Facing ‘Armageddon’?

Eleven days ago, at a Democratic Party fundraiser at the home of the Murdochs, President Biden, out of the blue, warned that the world “faced the prospect of Armageddon” because of the potential Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

What is weirder: that Biden said it, or that in the eleven days since, Biden has offered only the briefest and most generic remarks on Russia and Ukraine?

Since then, Biden issued a written statement denouncing Russian missile attacks on civilians, signed on to a joint statement from the G-7, mentioned Ukraine in a written statement on World Food Day, issued a written statement on a United Nations vote condemning Russia’s attempts to annex Ukrainian territory, and said during a press gaggle that Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure are “. . . brutal. It’s just — it’s beyond the pale.”

At the closed-door, high-dollar fundraiser for House Democrats in Los Angeles on Thursday, Biden briefly touched on the topic again: “Did any of you ever think you’d have a Russian leader, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons that would — could only kill three, four thousand people and be limited to make a point?”

It often seems as if Biden speaks more openly about his foreign policy at closed-door Democratic fundraisers than he does in his public remarks to the country. Notice that the White House never released the full transcript of Biden’s remarks at the “Armageddon” fundraiser, but released the transcript of Biden’s remarks at another fundraiser earlier that day. Biden did not mention Russia or Ukraine in his remarks at that event.

You should also notice that we haven’t had any big presidential address to the country and the world about the stakes of this conflict. We’re not seeing any special briefings to Congress about nuclear escalation. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, isn’t emulating her predecessor Adlai Stevenson and confronting her Russian counterpart about how the country’s aggression and recklessness is bringing the world closer to nuclear confrontation. No demands of “Don’t wait for the translation,” or “I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over.” The Biden administration authorized an additional $725 million dollars in security aid for Ukraine. But otherwise, it’s wartime business as usual.

As Peggy Noonan observed, “If we’re facing Armageddon, that should be taking up all the president’s time. When JFK spoke, it was in a studied, careful way, and to the entire nation.”

Apparently, Biden blindsided the rest of the U.S. government with his remarks; no one else in the government seemed to know what stirred Biden’s concern that particular day. The morning after the president’s remarks, Defense Department spokesman J. Todd Breasseale said to Politico, “To be clear: We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor do we have indications that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons.” His statement was echoed, verbatim, by State Department spokesman Vedant Patel the same day.

The following Sunday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had to do cleanup: “His comments were not based on new or fresh intelligence or new indications that Mr. Putin has made a decision to use nuclear weapons and, quite frankly, we don’t have indication that he has made that kind of decision.”

Clearly, Biden’s “Armageddon” remarks were not a deliberate strategy or a subtle form of messaging to the Russians. That was just old Joe, rambling about whatever was on his mind, blurting out his anxieties about one of the major foreign-policy crises on his watch.

I don’t want to pull a full Michael Brendan Dougherty here, but you get the feeling that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a crisis that really befuddles Biden, his foreign-policy team, and the so-called “foreign-policy blob” — the foreign-policy establishment found in the government, think tanks, international institutions, Capitol Hill, media, and academia.

What do you do when you have an autocrat who has absolute power in his country, an apparently unquenchable appetite for territorial conquest, a mountain range’s worth of historical grievances, a lifetime’s worth of paranoia and secrecy from a career in espionage and intelligence, a willingness to throw away seemingly endless fortunes in blood and treasure, considerable energy leverage over central Europe, debatable mental stability, and nuclear weapons?

Remember, there was a time when it was widely believed that bringing Russia into the international economy would help establish global stability and security. (Until Kosovo, no two countries that had McDonald’s restaurants in them had ever gone to war.) But in the end, having American brands sold in Moscow didn’t make much of a difference. Having extensive energy exports to Europe enhanced Russia’s leverage instead of mitigating it. All the trade ties and economic interaction with the rest of the world — and the threat of far-reaching crippling sanctions — didn’t matter because the country was ruled by a guy who really wanted that territory, who saw himself in near-messianic terms, and who was willing to pay any price in both Ukrainian and Russian lives to get it.

No matter how badly the war goes for Russia, Putin doubles down. The Moskva, a Russian naval cruiser and the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, sinks, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting. The Crimean Bridge gets partially blown up, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting. An estimated 90,000 Russian soldiers have died, cannot be accounted for, or have suffered such serious injuries that they are unable to return to service, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting. Tens of thousands of Russian men flee the country to avoid conscription, but Putin and the Russian army continue fighting.

It currently appears that the Russian army will continue to fight and bombard civilian targets in Ukraine until it has no more men or ammunition to throw at the problem. This is a formula for an exceptionally bloody stalemate.

Biden spent the 2020 campaign promising that he would stand up to Putin and “hold the Putin regime accountable for its crimes.” In a cringe-inducing display of hubris, Biden boasted that, “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”

We didn’t deter the Russian invasion. We haven’t deterred Russian attacks on civilians. We may have mitigated the worst effects of the invasion on world food prices, but the data is mixed and we’re not done yet. We may have deterred the use of tactical nuclear weapons so far, but that’s hard to tell; it’s difficult to know if Putin really was considering it or was simply saber-rattling for greater leverage.

Apparently, the U.S. strategy is to arm Ukraine — piecemeal and ploddingly — and hope for the best. Today on the website, Robert Zubrin urges the Biden administration to send American F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. You may notice this is very similar to the argument we had in the spring over NATO’s spare MiGs. And if we had sent those spare MiGs to them then, maybe the Ukrainians would be in better shape now. As Zubrin writes:

Fighters should be sent without further delay, starting with the MiGs that Poland offered to send Ukraine in March. That proposal was blocked by the Biden administration on the mistaken belief that Putin would be restrained by NATO restraint. If the MiGs had been sent, thousands of lives lost since that time could have been saved.

But there is no reason to limit the aircraft we send Ukraine to Soviet-era MiGs. America and its allies have more than 4,000 F-16s. While these are no longer the best fighters we have, they are pretty good, certainly much better than the legacy Soviet MiGs. They are also relatively easy to maintain. The United States has delivered F-16s to 25 countries around the world — NATO members and non-NATO countries — even including such questionable nations as Pakistan and Venezuela. We have so many of them that the U.S. Air Force uses them for target practice.

Putin has, at least in theory, more than 2 million former conscripts and contract servicemen he can mobilize. He thinks, with good reason, that his leverage will increase in winter if he cuts off energy supplies to central Europe. Russian military losses are, on paper, good for Ukraine and good for NATO — every Russian tank, artillery piece, plane, and other weapon destroyed is one less that can fire at Ukrainian civilians in cities. But every loss also makes Putin more desperate to show that this entire bloody endeavor was worthwhile. It’s conceivable that the worse it gets for Putin, the worse it will get for everyone else, too. Maybe this grim calculation is what spurred Biden to ramble about “Armageddon.”

But hey, Mr. President, you asked for this job. You spent two years telling us you could handle it. You specifically assured us you knew how to handle Vladimir Putin. (Apparently, Biden believed that the mere presence of himself in the Oval Office would intimidate Putin into good behavior. Go figure, it turns out everybody ‘[messes] with a Biden’ after all.)

If the turning-80-next-month president really finds the prospect of this crisis overwhelming, maybe he should step aside for someone who does feel up to the job.

ADDENDA: President Biden, licking an ice-cream cone, Friday: “Our economy is strong as hell.”

Bloomberg News:

A US recession is effectively certain in the next 12 months in new Bloomberg Economics model projections, a blow to President Joe Biden’s economic messaging ahead of the November midterms.

The latest recession probability models by Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Eliza Winger forecast a higher recession probability across all timeframes, with the 12-month estimate of a downturn by October 2023 hitting 100 percent, up from 65 percent for the comparable period in the previous update.

Boy, this series of questions seemed to hit a nerve. . . .

On the menu today: President Biden is enjoying his old habits, licking an ice-cream cone and boasting that “our economy is strong as hell,” as two new polls indicate that Americans think the economy is doing terribly with the midterm elections just weeks away. If a “red wave” washes out scores of Democrats in November, there will be a lot of justified finger-pointing at the president and jokes about whether the “Inflation Reduction Act” would be more accurately called the “Democrat Reduction Act.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post notices the lack of new information about John Fetterman’s health, and Democrats wonder if Raphael Warnock is blowing it against an opponent who was supposed to be a pushover. Every candidate thinks that they’re running hard in October, but none of these guys are Breece Hall.

The Inflation Reduction Act Comes Back to Bite the Democrats

In an image right out of a Republican ad-maker’s dreams, this weekend President Biden went to a Baskin-Robbins in Portland, Ore., and, while eating an ice-cream cone, declared, “Our economy is strong as hell.” Biden’s rosy-eyed assessment came just days after updated figures showed the inflation rate at 8.2 percent.

As luck would have it, back in March, folks on the right created a meme of Biden licking an ice-cream cone and telling someone who can’t afford food or gas, “Best economic recovery in history, Jack!”

This weekend brought two national polls focusing on the midterms, and while the topline numbers are good for Republicans, let’s home in on how Americans currently feel about the economy, in light of Biden’s claim that it is “strong as hell.”

In the Siena/New York Times poll, just 24 percent of likely voters said the country is on the right track, while 64 percent said the country is headed in the wrong direction. When asked whether they approve or disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as president, 39 percent said they approve, while 58 percent said they disapprove. When asked an open-ended question about what the biggest problem facing the country is, 26 percent said the economy (or jobs, or the stock market) and another 18 percent said inflation. Just 5 percent said “abortion.” Also note that among Hispanics, 37 percent list the economy as the top problem facing the country.

In the YouGov/CBS News Battleground Tracker poll, very few Americans share Biden’s opinion that the U.S. economy is as “strong as hell.” Just 6 percent of respondents said that “things in America today” are going very well, and just 5 percent rated the economy as “very good.”

Overall, 29 percent rated “things in America today” as going very well or well, and 71 percent rated them as either going badly or going very badly — with 40 percent choosing the worst option. Just 27 percent of Americans rated the economy as very good or fairly good, while 30 percent rated it “fairly bad” and 40 percent rated it as “very bad.” Only 15 percent of respondents said the economy was getting better, while 65 percent said it was getting worse, and 20 percent said it was staying about the same. Only 5 percent of respondents said higher prices had not affected their household finances. When asked about gas prices in the last few weeks, 63 percent said prices had been going up, 13 percent said they had been going down, and 18 percent said they’d been staying the same.

When asked about their view of the Democrats’ economic policies during the last two years in Congress, 29 percent said they had been helpful to the economy, 48 percent said they had been harmful to the economy, and 13 percent said they had not impacted the economy. Another 10 percent gave the delightfully honest answer, “I’m not sure what the policies were.”

As CBS summarizes,

By double digits, Democrats are still losing independents who report their personal financial situation is bad, and those for whom high prices have made their lives worse or more difficult. Democratic policies are not the main reason people see for inflation — more pin blame on international forces and supply issues — but the party isn’t absolved either. Two-thirds of voters report seeing gas prices go up. That isn’t helping Democrats: those who report increases are more apt to blame Democratic policies for it.

If the midterms turn into a Democratic wipeout — and at this moment, it definitely looks more like a red wave trending toward a red tsunami than a red wave trending toward a red trickle — there will be a lot of finger-pointing about the Democratic Party’s economic messaging during the past year.

If you take your usual Green New Deal-esque wish list and rename it the “Inflation Reduction Act” and pass it with great fanfare, then the electorate will expect inflation to go down. Expectations will get even higher after the president boasts that, “This bill cut costs for families, helped reduce inflation at the kitchen table.” (Notice Biden’s use of the past tense there.) In mid August, Biden and the Democrats pushed almost all their chips to the middle of the table and bet that inflation wouldn’t seem quite so bad by the time voters went to the polls in November. They lost that bet.

In fact, yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union, Colorado senator Michael Bennet unveiled what will likely be increasingly common excuses from Democrats:

Well, because the elements of the Inflation Reduction Act aren’t going to kick in for a while, Dana.

I mean, the cap on drug prices for seniors and the requirement finally — finally, we overcame pharma to have requirement that Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of the American people — capping insulin at $35 a month, I mean, these are things that are going to take a while to put in place. . . .

I’m concerned that the Federal Reserve kept their interest rates at zero for too long and that their quantitative easing was too aggressive. But that’s looking in the rearview mirror.

Bennet is arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act’s effects haven’t really started kicking in yet in October, while Biden was boasting that it was already working in September.

The New York Times notices that Democrats aren’t talking about their economic policies on the campaign trail:

Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races this fall have spent little time on the trail or the airwaves touting the centerpiece provisions of their party’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue package, which party leaders had hoped would help stave off losses in the House and Senate in midterm elections. In part, that is because the rescue plan has become fodder for Republicans to attack Democrats over rapidly rising prices, accusing them of overstimulating the economy with too much cash.

When Democratic lawmakers don’t want to talk about the policies they enacted, I suspect voters see that as a de facto admission that those policies didn’t work.

Oh, and in early August, when the narrative of the big Democratic midterm comeback was picking up steam, remember who told you, “When inflation is raging at a 40-year high, and gas and food prices are skyrocketing, the incumbent party is going to get thrashed.”

Red-Wave Warning

Democratic hopes for keeping the Senate rely on wins in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and you can almost feel the ground shifting underneath your feet in those two key contests.

In today’s Washington Post story about John Fetterman and the Pennsylvania Senate race:

The Fetterman campaign has declined repeated requests to interview his doctors or review updated medical information beyond what it has previously released. The last medical information from a doctor made public by the Fetterman campaign came in a letter from his cardiologist on June 3, explaining that surgery conducted 17 days earlier to install a defibrillator was to treat a previously undisclosed diagnosis of cardiomyopathy, and not for atrial fibrillation as the campaign originally claimed.

If what Fetterman’s doctors had to say was good and would reassure voters, or if his medical records showed good news, you would be seeing them. No campaign intentionally withholds good news for their candidate.

Meanwhile, in Politico’s coverage of Raphael Warnock and the Georgia Senate race:

Warnock’s campaign and allied groups have spent tens of millions of dollars elevating those claims. But some Democrats are starting to wonder if Georgia voters are hearing too much about Walker’s liabilities and not enough about Warnock’s assets.

As one Democratic pollster told Eugene: “There could be a misstep here in trying to disqualify Walker so much and not to requalify what Warnock has actually done. [Voters] get it. They understand Walker is the big bad wolf. They like Warnock. But they don’t have anything really good to say. They don’t know what he’s been doing.”

Biden won the state of Georgia by about one-fifth of one percentage point in 2020, with 49.4 percent of the total vote. It’s a purple state at best, but it’s probably better thought of as burgundy — red in normal circumstances, purple in unusual circumstances. And Warnock has voted with the Biden administration 96.4 percent of the time. If Warnock had voted like Joe Manchin, he would probably be in much stronger shape for reelection.

And if Warnock’s debate with Herschel Walker Friday had been a slam-dunk win by the Democrat, you would be hearing a lot more about it. Instead, Mark McKinnon offered this assessment to Jake Tapper on CNN Friday night:

Herschel Walker couldn’t have had lower expectations. Warnock had very high expectations. And Walker, listen, this is not just me talking. I’ve talked to lots of friends. Republicans, and Democrats, across the board, think that Herschel Walker exceeded expectations, and that Warnock did not meet expectations. I mean, he reminded me, of Al Gore, in the George W. Bush debates. It didn’t seem like you really wanted to be there.

Later in the interview, McKinnon elaborated:

It was Walker that came out, I don’t know, a week or so ago, and said, “Listen, you know, I’ll just be honest with you. I’m not — I’m not that good an orator, you know? I’m just a poor old country boy that played football, and I’m going to be up against this really articulate pastor, who’s been doing this for a living. You know, he’s been in Washington, you know, dealing with politicians. And he’s, you know, he’s a slick talker. And I’m not. But I just tell it like it is.” And so that was a very, very kind of standard lowering the bar. “Hey, you know, I’m just a dumb country boy.” And then, all he’s got to do, when he walks on the stage, is complete a couple sentences, and he’s beaten expectations.

But he did a lot more than that tonight, Jake. I mean, he was clearly prepped. I think, Newt Gingrich, and Lindsey Graham, had a hand in that. But they know what they’re doing. And Walker clearly followed their — followed instructions, tonight.

Say, wasn’t Walker supposed to be a pushover after the abortion allegations?

ADDENDA: Over in the Washington Post, some guy asks why the U.S. is still planning to build a new air-defense-testing facility in Saudi Arabia if Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is still screwing the U.S. over at OPEC+.

On the menu today: Politico declares that former president Donald Trump is “the main character of 2022,” which is a particularly convenient narrative for Democrats who do not want the midterm elections to be a referendum on the performance of the Biden administration; Pennsylvania Democrats who are sweating their chances in this year’s Senate race have no one to blame but John Fetterman for not disclosing his stroke sooner; and wondering what conservatives should make of Tulsi Gabbard, ex-Democrat.

Wait, Who’s the Current President Again?

This morning, Politico’s Playbook newsletter makes a case for, “Why Trump is the main character of 2022.”

That newsletter effectively argues that there is a lot of news surrounding Trump in the closing months before Election Day, and he’s had enormous influence on whom Republicans nominated for offices in this year’s midterm elections. I’m not going to argue that the controversies surrounding Trump, the hunt for missing documents at Mar-a-Lago, the hearings of the January 6 committee, and all the rest aren’t newsworthy or worth discussing. (I’d also note that we get a lot less “you won’t believe this crazy thing Trump just said on social media” coverage than we did when he was on Twitter, and I think the country is better off for it.)

But it is awfully convenient for the Democratic Party that publications such as Politico have decided that “Trump is the main character of 2022,” and not, say, the current president of the United States, or House speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer — you know, the people who have actually been running the government and shaping U.S. domestic and foreign policy for the past two years. A week ago, Biden declared that, “Folks, when it comes to the next Congress, this isn’t a referendum, it’s a choice.” It’s obvious that Biden doesn’t want the midterm elections to be a referendum on his performance. As no less a figure than Jen Psaki declared on Meet the Press a few weeks ago, “ If it is a referendum on the president, [Democrats] will lose. And they know that.” Today, Politico goes right up to the line of contending that the midterms are actually a referendum on the performance of former president Trump . . . again, which would make them the fourth consecutive national election cycle that was a de facto question: “What do you think of Trump?”

I suspect that a lot of mainstream-media reporters either A) really enjoy writing the latest version of “Republicans stink” or B) know their established audience is hungriest for the latest version of “Republicans stink” stories. A lot of people wake up with the attitude of, “I know my side is right; tell me why my side is right today.”

That’s why on any given day, you will see a lot of coverage of Trump, his family members, who’s rising and who’s falling in his inner circle, whatever crazy conspiracy theory Mike Lindell is talking up today, the trial of Alex Jones, and the latest antics of non-Left celebrities such as Elon Musk and Kanye West, with a healthy dose of “You won’t believe what Tucker Carlson just said” mixed in.

You notice that none of these people are currently in elected office.

I suppose someone could argue that the Right does this too, and no doubt over the past two years, I’ve written a lot more, and a lot more critically, about Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, “Prime Minister” Ron Klain, etc. But Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer etc. are currently running the country.

I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is over-covered — she’s not even on any committees! — but at least she’s currently a member of Congress. If you want to argue about what governors such as Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott or Brian Kemp are doing, fine — they’re actually setting policy at the state level.

A bit more than a decade ago, CNN’s Jake Tapper reviewed Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom for The New Republic, and he had a sharp, illuminating observation about what Sorkin thought the media was supposed to do:

And what are the important issues “News Night” covers instead of the piffle of Faisal Shahzad, a homegrown terrorist funded and trained by the Pakistani Taliban? McAvoy instead devotes at least a week of his broadcast to showcasing what a horribly inept and dangerous bunch Tea Party Republicans are as they — gasp! — defeat establishment Republicans in free and fair primaries and elections. It’s all well and good to follow the Koch brothers’ money, but at a time when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, it’s telling that McAvoy and Sorkin aim their sights at conservatives seeking power — not moderates and liberals wielding it.

A lot of members of the mainstream media are much more interested in watching the watchdog for flaws or controversies than joining the watchdog in watching the powerful. This is why we get so many stories about Republicans “pouncing” on a Democratic controversy, instead of the actual Democratic controversy. And this is how a major publication such as Politico can look at a country the day after inflation is at 8.2 percent, with waves of migrants at the border, a gallon of unleaded gasoline averaging $3.90 nationally, violent crime rising in major cities, and school children’s test scores plummeting, and conclude that, “The big story of this year’s midterm elections is Donald Trump.”

Remember, Fetterman’s Campaign Delayed Revealing His Stoke

Now that large swaths of the media have decided that NBC News reporter Dasha Burns is the villain of the Pennsylvania Senate race, let’s pause and refocus on some factors that aren’t getting enough attention, because most of the national media is partisan and stupid and works backward from, “We want the Democrat to win.”

1) John Fetterman’s stroke occurred on May 13, the Friday before the Tuesday primary in Pennsylvania.

2) His first brief statement about the stroke came out on Sunday, May 15. In it, he declared that, “The good news is I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”

3) Five hours before the polls closed, Fetterman’s campaign issued a statement that he was undergoing surgery: “It should be a short procedure that will help protect his heart and address the underlying cause of his stroke, atrial fibrillation (A-fib), by regulating his heart rate and rhythm.”

4) On primary night, his wife Gisele characterized it as “a little hiccup.”

5) The initial explanation of his ailment drastically understated the severity of the stroke, which Fetterman later characterized as life-threatening. It wasn’t until June that a letter from Fetterman’s doctor revealed that Fetterman had been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump in 2017, but had stopped taking his medication and didn’t see any doctor for five years before he suffered a stroke.

The Democrats are in this mess, in large part, because Fetterman and his team were not honest about his condition when it mattered most, and when Democrats could have considered other options to run for Senate. The reason Pennsylvania Democrats are nervous when Fetterman, his wife, and his campaign say his recovery is going fine is because they don’t trust him, because he and his team have already lied about his health.

If either of Fetterman’s primary rivals — Representative Conor Lamb or state representative Malcolm Kenyatta — were the nominee, they would probably be polling about the same (maybe better without this health issue hanging over their nomination!) and they would vote the same way as Fetterman on 99 percent of votes in the Senate. Fetterman is not irreplaceable, but he chose to act as if he is.

Also, if Fetterman wins, there’s at least a 50-50 chance Pennsylvania Democrats figure out some way to strongarm him into resigning and appointing a Democrat with no health issues.

The Dramatic Change of Tulsi Gabbard

I believe that Tulsi Gabbard is a genuinely independent, idiosyncratic, unpredictable voice who doesn’t naturally fit in either of the two major parties. When she’s willing to help the conservative cause, or make an eloquent argument against bad Democratic policies, I welcome her. But she is a particularly unique and unusual figure in the American political spectrum, and I hope Republicans adopt the old Reagan maxim, “trust, but verify.”

I think Dan McLaughlin has the right sense of how Gabbard can be an ally to conservatives but should not be mistaken for a 100-percent-reliable ally:

If Gabbard is actually inclined to go the next step and become a Republican — or a Republican-aligned independent — much depends upon the uses to which she puts her talents. If she were to run for office again in Hawaii, even the possibility of winning elections that are typically closed to the GOP would be worth making some common cause with her. Surely, Gabbard as an independent in the Senate, for example, would be an improvement on Mazie Hirono. But all too often, what some sections of the right prefer is to make Gabbard a national figure speaking at CPAC and on Fox News, taking up places better filled by actual conservatives, or — worse yet — encouraging her to run as a third-party candidate in a race Republicans might stand a chance of winning without her. No thanks.

I’m surprised how many people are surprised, or think it is significant, that Gabbard declared she’s no longer a Democrat. Once Gabbard embraced the pro-life cause, endorsed Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s legislation on schools and sexually explicit materials (and in fact argued that it should have gone further), denounced the Build Back Better legislation, argued that Biden’s immigration stance was an “open-doors policy” that benefited “gangs, cartels, and human traffickers,” guest-hosted Tucker Carlson’s program, and spoke at CPAC . . . should anyone have been all that surprised that she formally left the Democratic Party? Hadn’t she informally departed the Democratic Party a long time ago?

And yet, up until this past August, Tulsi Gabbard was listed as a fellow at the Sanders Institute in Vermont — the progressive think tank launched by Jane Sanders, the wife of former presidential contender and U.S. senator Bernie Sanders.

Gabbard endorsed Biden for president in 2020, and now, two years later, she’s campaigning for the very Trumpy GOP Senate candidate Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. That is a very intense shift in a person’s political outlook in a relatively short span of time.

ADDENDUM: I am pleasantly surprised to see that the Washington Post editorial board, in discussing how to “protect democracy,” remembered that Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars to promote GOP candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election and embraced kooky conspiracy theories. If you really think these guys are a threat to the country, stop reaching into your wallet and helping them!

On the menu today: On Monday, I told you that, “We don’t know what the exact updated inflation figure will be, but we know the number isn’t likely to be particularly good news.” This morning, inflation came in at 8.2 percent year-over-year, with similar grim numbers in the month-over-month measurements. There will not be any last-minute burst of good economic news to save Democrats’ bacon in the midterm elections. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t use that metaphor, because the cost of a pound of bacon has increased from $5.58 to $7.37 since 2020.

Welcome to Inflation Day

Man, you need an electron microscope to spot any silver lining in this morning’s inflation numbers.

At the beginning of the week, I told you this would be the week before the midterm elections that is most dominated by a focus on the economy and inflation, because of the release of the updated Consumer Price Index figures.

This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped the latest round of bad news:

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.4 percent in September on a seasonally adjusted basis after rising 0.1 percent in August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all-items index increased 8.2 percent before seasonal adjustment.

Increases in the shelter, food, and medical care indexes were the largest of many contributors to the monthly seasonally adjusted all items increase. These increases were partly offset by a 4.9-percent decline in the gasoline index. The food index continued to rise, increasing 0.8 percent over the month as the food at home index rose 0.7 percent. The energy index fell 2.1 percent over the month as the gasoline index declined, but the natural gas and electricity indexes increased.

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.6 percent in September, as it did in August. . . .

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers is a pretty darn straight shooter in his assessments of the economy, and his instant reaction didn’t sugarcoat it, for those who were hoping to get a burst of good economic news about a month before the midterm election:

Inflation is proving to be more resilient — and more troubling — than many had hoped or forecast. Both the headline and core inflation readings are about 0.2 percentage points higher than expected. That might not sound like a lot, but over a month, it’s a pretty big miss. Worse, it comes after a run of disappointing inflation readings. There’s nothing in this report that folks at the Fed are going to cheer. Even as nominal wage growth remains contained, inflation continues to run at troubling rates. Remember, the Fed is focused on core rather than headline inflation, and core is a more dismal story.

One year ago, in September 2021, the U.S. inflation rate was 5.4 percent, continuing a stretch of steadily high, but not quite astronomically high, inflation rates that had begun in April. By November, the rate had jumped to 7.8 percent, the largest year-over-year jump since 1982, and we knew we were entering once-in-a-generation territory. This September’s prices are 8.2 percent higher than those prices, which were already 5.4 percent higher than September 2020’s prices. In other words, we’re now well into our second year of exceptionally high inflation. For 19 straight months, the inflation rate has been higher than it was a year earlier.

CNBC reported that economists had expected the CPI to have risen 0.3 percent, up from 0.1 in August, and offered an ominous quote from Diane Swonk, KPMG’s chief economist:“The core inflation is going to be higher, so it’s still an inflation that hasn’t peaked yet in many ways. There’s still more risks of supply side shocks.”

Yesterday brought the update to the Producer Price Index, a less-discussed figure that measures the prices that suppliers are charging businesses and other customers. That number increased 0.4 percent from this August to this September, and 8.5 percent from last September to this September.

If inflation is cooling, you shouldn’t be seeing big jumps in the PPI number or the CPI number. You know that a lot of people wanted to see some glimmer of hope in those numbers, both for the sake of the country and for the sake of Democrats’ hopes in the midterms. But CNBC’s Jim Cramer couldn’t find a silver lining yesterday:

“It was just plain bad. There’s absolutely nothing to say about it other than it was bad. A lot of people were hoping this number’s going to be good, maybe accepting that tomorrow’s going to be bad,” he said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “The only thing that’s actually even remotely positive about it is that there’s nothing that’s really shocking to the upside, it’s just kind of as bad as it’s been.”

“There’s no relief here . . . there’s just nothing good here,” he added.

All of this makes for a target-rich environment for Republican challengers to Democratic incumbents. You can picture the ad and debate lines already: The so-called Inflation Reduction Act was signed in August, and so far, it’s not doing a darn bit of good. The economy was already recovering in early 2021, and then Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democrats decided to throw another $1.9 trillion in cash into the economy — too much money chasing too few goods, driving prices up. Biden said in July 2021 that inflation was going to be temporary, and he declared in December that inflation had peaked, and he said in February that it would “taper off.” He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He just keeps telling us to be patient and that things will get better. That’s not optimism; that’s stubborn denial. The Democrats always want to spend their way out of a problem, and when you’re in an inflation crisis, that’s like pumping gasoline onto a raging inferno. Just this month, Gavin Newsom started sending out $1,050 checks to California residents to “help with inflation.” That makes the problem worse! When too much money is chasing too few goods, giving people more money only drives the prices up further!

By the way, this morning in Politico, Victoria Guida begins her piece with, “Officials at the Federal Reserve and in the Biden administration are seeing promising signs that the U.S. might finally be through the worst of inflation.”

Are they?

Yesterday, the Associated Press released a new poll revealing that 46 percent of Americans now call their personal financial situation “poor,” up from 37 percent in March. For perspective, in March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was shutting down American society, 38 percent said their personal financial situation was poor — and that number actually improved slightly in the subsequent months. Now, just 23 percent of respondents say they feel the U.S. economy is “good,” and intriguingly, “The drop since September came primarily among Democrats, from 46 percent then to 35 percent now.”

In other words, even the people who are most instinctively sympathetic to the argument that the economy is doing well aren’t buying the happy talk coming from the White House. Not that President Biden is changing his approach.

On Tuesday, Biden was interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper, and he scoffed at JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s assessment that the U.S. is either already in a recession or will enter one in the near future.

“Look, they’ve been saying this now how — every six months, they say this,” Biden said. “Every six months, they look down the next six months, and say what’s going to happen. It hadn’t happened yet. It hadn’t been — there has — there is no — there’s no guarantee that there’s going to recession.”

As you probably know, the U.S. has experienced two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which for a long time was the traditional definition of a recession.

Biden continued, “I don’t think there will be a recession. If it is, it will be a very slight recession. That is we’ll move down slightly. . . . It is possible. Look, it’s possible. I don’t anticipate it.”

The president didn’t anticipate 19 months of high inflation, either.

Yes, Why Is January 6 Such a Non-Issue in the Midterms?

Stephen Collinson is quite irked that Americans are more worried about inflation and grocery prices than the events of January 6 and the continuing nonsensical claim that Donald Trump was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election. Collinson writes over at CNN:

Grocery bills are just a pain right now. Frozen potato products are up 10 percent, pork products that are not sausages are 5.5 percent more expensive. While it would be too simplistic to say voters are more preoccupied with the cost of French fries than the price of democratic freedoms, it wouldn’t be far from the mark.

What are we to make of the fact that Democrats are choosing not to focus on January 6?

Per Politico:

. . . criticism of the 139 House Republicans who voted to challenge Trump’s loss on Jan. 6, 2021, has been all but absent from the TV airwaves with 25 days to go before the midterms. Just a handful of them are in close races, where they’ve faced questions about their election objection in debates, social media and smaller-scale ads. Democrats view that as part of their larger focus on “extremism.”

Overall, less than 2 percent of all broadcast TV spending in House races has gone toward Jan. 6 ads, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact — or just $2.7 million of $163 million. Taken in total, Democrats have aired just two dozen spots focused on threats to democracy this cycle, in roughly 16 different battleground districts.

Democrats can read polls, and they can conduct focus groups. Democrats are trying to figure out what is foremost in the minds of voters, just like Republicans are. If Democrats don’t think it’s worthwhile to focus on January 6 as the country experiences its second year of runaway inflation, why should anyone else?

ADDENDUM: Just clarifying a point from yesterday’s Jolt: Within three years of becoming mayor of Braddock, Pa., the national and even international media came to the small (roughly 2,900 residents in 2000) town, fascinated and eager to share the tale of the unusual-looking mayor, John Fetterman.

Fetterman was elected mayor in 2005 and took office in January 2006. By the first day of February 2009, the New York Times published its generous profile, about how a “political novice is starting to shake things up.” By the end of February, Fetterman was making his first appearance on The Colbert Report. By mid March, CNN’s American Morning had done a profile of Fetterman and his efforts to turn around the town.

By April, Fetterman was testifying before Congress with the Environmental Defense Fund, calling on Congress to pass climate-change legislation. (In April 2009, how concerned were Braddock residents about climate change?) By May 2009, Rolling Stone published its profile of Fetterman, featuring the line, “How many small-town mayors look like a skinhead but claim to be a warrior for social justice? — yet Fetterman insists he hates the spotlight.” And by July, the Guardian was calling him “the coolest mayor in America.”

Within six months, Fetterman went from just another obscure, first-term, small-town mayor to being the subject of profiles in some of the biggest publications and shows in America. First, when that happens, don’t tell me you hate the spotlight. Second, that doesn’t just happen. Either Fetterman had an exceptional pitch to journalists and television producers — “He looks like a skinhead, but he’s a social justice warrior” — or someone decided he was going to be the next big star in Pennsylvania politics.

On the menu today: A long look at the symbiotic relationship between Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman and the national media that fell in love with him – and fell in love with him surprisingly early in his tenure as mayor of the beleaguered, small, blue-collar town of Braddock. If you feel like the coverage of Fetterman is obsessed with what he wears and how he looks and notably less interested in what actually changed while he was mayor, your instincts are serving you well.

John Fetterman, Beyond the Hype

You can see why national political correspondents love to write about John Fetterman; they get to stretch those writing muscles describing his appearance.

Way back in 2009, Ed Pilkington of the Guardian called him, “America’s coolest mayor” and gushed, “Everything about him stands out from the crowd. . . . He is 6ft 8in tall and weighs 300lbs. With a shaven head, big ears and a goatee, he looks like a James Bond baddie rather than the political leader of a community in the north-eastern US. He walks around town dressed in black workers’ overalls and steelworkers’ boots.” Around that same time, a Rolling Stone profile of “The Mayor of Hell,” written by Janet Reitman began, “John Fetterman looks a lot like a convict. For starters, he’s 6-feet-8, weighs 320 pounds, and has a shaved head and a bushy chin beard. He dresses most of the time in modified prison garb: Dickies work shirt, baggy jeans, black steel-toe Dr. Martens. His arms are the size of small trees. He also sports some impressively large tattoos.”

In a 2011 New York Times magazine profile calling him “the Mayor of Rust,” Sue Halpern described him as “a 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other . . . a guy in biker boots bringing the Park Slope (Aspen, Marin, Portland, Santa Fe) ethos — organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven — to the disenfranchised.”

A bit more recently, James Bennet, the brother of Colorado Democratic senator Michael Bennet, wrote in The Economist that, “Fetterman defies all political convention. Well over two metres tall, bald and goateed, he sports a hoodie and baggy shorts regardless of weather or occasion. At rallies he extends his long arms, taking the crowd in a virtual hug and revealing the tattoos lining his forearms.” Most recently, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine called him, “an enormous white man who had played offensive tackle in college and appeared to be built of all the XXL parts at the Guy Factory.”

In Politico, Holly Otterbein acknowledged the obvious: that Fetterman’s distinctive size and appearance are a big reason why he became one of the most frequently profiled small-town mayors in American history. “Fetterman is one of the most photographed rising stars in the Democratic Party. As gargantuan as Lurch Addams, with a bald head, goatee and closet full of Dickies shirts — and tattoos running down his arm marking every date a life was taken while he was mayor of his hard-knock steel town — Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is a cartoon image of a working guy from the Rust Belt. Which is catnip for glossy magazine spreads.”

You notice these profiles all start with Fetterman’s height, size, shaved head, tattoos, and casual clothing style. Yes, Fetterman looks like he spent his younger years working in a steel mill or an auto assembly line or a construction site. But as you probably know, he didn’t:

Public records show — and Fetterman has openly acknowledged — that for a long stretch lasting well into his 40s, his main source of income came from his parents, who gave him and his family $54,000 in 2015 alone. That was part of the financial support his parents regularly provided when Fetterman’s only paying work was $150 a month as mayor of Braddock, a job he held from his mid-30s until he turned 49. He lived in an industrial-style loft he purchased from his sister for $1 after she paid $70,000 for it six years earlier. . . .

Fetterman, 52, grew up, in his own words, in a “cushy” environment in York County. His upbringing helped him get an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a master’s degree from Harvard without taking on student debt.

Fetterman’s working-class image is just that — an image, or “blue-collar cosplay” as my podcast co-host calls it.

It is great that Fetterman’s parents’ generosity allowed him to dedicate himself to public service, leading to his unexpected victory in small-town Braddock’s mayoral election one year after he’d moved there. And Braddock is a small town, where the mayoral vote totals don’t exceed three digits. Fetterman won by a single vote in a three-candidate Democratic primary in 2005, and the powers of the mayor’s office were limited. Here’s how Fetterman described his arrival to the Pittsburgh City Paper, back in 2006:

How did he choose Braddock as the place to stake his claim? As Fetterman tells it, while doing pro-bono grant-writing work for the Hill House Association, he wrote a proposal to help out-of-work youths get their GEDs and jobs. Hill House liked the proposal, and asked Fetterman if he’d head up an office in Braddock. Fetterman accepted, and began working there in 2001. By 2004, drawn to the borough’s post-industrial “Fight Club-feel,” he decided to live there. . . .

In late 2004, Fetterman purchased an old Presbyterian church building with family money. “I squatted in my church’s basement with no heat or windows for eight months through the coldest winter in a decade,” he says. And then he secured the warehouse next door.

Fast-forward to this year. Mayor Fetterman has moved into the old concrete-block warehouse, having converted it into a Greenwich Village-style loft apartment with brown leather couches, exposed concrete block walls and stainless-steel countertops. He’s also allowed the kids he works with to paint graffiti inside it. He’s refurbished the church next door, having transformed it into a community center that provides space for after-school programs and community dances.

Fetterman is one of the few people making such investments here. His father owns a private insurance agency in York; Fetterman says the firm is successful enough to give him “the opportunity to target investments in Braddock . . . and to reinvest nearly all of my [work] salary . . . back into the community.”

There’s also this curious detail:

His activities, though, have not been welcomed by Braddock’s borough council, whose monthly meetings he no longer attends.

Which falls in line with this Associated Press assessment of Fetterman’s time as lieutenant governor:

Records from Fetterman’s four years in office, however, offer a different portrait of his time in the $179,000-a-year elected job. They show Fetterman typically kept a light work schedule and was often absent from state business, including presiding over the state Senate, which is one of his chief duties, according to an Associated Press review of his daily calendars and attendance records.

The review found that Fetterman’s daily schedule was blank during roughly one-third of workdays from January 2019, when he first took office, to May of this year, when he suffered a serious stroke. Even on days where his schedule showed he was active, a typical work day for Fetterman lasted between four and five hours, the records show.

For a man who works in government, it seems fair to wonder just how interested Fetterman is in the day-to-day work of actually governing.

Fetterman became mayor of a small town that was so devastated by decades of economic decline that it was used as a filming location for the post-apocalyptic movie The Road, but surprisingly quickly, national and international correspondents came calling, eager to spotlight the Harvard graduate who looked like a Hell’s Angel and was trying to turn around a Rust Belt town.

In February 2009, the New York Times wrote a generous profile:

Mostly, the mayor offers encouragement, ideas and energy. With the financial help of his father, who owns a commercial insurance agency in York, Pa., he also makes direct and indirect investments in local real estate. He set up the nonprofit organization, Braddock Redux, and gave it $50,000 to buy a former Presbyterian church to serve as a community center.

In 2010, The Atlantic did a video interview with Fetterman, and in accompanying text gushed about his appearance: “Standing 6’8″ and built like an MMA fighter, he has a shaved head and a long, grey-flecked goatee. His forearms are emblazoned with tattoos” Fetterman appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show in 2009 and 2010.

It’s not that Braddock had experienced an amazing renaissance or economic turnaround during this time. Some longtime residents are irked by the national narrative that Fetterman turned their city into a success story, a narrative that overstates both town’s improvements and his role in them. While Fetterman was mayor, Braddock’s population continued to shrink. A recent Fetterman ad boasts, “We stopped gun deaths for five years.” Yes, but Fetterman was mayor for 13 years. (That ad also shows off his tattoos.) But the town’s violent-crime rate surged in 2016 and remained high until 2019 — when Fetterman departed to become lieutenant governor. (And make no mistake, Fetterman always intended to use the lieutenant-governor position as a stepping stone to the Senate; a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile in 2019 stated that, “At the end of four years, Mr. Fetterman hopes to have a record that would place him in good position to challenge again for Mr. Toomey’s Senate seat, if he decides to pursue it.”)

About the best you can say for Fetterman’s time as mayor is that he volunteered for a tough job and tried hard in difficult circumstances, which is noble. But America has lots of blue-collar small-town mayors who try hard, and they rarely if ever turn into national celebrities. Fetterman offered the national media exactly the kind of story they would love to tell: “Hey, this guy with an elected government job looks like he’s in a biker gang, but he went to Harvard and he’s promoting progressive policies!”

Back in 2019, after Beto O’Rourke fell just short in his Texas Senate bid and was starting to generate presidential buzz, I wrote a parody of those ubiquitous glossy magazine profiles. I conjured an imaginary consultant declaring that:

It’s as if he had been grown in a lab to make middle-aged magazine journalists feel they’re youthful rebels again, that they’re sticking it to The Man like they’re teenagers, so you can avoid the thought that you’ve become The Man and are in fact at least partially responsible for a political culture and electorate that evaluates presidential candidates on shallow charisma and appearances instead of their policy agendas and records of accomplishment.

There’s a bit of that to Fetterman, with his “f*** the haters” style and the obsessive discussion of his appearance, attire, and attitude. Fetterman looks and sounds like an old-school tough guy with a heart of gold, and the visiting correspondents swoon. No reporter traveled to Braddock to write the story that Fetterman’s efforts were just nibbling around the edges of a community that had deep-rooted, colossal problems.

The more I read about Fetterman, the more I’m reminded of O’Rourke, as well as another mayor who was once The Next Big Thing in Democratic Politics, Julian Castro. From the moment the then-San Antonio mayor Castro gave the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, he was touted as the Democratic Party’s candidate of tomorrow. Back then, I noticed effusive praise for a mayor with limited powers who’d made middling city improvements — if any.

At some point, the governing record of the Next Big Thing in Democratic Politics stops mattering; he or she becomes famous for being famous. Everyone becomes too psychologically and emotionally invested in the figure’s continued success to really scrutinize whether they can possibly live up to hype. They become, to use the phrase from the Great Recession, “too big to fail.”

ADDENDUM: The allegations that Herschel Walker paid for a girlfriend’s abortion . . . may not have been that big a deal in the Georgia Senate race:

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker remain in a neck-and-neck race for the state’s wildly competitive Senate seat, according to a University of Georgia poll released Wednesday, while GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has a double-digit lead over Democrat Stacey Abrams. . . . The poll showed Warnock at 46 percent and Walker at 43 percent, within the margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, joining other surveys that showed both hovering below the majority-vote mark needed to avoid a runoff.

That general runoff election will take place on December 6, 2022, if necessary — and the Walker revelations will be even older news by then. Warnock may find himself hoping that control of the Senate doesn’t come down to his race, because pro-life Republicans in Georgia will find it really easy to hold their noses if control of the chamber comes down to their decision in December.

Also notice that Stacey Abrams is slipping down into “not even close” territory in the gubernatorial race. Glossy magazine profiles don’t elect southern governors!

On the menu today: The Senate races in Georgia and Pennsylvania are probably overcovered because they feature celebrity GOP candidates and decent Democratic chances. But if you widen the aperture on your view of the midterm elections, you notice signs of a wave somewhere between the “red tsunami” GOP hopes of the spring and the “red trickle” fears of early autumn. Democratic candidates still don’t want President Biden or Vice President Harris anywhere near them; Democratic groups aren’t willing to spend more to try to put Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan over the top; a Republican is leading a House race in Rhode Island; and statewide races in Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina are starting to slip away from Democrats.

Thundering Down the Final Stretch

There are some little signs that the “red wave” of this election may be picking up speed.

In one of those “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills” moments, I continue to notice that the president and vice president are nowhere near the campaign trail with other Democratic candidates most days as the midterm campaign season approaches the final stretch — and almost all of Washington is acting like this is perfectly normal.

Today, President Biden — whose job-approval rating is around 42 percent — will be “participating in a virtual reception for Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester” this evening. Blunt Rochester represents Delaware’s at-large district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Delaware scores a D+6 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index. Blunt Rochester won with 56 percent of the vote in 2016, 64 percent of the vote in 2018, and 57 percent of the vote in 2020. In her last fundraising update, Blunt Rochester had raised more than $2.1 million; her GOP rival, Lee Murphy, had raised a bit more than $288,000.

In other words, with 27 days until Election Day, the president is appearing at a virtual event for a near-lock Democratic candidate in his home state, where the incumbent already enjoys a 7–1 fundraising advantage.

Here’s the public schedule for Vice President Kamala Harris for today: “At 3:00 p.m. eastern, the Vice President will ceremonially swear-in Travis LeBlanc to be a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. This ceremony in the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office will be pooled press.” Harris’s current approval rating is 37.6 percent.

Yesterday, Harris attended a DNC fundraiser in Princeton, N.J., and taped an appearance on Seth Meyers’s late-night television program. On Saturday, she traveled to Austin to give the keynote address at the Texas Democratic Party’s Johnson-Jordan Reception fundraiser. (The Texas Tribute noted that, “One topic noticeably absent from her visit was immigration.”) Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa boasted that, “[Harris’] trip shows that the nation’s eyes truly are upon Texas as we head into the midterm elections — and, critically, that from Beto’s race, to Mike’s and Rochelle’s races, to races up and down the ballot, Texas is a winnable state.”

Alas, gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke could not rearrange his schedule to meet with the vice president while she was in his state, with the election a month away. He did show up and stay for an entire Dixie Chicks concert at The Woodlands Saturday night.

Tomorrow, President Biden travels to Colorado to designate Camp Hale an official national monument, and Colorado senator Michael Bennet, currently comfortably leading in his reelection bid, is expected to join the president for the event. I guess if you’re an incumbent who’s ahead by about seven points, it is safe to appear with Biden.

You notice that, at least so far, Biden and Harris are not appearing alongside incumbents such as Mark Kelly in Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. They’re not doing joint events with Tim Ryan in Ohio, or John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, or Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin. If Democrats thought Biden or Harris would do some good in those races, they would be there. (Meanwhile, Barack Obama is also limiting the number of campaign events he does this fall.)

Speaking of Tim Ryan, NBC News recently noticed that the Ohio Democrat is attempting to win his Senate race more or less “all by his lonesome,” with exceptionally little help from Democratic committees and allied groups:

Through Monday, Republicans had spent or reserved at least $37.9 million worth of advertising on the general election, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Only $3.7 million of that had come directly from Vance’s campaign, with another $1.6 million split between the campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee through coordinated advertising.

On the Democratic side, Ryan’s campaign had accounted for $24 million of the more than $29 million spent or reserved through Election Day and splitting another $835,000 with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Other outside Democratic groups had committed only $4.5 million to the race — about 14% of what the GOP groups are spending.

Polls have been fairly consistent in showing Republican candidate J. D. Vance with a lead, but it’s a small one. American Greatness — a group largely attuned with Vance’s philosophy — commissioned a poll and found the Republican Senate candidate ahead of Ryan by two percentage points. Meanwhile, the same survey found the allegedly boring, milquetoast GOP governor Mike DeWine ahead by 22 points. That is not a typo; the poll found a 20-point split between the performances of the GOP senatorial and gubernatorial nominees.

Democrats can read polls, too, and for whatever reason, they don’t see Ryan as a wise investment of limited resources this late in the campaign. If Democrats don’t think they can spare a couple million for a guy who’s only down by a few points in a key Senate race, they must be really worried about some other races.

Also notice that you don’t hear nearly as much Democratic excitement about Mandela Barnes’s bid in Wisconsin anymore, and don’t sleep on the governor’s race in that state either. Over in Nevada, Senate GOP candidate Adam Laxalt has very quietly built a consistent lead over Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, and that state’s governor’s race is another one that has slowly shifted away from the Democrats, with Democratic governor Steve Sisolak, who once enjoyed a steady lead, now either tied with or narrowly ahead of Republican Joe Lombardo.

You don’t hear as much Democratic buzz about Cheri Beasley pulling off an upset in North Carolina’s Senate race, either. Republican Ted Budd rarely leads by much, but he hasn’t trailed in an independent poll since June; one poll by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling had Beasley up by one point in late August.

Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina — none of these Senate races look like GOP landslides, but none of them look like easy pickup opportunities for Democrats, either. And if Democrats are forced to prioritize to the point where they’re skimping on a once-promising prospect such as Tim Ryan, they probably can’t afford to prioritize these Senate races, either.

Meanwhile, over in the battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives, there’s a poll showing a Republican leading a race in Rhode Island, which is something you almost never see:

A new poll has found Republican Allan Fung with a lead outside the margin of error for the first time in the race for Rhode Island’s 2nd Congressional District, buoying GOP hopes of picking up a the blue-state seat next month.

The new Boston Globe/Suffolk University survey of 422 likely voters in the 2nd District finds Fung at 45 percent and Democrat Seth Magaziner at 37 percent, with 13 percent undecided and 5 percent backing independent William Gilbert, who will appear on the ballot as “Moderate.”

The 8-point lead for Fung in the new survey confirms the findings of last week’s 12 News/Roger Williams University poll, which showed Fung leading Magaziner by a similar margin of 6 points. The results have increased the alarm among Democrats that they could lose a seat they’ve held for years, due to the retirement of 11-term incumbent Jim Langevin.

Finally, I feel like a lot of Democrat-aligned media voices are sort of sleepwalking into the usual midterm drubbing. Five days ago, CNN asked, “Could Republicans lose a Senate race in deep-red Utah?” Every time I make even the briefest reference to the Mike Lee–Evan McMullin Senate race in Utah, some enthusiastic McMullin supporter on Twitter crashes through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and insists that McMullin is going to win. Lee’s lead isn’t as big as you might expect, but he’s led every poll. Every poll!

Joe Biden’s job-approval rating in Utah is 27 percent, according to the Civiqs polling firm. You think that’s the kind of environment where a two-term incumbent Republican loses?

Washington Post columnist Lizette Alvarez writes that Val Demings is ‘a law-and-order Democrat [who] could disrupt . . . reelection.’ But the only poll Demings has led this cycle was a poll of registered voters done back in early August. Biden’s approval rating in Florida is 37 percent. Ron DeSantis is on pace to crush Charlie Crist in the state’s governor’s race. None of those are factors that point to a big upset win for Demings.

When the now-traditional midterm wave hits the Democrats, why does it always seem worse than expected? Probably because so many media voices spend October telling Democrats that it won’t be that bad.

ADDENDUM: This morning, the New York Times offers the most generous framing possible for the fact that Joe Biden exaggerates so wildly, he might as well be lying:

Standing in front of Floridians who had lost everything during Hurricane Ian, President Biden on Wednesday recalled his own house being nearly destroyed 15 years ago: “We didn’t lose our whole home, but lightning struck and we lost an awful lot of it,” he said.

Mr. Biden has mentioned the incident before, once saying that he knows what it’s like “having had a house burn down with my wife in it.”

In fact, news reports at the time called it little more than “a small fire that was contained to the kitchen” and quoted the local Delaware fire chief as saying “the fire was under control in 20 minutes.”

The story is not an isolated example of embellishment.

The exaggerated biography that Mr. Biden tells includes having been a fierce civil rights activist who was repeatedly arrested. He has claimed to have been an award-winning student who earned three degrees. And last week, speaking on the hurricane-devastated island of Puerto Rico, he said he had been “raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.”

For more than four decades, Mr. Biden has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience, often emphasizing the truth of his account by adding, “Not a joke!” in the middle of a story. But Mr. Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences.

Not a joke!

Happy Columbus Day, or as some prefer to call it, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or as the New York Jets call it, “Victory Monday.” On the menu today: This is likely to be the week before the midterm elections that is most dominated by a focus on the economy and inflation, as the updated Consumer Price Index figures will be released Thursday morning, right before some key debates in Wisconsin and Georgia. We don’t know precisely what the new inflation numbers will be, but we can strongly suspect that they won’t be particularly good. Meanwhile, gas prices continue to creep up, with 13 states averaging over $4 a gallon, and three others close to the $4 mark.

A Key Week for Voters’ Perceptions of the Economy

We don’t know everything that the week ahead holds, but on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Labor will release the latest numbers in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), giving us a look at the cost of inflation in the month of September. In August, the CPI was 8.3 percent, after being 8.5 percent in July and 9.1 percent in June. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is expecting the inflation rate to be around 8 percent; Kiplinger’s expects it to remain around 8 percent until the end of the year. As usual, we don’t know what the exact figure will be, but we know the number isn’t likely to be particularly good news.

A Monmouth University poll released last week found that 82 percent of respondents consider inflation to be either an “extremely important” or “very important” issue, and just 30 percent approve of how President Biden is handling the issue. The partisan breakdown is about what you would expect:

About 8 in 10 Republicans put inflation, crime, and immigration at the top of their issue list. A similar number of Democrats prioritize climate change, racial inequality, elections and voting, gun control, and abortion, with about 3 in 4 also giving emphasis to jobs and inflation. However, the only issue which more than 3 in 4 independents place high importance on is inflation. Additionally, independents are more concerned about overall economic issues along with crime and immigration than they are by other issues.

In other words, on Thursday morning, we will get new numbers that will spur a news cycle heavily focused upon inflation, probably the last one before Election Day. October’s CPI numbers are released November 10 — two days after Election Day. (Also, it is possible that races in Georgia and Louisiana will go to runoffs.)

When President Biden is pushed on the issue of inflation, he usually crumbles; in his recent 60 Minutes interview, he insisted that, “Inflation hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even.” Let’s keep in mind though, that inflation remaining “basically even” near the worst rate in 40 years is a terrible place to be.

Even when he’s not speaking off the cuff, Biden doesn’t have much of a better argument. Everyone focused upon his silly opening line from Friday, “Let me start off with two words: Made in America.” But Biden’s meandering remarks — which began with him saying that his father’s regret was that he never went to college — contended that the two reasons inflation is so high is because families must pay so much for insulin and because corporate taxes are too low. U.S. federal corporate tax revenue came in at a record high of $372 billion in fiscal year 2021. As the Tax Foundation dryly observed:

This year’s robust corporate tax collections calls into question efforts by the administration and congressional Democrats to increase the corporate tax rate and raise other corporate taxes based on claims of relatively low tax collections following the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017. In fact, corporate tax collections this year are about 25 percent higher than the $297 billion collected in 2017, prior to passage of TCJA. Likewise, as a share of GDP, corporate tax collections are higher this year (1.63 percent) than in 2017 (1.52 percent).

Biden’s knee-jerk instinct is to argue that the reason inflation is high is because taxes are too low, which is nonsensical, because taxes were low for years before the inflation rate spiked.

I suspect that people’s perceptions of inflation are driven by two regular purchases: groceries and gasoline. Even when gas prices were declining from their mid June record high, American consumers continued to feel pain at the checkout counter:

Some sobering news for US shoppers: There’s little relief in sight on grocery store bills.

Grocery prices climbed 13.5 percent in August from the year before, the highest annual increase since March 1979, according to government data.

Executives at large food manufacturers and analysts expect inflation to hover around this level for the rest of 2022.

Next year, the rate of food inflation is expected to moderate — but that doesn’t mean prices are going to drop. Once prices hit a certain level, they tend to stay there or go up, but rarely down.

Of all the goods that consumers buy regularly, gas prices are the ones that are likely the easiest to track. Gas prices are advertised on the big signs of gas stations on just about every major road and highway in America, and people generally remember what the price was last week and last month, and how much they usually pay when filling up their tank. The price of eggs has jumped dramatically — as have the prices of white flour, chicken breasts, milk, and potatoes — but people don’t see those prices on big signs as they drive to work every weekday.

The national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas is up to $3.91, an increase of 19 cents in the past month. The usual capacity of a U.S. car’s gas tank is 13 to 16 gallons, so this week, lots of Americans will notice that, “Hey, that’s about $2 or $3 dollars higher than I paid last month.” What should really worry the Biden administration is the psychological threshold of $4 a gallon; I’d contend that seeing the $4 on the big sign is what gets people saying, “Wow, gas is really expensive again.” As of this morning, 13 states have statewide averages above $4 a gallon, and Wisconsin ($3.98), Ohio ($3.92) and Pennsylvania ($3.88) are knocking at that door. Say, are any big statewide races currently occurring in those places?

(At a statewide average of $6.33, California is still close to its all-time record of $6.43 per gallon. This is mostly due to the state-specific tax and regulatory and refinery issues I discussed last week.)

The CPI numbers will be released Thursday morning; that evening, Wisconsin Republican senator Ron Johnson and his Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes will meet for their second debate. This coming Friday night is the only scheduled debate between Georgia Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker — the same night as a debate between Wisconsin Democratic governor Tony Evers and Republican challenger Tim Michels. The following Monday, Utah GOP senator Mike Lee and his “unaffiliated” but de facto Democratic challenger Evan McMullin will debate. The inflation rate and gas prices will likely be hot topics in all those debates.

Also, if you’re the kind of suspicious mind who thinks that Democratic campaigns or the White House save up “October surprises” to release into the news cycle when they need to distract from bad news . . . the end of this week would likely be a prime occasion to drop some premium opposition-research dirt.

According to professor Michael McDonald, who collects the early vote statistics from all the states, as of yesterday, more than 662,000 Americans have already voted in the midterm elections.

Everybody Reads Me

Yesterday in Politico, two lawmakers on the left, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Ro Khanna, wrote that the U.S. has considerable leverage over Saudi Arabia and ought to use it. They linked to my September 7 Corner post about the proposed “Red Sands” military-testing facility in Saudi Arabia, which they characterized as “controversial, new, and hastily planned.” In my post, I noted that while the U.S. should pursue any course of action that it believes furthers its national-security interests, the history of the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi Arabian soil is . . . complicated.

ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, some guy writes that Hung Cao, a Republican congressional candidate in northern Virginia, is demonstrating how to thoroughly put questions about the 2020 election behind us and get Republicans refocused upon making the case against the agenda of President Biden and congressional Democrats.

On the menu today: Our president and his less-than-careful mouth did it again, this time warning that the U.S. faces the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” in off-the-cuff remarks during a private fundraiser for Democratic Senate candidates at the Manhattan home of James and Kathryn Murdoch. It’s another cringe-inducing case of Biden blurting out whatever’s on his mind, with the potentially huge consequence of implying that Ukraine is covered or protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, which would represent a major change in U.S. defense posture.

President Biden Warns of ‘Armageddon’

My first thought is that if the president of the United States is genuinely worried that a regional conflict in eastern Europe is leading us toward a nuclear exchange and “Armageddon” — Joe Biden’s words, not mine — then he probably should not announce it in off-the-cuff remarks during a private fundraiser for Democratic Senate candidates at the Murdochs’ Manhattan home. That seems like the sort of thing that warrants an Oval Office prime-time address.

And yet, here we are:

President Joe Biden is declaring that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is at the highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as Russian officials speak of using tactical nuclear weapons after suffering massive setbacks in the eight-month invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking at a Democratic fundraiser, Biden said Thursday night that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a guy I know fairly well” and the Russian leader is “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.”

Biden added, “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” He suggested the threat from Putin is real “because his military is — you might say — significantly underperforming.”

As CNN dryly observed: “It’s striking for the President to speak so candidly and invoke Armageddon, particularly at a fundraiser, while his aides from the National Security Council to the State Department to the Pentagon have spoken in much more measured terms, saying they take the threats seriously but don’t see movement on them from the Kremlin.” Striking is one word for it, yes.

This is another statement that is likely going to get walked back. “Following Biden’s remarks, officials emphasized to CNN Thursday night that they had not seen any changes to Russia’s nuclear stance.”

As this newsletter noted early in the Ukraine conflict, as bad as the detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon would be, it would not cause the wide-scale devastation that people envision, thinking of The Day After, Threads, the Terminator movies, etc. No doubt, any nuclear detonation would be devastating to the immediate area. Putin and the Russian military could detonate a tactical nuke high in Ukraine’s atmosphere, generating an electromagnetic pulse and frying electronic equipment over a wide area. A low-altitude air-burst would be devastating to an area but have less-concentrated fallout. A surface or near-surface burst would generate a lot of radiation at the point of impact, and that radiation would likely be carried through the air to locations downwind, including for locations downwind. Finally, a subsurface burst would generate a large crater, but also in all likelihood less radiation, if it did not rupture the surface.

None of those are good things, but they are not the same as wiping out a city the size of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Since the first nuclear-test explosion on July 16, 1945, at least eight nations have detonated 2,056 nuclear bombs at dozens of test sites in remote locations. (The term “at least eight nations” is because no one has confirmed that the “Vela incident” was the Israelis and South Africans setting off a nuke on Prince Edward Islands in 1979, and it is widely suspected this was a key moment in the nuclear programs of those two countries.) A mushroom cloud in a remote, unpopulated area within Ukrainian borders, or out in the Black Sea, would mark a dark day, but it would not, ipso facto, begin the process of starting the end of civilization as we know it.

Biden’s specific words, according to the AP, were, “I don’t think there is any such a thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.” I suppose that is indeed one form of attempted deterrence, but Biden’s words indicate that the use of a Russian tactical nuke would inexorably lead to an American nuclear response.

Let us be exceptionally clear: The U.S. may want to help Ukraine, but Ukraine is not a member of NATO, the U.S. is not obligated by treaty to defend Ukraine, and Ukraine is not covered by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. A nuclear attack on Ukraine is not the same as a nuclear attack on the United States, and it should not be treated as such. The detonation of a Russian nuke on Ukrainian soil or off Ukraine’s coast would be an outrage and a war crime. It would demand the imposition of all kinds of serious repercussions on the Russian state. But an American nuclear counterstrike is not and should not be one of those repercussions. (We have all kinds of ways to hit Russia hard that do not involve nuclear weapons. For example, that’s a nice power grid you’ve got there, Russia. It would be a shame if something happened to it.*)

The U.S. cares a lot about what happens in the Russia–Ukraine war. But we don’t care so much that we’re willing to lose some cities over it.

Biden’s off-the-cuff “Armageddon” warning is in line with his past “minor incursion” and “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” gaffes. Biden has never been a disciplined thinker or speaker, and now that he is almost 80, he often blurts out the first thing that pops into his head. (Further evidence that Biden’s remarks were completely spur-of-the-moment and not any kind of planned announcement or release: Biden attended another Democratic fundraiser earlier in the day and didn’t mention Russia at all.)

Biden keeps saying things that are not U.S. government policy, and his staffers are then forced to rush out and insist that he didn’t mean to say what he just said. (CNN reported, “a senior US government official expressed surprise at the President’s remarks, saying there were no obvious signs of an escalating threat from Russia.”)

There is a time and place for strategic ambiguity — for leaving your opponent unsure of what your actual “red lines” are and what you’re really willing to do. But the stakes don’t get much higher than this, and miscalculations tend to have their own form of compounding interest: Each subsequent underestimation or overestimation of the opponent gets further from the mark.

It also seems like the Putin we’re dealing with now is not the same Putin we’ve dealt with during past crises and periods of tension. Putin was always cold, calculating, opportunistic, and underhanded, but he was also always rational. The Russian leader always seemed to be probing, testing to see what he could get away with, and through four U.S. presidents, he could get away with a lot. But this Putin, with his nearly two-year isolation because of Covid, partial mobilization of reserves, obsession with historical grievances, and claims that he “spends more and more of his time isolated deep inside nuclear bunkers” doesn’t seem like a man with a fine-tuned sense of risk.

For what it’s worth, United Kingdom defense secretary Ben Wallace recently declared that Putin is “highly unlikely” to use nuclear weapons, but that he is acting irrationally.

Looking back at NR’s writing after the first month of the war, our John Hillen was prescient, saying that, as much as we hated facing down a strong Putin, a weak Putin could be even more dangerous: “An embittered, embattled Putin in a declining nuclear state is a different actor from Putin the expansionist regional leader.”

*Yes, I know, the last time I wrote something like that, a few months later, someone came along and actually sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.

ADDENDA: Wondering why you haven’t seen the illustrious Mary Katharine Ham on CNN lately? She was wondering that, too. You’ll want to read the whole thing.

You know, now that I think about it, “Armageddon is coming” probably isn’t a great message for Democrats in the midterm elections.

And here’s one of my favorite reader comments in a while, because it is a useful reminder that very few people ever know who you are and what you’ve done in the past:

I have always gotten the impression, Mr. Geraghty, that you’ve been a little too compliant and comfortable with our government’s reaction to Covid. I’m not as comfortable as you with Scott Gottlieb either. He’s too cozy with the bureaucracy, don’t you think?

Seriously, Jim. Evidence has been steadily mounting that it most certainly came to us from a lab leak. Entertaining the other option is just being way too open-minded.

Yup, that’s me! Mr. Insufficiently-Curious-about-the-Lab-Leak-Theory, all the way back to April 3, 2020!

On the menu today: Democrats are “seething” about the decision by OPEC+ to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day, but they wouldn’t be in this mess if they had embraced policies designed to expand U.S. oil production and refinery capacity. (Few people noticed, but the oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases had to be sent to Asia and Europe to be turned into usable gasoline.) Meanwhile, Joe Biden keeps getting sand kicked in his face by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and there’s more evidence suggesting that New Hampshire Republicans have thrown away about as winnable a U.S. Senate race as you’re going to find.

A Failure to Insulate from OPEC+

Politico reports that Democrats are “seething” about the decision by OPEC+ to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day.

Well, fellas, if you don’t want OPEC+ to be in a position where it can influence U.S. gasoline prices a month before the election, you need policies that minimize the U.S. market’s dependence upon the global oil market. This means maximizing U.S. oil production and expanding U.S. refinery capacity.

It would be a mild exaggeration to declare that the Biden administration has completely stopped issuing leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters, but only a mild one. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, “President Biden’s Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20, his first 19 months in office, the analysis found. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term.” It’s not a complete halt, but it’s very close to one. This means that the U.S. is almost entirely dependent upon oil production from private lands.

The good news is that there’s still a lot of oil beneath private lands. As of July, the U.S. was producing 11.8 million barrels per day, an increase from the 11.1 million barrels per day produced in January 2021, the month President Biden took office. But before the pandemic hit in early 2020, the U.S. was producing 12.8 million barrels per day, and it even hit 13 million barrels per day in November 2019. We have the proven ability to produce about 1.2 million more barrels per day than we are, if we want to do so and our public policies encourage it. But right now, they do not.

The Biden administration keeps insisting that it’s doing everything it can to bring gas prices down, including releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — which is now at its lowest level in 40 years. But what’s in the SPR is oil, not gasoline, and oil must still be refined. You can’t just pump the stuff out of the ground and put it in your car.

U.S. refineries are running at full capacity, or just short of full capacity. This is why oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases got sent to Europe and Asia, because they had the room and equipment to turn it into actual usable fuel. The U.S. currently has no more spare ability to turn the oil from the reserve into stuff that will actually make your car move; yelling at the oil companies isn’t going to change what is fundamentally an engineering problem.

This lack of capacity is exacerbated by two policy choices. First, the U.S. almost never builds new oil refineries on its own soil anymore. According to the U.S. Energy Information Association, the newest refinery in the United States is the Targa Resources Corporation’s site in Channelview, Texas, which began operating in 2019 and processes 35,000 barrels per day. Before that, the newest refinery with significant downstream unit capacity was Marathon’s facility in Garyville, La. That facility came online in 1977.

The second problem is that, in addition to not creating new capacities, old ones are being taken offline and turned into biofuel-processing plants — again, in response to the contention of Democratic policymakers that fossil fuels are obsolete and “alternative fuels” are the way of the future.

I’ve been beating the drum on this issue all year, but no one in the administration wants to listen. We’re getting back to pre-pandemic levels of demand, while our refineries are pumping out about a million fewer gallons of fuel per day than they did before the pandemic. And it’s going to get worse. Chemical maker Lyondell Basell Industries announced in April that the company will permanently close its Houston crude-oil refinery by the end of 2023. That plant refines about 263,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel per day.

The cost of refining isn’t the biggest factor in the prices at your local gas station, but it’s a chunk of the cost. As of August, the cost of crude was 57 percent of the cost of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline, and the cost of refining it was 15 percent. Another 15 percent went to distribution and marketing, and 13 percent of the cost, on average, went to taxes. For diesel, 45 percent is the cost of crude, 26 percent is the cost of refining, 17 percent is distribution and marketing, and 12 percent goes to taxes.

Biden has declared that the profit margins of oil refiners are “not acceptable.” But refinery capacity is subject to supply and demand, just like everything else. When there is great demand for refinery capacity but limited supply, prices go up. If we ever increased the number of refineries in this country, the cost of turning oil into unleaded gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel would come down.

In other good news, the U.S. has an estimated 38.2 billion barrels of proven reserves, meaning that if we never imported another drop, we could operate for 5.2 years at our current level of demand. It’s a bit tougher to get a sense of what our “normal” gasoline-demand level is since the pandemic, but the range of consumption in 2022 has been lower than the range of consumption from 2015 to 2019.

This is where Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm would wag her finger and assert that it’s your own fault for not buying an electric vehicle. “People can buy electric vehicles and don’t have to ever worry about going to fill it up at the gas pump!” she declared in March. Currently, it’s estimated that around one percent of the 250 million cars, SUVs, and light-duty trucks on U.S. roads are electric.

The U.S. could be minimally impacted by the decisions of OPEC+ if we wanted to be. Back in 2018, you saw headlines such as, “How The Fracking Revolution Broke OPEC’s Hold On Oil Prices.” We choose to be dependent upon the goodwill of oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia because genuine energy independence would require us to enact policies that environmentalists don’t like.

Biden the Pushover

Back in April, Phil Klein observed that President Biden still talks like a senator — that is, Biden isn’t careful about what he says because his formidable political experience was as a senator, a position in which off-the-cuff statements just didn’t matter as much.

Despite being a well-known elected official for decades, Biden didn’t have a ton of responsibility. He was one of 100 senators and was rarely the deciding vote.

As vice president, Biden was undoubtedly an important voice in the room, but no one ever doubted that President Barack Obama had the final call. Biden infamously argued against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Obama was apparently unimpressed with Biden’s decision-making, warning Democrats behind the scenes as they considered their options in the 2020 cycle, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** this up.”

The official narrative was that the two men loved each other like brothers, but the truth was always more complicated. There’s good reason to think that Obama saw Biden as a somewhat ridiculous but lovable mascot, a necessary concession to those who would be uncomfortable with the young African-American president and who needed to see a white, so-called elder statesman by his side. Obama could have cleared the field for his vice president in either the 2016 or the 2020 cycle, if he’d felt that was the best course of action for his party and the country. He clearly chose not to do that.

Now nearly 80, Biden is in the big chair and making the decisions himself. Apparently, he is notoriously indecisive, a character trait that very few people in the mainstream media felt was worth mentioning during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle. Hey, it’s not like the president of the United States has to make a lot of decisions, right?

We don’t know what happened behind the scenes in Saudi Arabia when President Biden met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He said he confronted the prince about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi; the Saudi foreign minister said he did not. I think it is safe to assume that MBS was neither intimidated nor impressed with what he saw during his in-person meeting with Biden.

Remember, after the fist bump, even Stephen Colbert started joking that Biden looked like a weak, hapless old man out there.

Biden left Saudi Arabia with a pocketful of Saudi promises, almost none of which were kept. (As CNBC characterized it, “Weeks later, however, OPEC+ raised oil output by a minuscule 100,000 barrels per day in what was widely interpreted as an insult to Biden.”) And then yesterday brought the metaphorical middle finger: an OPEC+ cut in oil production a month before the midterm elections. MBS has absolutely no fear of crossing Biden.

So . . . what does Vladimir Putin see?

ADDENDUM: Probably the most interesting poll released yesterday was St. Anselm College’s survey of New Hampshire, which showed incumbent Democratic senator Maggie Hassan ahead of Republican challenger Don Bolduc, 49 percent to 43 percent. That doesn’t point to a Bolduc victory, and it’s a genuine disappointment, considering how Hassan won in 2016 by just five one-hundreths of one percentage point — or a bit more than a thousand votes. In this environment, Hassan should have been toast. Just 48 percent of respondents in the St. Anselm poll said they felt favorably toward her, just 44 percent said they felt favorably toward President Biden, 69 percent of respondents said they thought the country was on the wrong track, and the single biggest issue on respondents’ minds was the economy.

And even with all of that, Bolduc is six points behind. New Hampshire Republicans just had to nominate the Trumpiest guy in the field, didn’t they? Great call, guys, great call. Heck of a job.

On the menu today: A reminder about all of the excellent midterm-election coverage you’re missing if you’re not subscribing to NRPlus; CNN reports that the White House is “panicking” about the price of gasoline and potential price hikes in the near future; Florida governor Ron DeSantis gets some red-hot new polling numbers; and why authors don’t mind if the feedback on their work isn’t always 100 percent positive.

First, Why You Need NR Plus . . .

Yes, this ties into this week’s subscription drive, where NRPlus is 60 percent off the regular price. . . .

Do you ever get the feeling that some news organizations are trying to serve you more red meat than you need?

By “red meat,” I mean news and analysis that is what you want to hear, that generates a brief dopamine rush of unexpectedly good news for your side or unexpectedly bad news for the other side, and that may be just speculative or wish-casting.

For example, a few days ago the New York Post offered what seemed like a huge scoop: “Ex-Clinton adviser: Hillary setting up 2024 presidential bid with ‘open borders’ critique of Biden.” Yikes! Hillary Clinton challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination? That would be wild, the most significant primary challenge to a sitting president since Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

And then you read in the article: “veteran political consultant Dick Morris said in a new interview.” Oh.

Now, I love the New York Post. It is everything that a big, brassy New York City tabloid should be. But come on, guys. Morris hasn’t been tied in with the Clintons since 1996 and has a notorious record of making outlandish predictions that don’t pan out. He can be fun to listen to, but you don’t bet the mortgage payment on his tips.

News organizations want headlines to be eye-catching and dramatic, but they shouldn’t be misleading. And I’ll bet you’ve encountered more than your share of bait-and-switch headlines over the years. Think of the sheer number of times The Hill would write a headline like, “Conservative columnist: I want Democrats to take over Congress” and then you’d see that the “conservative columnist” was Max Boot, who has been denouncing Donald Trump and any Republicans who supported him since the 2016 general election.

I’d like to think that at National Review, we give you just the right amount of red meat. Sometimes Democrats are just the worst and deserve every lambasting they get. Sometimes, a Democratic candidate, held aloft by a far-too-credulous and enthusiastic press corps, comes crashing down to earth, and you and I can gleefully declare that we told them so. But sometimes, things don’t look so hot for a Republican candidate, and you deserve to know how the campaign is progressing, good or bad.

You see this just-right dynamic in our coverage of the ongoing midterm cycle, which features Ryan Mills reporting from Georgia, Luther Ray Abel reporting from Wisconsin, John J. Miller reporting from Michigan and from Nevada, and Nate Hochman reporting from Texas while keeping a close eye on his home state of Oregon.

We’ve tackled the big issues, with Yuval Levin laying out how Republicans need a concrete agenda for their potential congressional majoritiesl; John McCormack showing what a continued Democratic majority would do in office; Ramesh Ponnuru discussing how Republicans should handle the abortion issue moving forward; Rich Lowry writing on the legitimacy and importance of Republicans’ campaigning on the issue of crime; and Dan McLaughlin talking to pollster Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar about what the surveys may be missing this year. Also, McCormack and Brittany Bernstein launched a new newsletter focused entirely on the midterm elections entitled, The Horse Race.

If you’re not an NRPlus subscriber, you’ve probably missed out on a lot of this. Some of this stuff has to stay behind the paywall. The Morning Jolt will always be free — at least, as long as I have any say in the matter — but if you’re not reading my colleagues, you’re missing out on a lot, and pound-for-pound, the best coverage of the midterms, you’ll find anywhere. So I hope you’re a subscriber, and if you aren’t, this is just the right time to start: We’re offering 60 percent off the regular price right now.

CNN: ‘Panic’ at the White House over Rising Oil Prices

It’s now almost cliché that the Democrats want the 2022 midterms to be about abortion, January 6, and Donald Trump, while Republicans want voters to focus upon inflation (particularly high grocery prices and energy prices), the broader economy, illegal immigration and the border, crime, and education (particularly in the context of controversial curriculum choices and parents’ rights).

On the economy, the president’s go-to move is to point to the low unemployment rate, insist that the economy is growing — the U.S. GDP numbers indicate otherwise — and argue that inflation “for the last several months, it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even.” (Never mind that we’re enduring the highest inflation rates we’ve seen in four decades.)

On Monday, this newsletter pointed out that the issue of high gasoline prices had either returned or never really gone away. Yesterday, CNN reported that the Biden administration is “panicking” — their reporter’s words, not mine! Notice the link to the transcript! — that OPEC is about to enact a production cut that will send the price of oil soaring even further:

JAKE TAPPER: Election Day just five weeks away, the Biden administration working overtime to keep gas prices from skyrocketing with a new plan to try to stop Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries from cutting oil production.

CNN’s Alex Marquardt and Matt Egan joining us.

Alex, you are reporting that White House officials are, quote, taking the gloves off. That is my least favorite metaphor from White Houses. But anyway, according to one U.S. official, to stop this from happening. So, tell us what you’re hearing what they’re planning.

ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, that same U.S. official said that the White House, in fact, it’s panicking, that this is something that they desperately do not want to happen. Cutting oil production means higher oil prices, means higher gas prices. That, of course, is something that the Biden administration does not what happening right now.

So, tomorrow, there’s a meeting of the oil producing countries, this cartel known as OPEC, is ostensibly lead by Saudi Arabia. Russia is also a member.

The U.S. is not a member. What we have learned, myself and our colleagues, Natasha Bertrand and Phil Mattingly, is that there is this furious last-ditch, wide scale effort to lobby the OPEC plus oil-producing countries not to cut oil production, that senior members of the Biden administration are reaching out to members of the cartel, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The cartel could cut as much as one million dollars a day in production, that would be the biggest cut since the beginning of the pandemic. [Emphasis added.]

CNN reporter Matt Egan said that if OPEC went ahead with the production cut, it could increase the price of oil by between $13 to $20 per barrel. It was late August when publications such as The New Republic, Politico, and Bloomberg contended that high gas prices were no longer a serious issue in the midterm elections.

In other economic news, ignoring the national debt is now a thoroughly bipartisan pastime, but ignoring a problem does not make it go away. This morning the New York Times notes that not only has the U.S. national debt surpassed $31 trillion, but that higher interest rates mean it will increase faster, even if the government were to alter its runaway spending habits:

Higher rates could add an additional $1 trillion to what the federal government spends on interest payments this decade, according to Peterson Foundation estimates. That is on top of the record $8.1 trillion in debt costs that the Congressional Budget Office projected in May. Expenditures on interest could exceed what the United States spends on national defense by 2029, if interest rates on public debt rise to be just one percentage point higher than what the C.B.O. estimated over the next few years. . . .

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Mr. Biden’s policies have added nearly $5 trillion to deficits since he took office. That projection includes Mr. Biden’s signature $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, a variety of new congressionally approved spending initiatives and a student-loan debt forgiveness plan that is expected to cost taxpayers nearly $400 billion over 30 years.

Remember, it isn’t just that inflation is greatly exacerbated by the federal government’s throwing more and more money into the economy, faster than the economy can produce goods; it’s that the federal government is borrowing almost all of this money and promising that our children will pay it back.

We will learn the unemployment numbers for September on Friday. Perhaps more significantly, we will get our last pre-Election Day update on the inflation rate and consumer price index on October 13. The state unemployment numbers are released October 21. And this month’s jobs numbers will be released November 4, four days before Election Day. (Keep in mind that by then, a lot of Americans will likely have already voted early.)

The Margin Matters in Florida

Very few serious political observers think Democrat Charlie Crist has a shot at winning the Florida governor’s race this year. The real question is whether incumbent Republican governor Ron DeSantis wins by a big margin or a small margin, and whether that generates a lot of momentum for an expected 2024 presidential bid or not much momentum at all. Florida has turned red over the past 20 years, but often the Republican margin of victory in key statewide races is pretty small. Donald Trump won by one percentage point in 2016, and by three points in 2020. DeSantis won by four-tenths of a point in 2018. Rick Scott won his 2010 gubernatorial race by 1.1 points, and was reelected in 2014 by one point. He won his Senate bid in 2018 by about one-tenth of a point.

Mason-Dixon, a pretty darn reliable pollster, completed a survey in the state just as Hurricane Ian was making landfall: It had DeSantis leading Crist, 52 percent to 41 percent.

If DeSantis blows Crist out of the water, that will supercharge the “DeSantis 2024” talk. (And I suspect some Florida Democrats will wonder if Nikki Fried would have performed that much worse than Crist.)

ADDENDUM: It’s been a while since I’ve nagged you about Gathering Five Storms. Believe it or not, I love reader reviews that are not entirely positive — although I obviously prefer if people enjoy the novel! Book-writing is a lonely process. You can try to get feedback from friends and test readers, but you never really know how the audience as a whole is going to react until the book is in people’s hands. Not every idea works, not every joke lands, and sometimes that characterization comes across different than intended. Every response provides important lessons for the next effort.

Susan writes:

I read the 3-book series — well worth the money and time. But do your reading in chunks to avoid information overload at times.

My mostly thumbs up judgments:

1. Good enough ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ plot with GREAT embedded recaps of history tied to today’s political polarization — stuff we forgot or never followed deeply the last 2+ decades. (Cf, The Cypriot airport/abandoned plane in the early book. In this book — Hellfire missile precision kill description — THAT’S what it does? . . . ewww.)

2. Clever humor of 2 or 3 kinds, touch-and-go verbal play, clever cultural allusions, and plot-related or irony fun.
   3. Okay character depiction within a type-cast-clique role framework, my favorite being Alec. I’m still laughing about Alec’s diverting the Mexican thug clobbering him in the jungle via quick-thinking: “Has she paid you yet?” And yes, a married couple as sexy skilled players=A+. Pregnancy emotion stereotyping — meh.

3. C-minus level sentence too-hasty editing in Kindle version. A minor but intrusive annoyance. (ex: If you change A to Some or The, cut the A!)

4. Love it that Geraghty doesn’t toy with delaying conclusions. We get plenty reader clues to next steps, but the unfolding is the joy. The last pages signal a next book’s likely direction and confirm what most readers would have intuited.

An unidentified Amazon customer with a verified purchase writes:

Bottom line: if you liked Between Two Scorpions and Hunting Four Horsemen you will LOVE this book. If this is your first read of Jim Geraghty, you’ll want to go back and get the aforementioned first two as well. Intrigue, intensity, emotional appeal, national security worries, and big moral questions, along with even better snark to go with the dangerous action- you’ll be glad you picked this book to read!! Do yourself a favor and get it NOW!

And Leonard writes, “Excellent thriller. I could not put it down near the end. All plot lines were wrapped up. I am looking forward to the next book.”

As always, and in all forms, thanks for reading.

On the menu today: Maybe Georgia’s GOP Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, could survive a former girlfriend alleging that he paid for her abortion in 2009. We’ve seen October surprise scandals and accusations plenty of times before. But the abortion accusation — coupled with the candidate’s son, Christian Walker, accusing his father of running around with other women, threatening to kill members of his family, and being violent — will be exceptionally hard to overcome. This, unfortunately, is the kind of risk a party accepts when it chooses to nominate an unvetted first-time candidate to run for a key U.S. Senate seat. Meanwhile, there is good news for the GOP elsewhere, and there are tough questions to be answered about U.S. efforts to deter Russian nuclear aggression.

A Reminder to Vet Your Candidates

These are the sorts of risks you encounter when you nominate Senate candidates who have never run for office before. Herschel Walker — like his fellow GOP Senate candidates Mehmet Oz, J. D. Vance, Blake Masters, and the not-so-Trumpy Joe O’Dea as well as GOP gubernatorial nominees Kari Lake (Arizona), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Arkansas), and Tudor Dixon (Michigan) — has never run for any office before.

Rookie candidates haven’t really had their backgrounds vetted the way experienced candidates have. And sometimes, right around this time of year, that lack of vetting becomes consequential. The Atlanta Journal Constitution published a piece this morning, saying:

But the one-two punch on Monday of a Daily Beast story that accused Walker of paying for his then-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009 coupled with his adult son’s stunning attacks on his father’s candidacy may pose the greatest threat yet to the Republican’s bid.

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson said the fallout is “probably a KO” for Walker’s midterm chances. Nicole Rodden, a former Republican House contender, blamed party leaders for backing a candidate who has “cost the GOP the US Senate for a second time.”

Walker reacted by condemning the Daily Beast report as a “flat-out lie” and said on Fox News he “never asked anyone to get an abortion, I never paid for an abortion.” His attorney has pledged to file a defamation lawsuit against the publication, which stands by the story.

The Republican and his allies had a more muted response toward his son Christian Walker’s claims that his father threatened to kill his family members and entered the race despite opposition from “every single one” of his relatives.

“I LOVE my son no matter what,” Walker tweeted.

Christian Walker tweeted last night:

I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us. You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence. Don’t care about someone who has a bad past and takes accountability. But how DARE YOU LIE and act as though you’re some ‘moral, Christian, upright man.’ You’ve lived a life of DESTROYING other peoples lives. How dare you.

The Daily Beast says that Walker’s ex-girlfriend “supported these claims with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a ‘get well’ card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt that included an image of a signed $700 personal check from Walker.”

Walker appeared on Sean Hannity’s program last night; when asked if he knew the woman, Walker responded, “No idea, but it is a flat-out lie” and then he mentioned his campaign website. When Hannity asked if he’d sent the woman a $700 check and a get-well card, Walker responded, “I haven’t seen it, but you know, I can tell you, I sent out so many get well — sent so much anything, but I can tell you right now, I never asked anyone to get an abortion, I never paid for an abortion. That’s a lie.”

Hannity pressed further. “What about the $700 check? Is there anyone you can remember sending that much money to?”

Walker responded, “Well, I send money to a lot of people. And that’s what’s so funny. And let’s go back to my part, you know, I do scholarships for kids, I give money to people all the time, because I’m always helping people, because I believe in being generous. God has blessed me, and I want to bless others. I got into this race because I’m a Christian, I love the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Walker didn’t have much margin for error before these reports. After enjoying a small-but-consistent lead in late August and early September, the last three polls — Marist, CBS News, and Fox News — had Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock ahead by a few points. At first glance, the CBS News poll was the most ominous, as it put Warnock at 51 percent, just above the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. But it appears that that poll did not list Libertarian Chase Oliver as an option; it did list “someone else,” and not a single registered-voter respondent said “someone else,” which seems a little surprising.

But the point is, Walker had a decent shot at advancing to a high-stakes runoff with Warnock before these stories broke, and now it’s anyone’s guess.

A lot of Georgia Republicans will stick with Walker, as well as a lot of pro-lifers. They’ll conclude that a man who pledges to be a pro-life senator with a problematic past is a better option than a pastor who supports taxpayer-funded abortion. Lots of people hunger for a redemption story, and a more articulate candidate could lay out the details of the past encounter in a sympathetic way. (A better candidate would have leaked the details of a past scandal to a more friendly news institution, talked about the hard lessons and what he learned, how he became a better person, and then after a few days declare it old news.) Back in 1999, Donald Trump said in an interview, “I am very pro-choice.” He ran as a pro-lifer in 2016, and pro-lifers believed him.

Speaking of Donald Trump, a lot of Trump critics — and hoo-boy, has our frothing-at-the-mouth nutjob of a former president given his critics a ton of legitimate ammunition lately — will blame Trump for the Georgia Republican primary electorate nominating Walker. But as I noted back in April, Walker was, by far, the best-known and heretofore best-liked candidate in that state’s GOP Senate primary field. The other GOP Senate candidates were state agriculture commissioner Gary Black, former state representative Josh Clark, U.S. Air Force captain and entrepreneur Kelvin King, and former U.S. Navy SEAL and director of Intelligence Programs on the National Security Council Latham Saddler — all relative unknowns, and all drastically underfunded compared to Walker.

In the primary, Black came closest, with 13.3 percent to Walker’s 68.1 percent. Trump’s endorsement no doubt helped Walker, but he was a heavy favorite with or without Trump’s support. When you are arguably the greatest college-football player of all time, lead the University of Georgia Bulldogs to the national championship in 1980, and win the Heisman Trophy in 1982, a lot of Georgians will remain eternally grateful.

The Walker news will leave a lot of Republicans depressed, and it should leave them depressed. In this kind of political environment, with Biden’s approval rating being lousy in just about all of the key states, a bunch of nice, boring, generic Republicans would likely be enjoying solid leads over Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, and maybe even John Fetterman. All Republicans needed to do to win big this midterm cycle was to be normal. Apparently, that was too much to ask.

Noam Blum asks a question that every Republican should contemplate: “If Trump’s only kingmaker skill is crowning primary winners who lose general elections, how much longer will Republicans continue to pretend that he’s vital to their party?”

Meanwhile, in the Rest of the Country . . .

The news is not all bad for the GOP, however. Very quietly, Republican gubernatorial candidates are starting to enjoy small-but-consistent polling leads in Wisconsin and Nevada. The fact that you’re not hearing anything about the Florida state government’s response to Hurricane Ian is a sign that the media can’t find any angle from which to attack Ron DeSantis. The incumbent Republican is on pace to win reelection over Charlie Crist by a very healthy margin by Florida , enjoying a high-single-digit lead over Crist.

Similarly quietly, Adam Laxalt might now be a slight favorite over incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada’s Senate race. J. D. Vance still looks like the safer bet in Ohio’s Senate race, as does Ted Budd in North Carolina’s Senate race. You don’t hear Democrats talking up the chances of Mandela Barnes against Ron Johnson in Wisconsin’s Senate race so much anymore.

You know what outcome looks pretty likely on the Senate map if you project Warnock winning reelection?

Another two years of a 50-50 Senate.

I Liked It Better When the ‘Nuclear Option’ Meant Ditching the Filibuster

If, God forbid, Russia uses a nuclear weapon on Ukraine in the coming weeks or months, we will look back at the current moment and ask if we did enough to deter that awful outcome. I feel like we’re sleepwalking into another major-league crisis. Michael Brendan Dougherty and I see the world of foreign policy quite differently, but I think he accurately diagnosed the dynamic currently at work:

There is a pattern in the interplay between Washington and Moscow when it comes to the war in Ukraine. Washington draws a firm-ish line in the sand, hoping to deter Moscow. Moscow notices the hedging, and presses forward. Washington, suddenly now worried about what new precedents are being set by Russian action, scrambles to invest more in the conflict, and then draws another firm-ish line, effectively daring Moscow to cross it.

It’s a game of escalation by miscalculation.

Michael notes that Biden believes that a Russian nuclear strike can be deterred by threats of conventional-force strikes from NATO. This is a major change from past U.S. thinking, which believed that the potential threat of a U.S. nuclear counter-strike was necessary to deter the opponent’s first strike.

No one in their right mind wants to start a nuclear war, and few Americans want to get into a shooting war with Russia. But one of the ways you can deter another nation’s aggression is by threatening to escalate the stakes of the conflict to a level their leaders aren’t willing to lose.

So while we don’t want to threaten to use nuclear weapons . . . but getting Russia to believe we might use nuclear weapons may be one of our best tools to deter Russia from using a nuclear weapon or crossing other red lines (using chemical weapons, etc.). But if the Russians sense we’re bluffing, they may well call our bluff.

Our policy is a contradiction. From the beginning, Biden has been driven by two contrary impulses: the desire to punish Russia for its territorial and military aggression, and the desire to stay out of direct conflict and wishing the war had never started in the first place. Those two desires run in opposite directions.

As Michael concludes:

Is Biden willing to impose the costs and risks that this project entails on Americans? The question demands an answer, because we’re rapidly approaching a point where he may no longer be able to conduct this war as if it were a small conflict with a power incapable of reaching us.

ADDENDUM: Unfortunately, Charlie Cooke really understands the dynamics of the media — including the dynamics here at NR.

On the menu today: You don’t hear as much now about gas prices as you did during the record highs in June, but that doesn’t mean that prices at the pump are anything close to normal. That long stretch of declines from the June high ended in late September, and gas prices are actually up about eleven cents a gallon in the past week or so. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest point in nearly four decades; California refineries are shutting down; Gavin Newsom says that there’s no explanation for price hikes; and OPEC, the Russians, and the Saudis are laughing all the way to the bank. Also remember that in Joe Biden’s mind, his policies on energy are a success story.

Gas Prices Return as an Issue

Late last week, I flew into Los Angeles for the National Review Institute’s annual Buckley Prize Dinner, and in addition to spying Nakatomi Plaza in the distance, I saw a gas station selling regular gasoline at — still! — more than seven dollars a gallon. Perhaps this was one of those high-priced stations that aims for travelers who are about to return their rental cars; the other gas stations we passed were close to seven dollars a gallon but not quite over it. This morning, according to the American Automobile Association, the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in Los Angeles is $6.46.

Yes, Los Angeles gas is always more expensive than the state average of $6.38 per gallon, and California gas is always more expensive than the national average of $3.79. (One year ago, the national average was $3.19; last November, at an event in Baltimore, President Biden exclaimed, “Did you ever think you’d be paying this much for a gallon of gas? In some parts of California, they’re paying $4.50 a gallon!”)

But none of those prices are cheap by historical standards. Late last week, the AAA warned that:

According to new data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), gas demand increased nationally from 8.32 million barrels per day to 8.83 million barrels per day last week, and total domestic gasoline stocks decreased by 2.4 million [barrels] to 212.2 million barrels. Higher gasoline demand amid tight supply and fluctuating oil prices have increased the national average. If demand remains robust as supply tightens, drivers should brace for rising pump prices through the weekend.

The average price for a gallon of regular gas remains above $4.10 in Illinois, Michigan, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, California, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii.

As I noted in late August, a lot of Democrats and Democrat-aligned voices treated declining gas prices as a sign that the issue had been resolved, but a decline from the all-time high is not the same as a price that will get customers to stop thinking about how high gas prices are. Once again, President Biden has taken a victory lap far too early.

And while gas prices in California have always been higher than the rest of the country, they’re now pulling away from the national average. One reason is that there are four major refineries offline in California, with three having scheduled maintenance and a fourth having “power problems.” And because California has the strictest and most complicated gasoline formula for environmental purposes, the state can’t easily import gasoline from other states. When the state combines low supply and high demand, once again, prices skyrocket.

This morning, the editors of the Wall Street Journal note that California’s woes are largely self-inflicted:

California gas prices have long been higher than the national average owing to hefty fuel taxes and climate regulations, but the difference now is the largest in at least two decades. Taxes add about 66 cents to the price of a gallon, about twice as much on average as other states. California’s cap-and-trade program and low-carbon fuel standard add roughly another 46 cents a gallon.

These climate regulations are causing refineries to shut down or convert to producing biofuels that are more profitable because of rich government subsidies. California lost 12% of refining capacity between 2017 and 2021 and is set to lose another 8% by the end of next year. Yet refineries outside of the state can’t produce its supposedly greener fuel blend.

If you think high gas prices in California don’t affect you because you don’t live there, think again. Remember, more than 40 percent of the total containerized cargo entering the U.S. arrives through California ports, and nearly 30 percent of the nation’s exports flow through those ports. The current cost of diesel in California is $6.32 per gallon, two dollars higher than this time last year. The state began a one-year suspension of taxes on diesel fuel on Saturday, but Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing a new “windfall tax” on oil companies. He says the oil companies have “no explanation” for the high gas prices; I guess he thinks crude oil just magically turns into gasoline that can run a car’s engine.

“We’re not going to stand by while greedy oil companies fleece Californians,” Newsom said, ignoring the fact that his state has the second-highest gas tax in the country.

This means that everything you buy that comes through one of California’s ports is more expensive because of the higher costs to the trucks bringing those goods to the rest of the country. California’s refineries are also switching over to renewable diesel — which reduces their output:

In terms of production issues, many refineries have pivoted to creating renewable diesel, which [GasBuddy spokesperson Patrick] De Haan says produces less product.

“Generally, renewable diesel yields about a third of what a traditional unit would produce,” said De Haan.

When it comes to fighting high gas prices, the Biden administration is a one-trick pony: It just keeps releasing more from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to be saved for national-security emergencies, not political emergencies.

Last week in National Review, Wyoming senator John Barrasso laid out how the administration was effectively cleaning out the national savings account instead of getting a job and earning more money:

In March of this year, Biden issued two emergency orders authorizing the release of a combined 190 million barrels of oil through October, about 155 million barrels of which have been released to date, with the rest expected to be released before December.

Add 70 million barrels of exchanges and statutorily required sales, and SPR oil stocks will plunge from 620 million barrels at the start of this fiscal year to just 360 million. That will leave the inventory at its lowest level since 1983, adequate for just about 22 days of supply and down from a high of more than 50 days of supply. Despite this, energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has not ruled out further SPR sales.

Alexander Zemek lays out how unprecedented these moves are: “Less than two years into his presidency, President Biden has released more oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve than all previous presidents combined. To date, Mr. Biden has allowed over 200 million barrels to be withdrawn — more than 30 percent of the total reserve he inherited, intended to be used in case of urgent need.”

And as you’ve likely noticed when you fill up your tank, the effect of those releases is modest in the context of the overall price hike since last year:

In July, four months after opening the SPR spigots and tens of millions of barrels sold into the economy later, the Treasury Department estimated that the decision, “lowered the price of gasoline by 17 cents to 42 cents per gallon, with an alternate approach suggesting a point estimate of 38 cents per gallon.”

That estimate, given the average retail price for a gallon of gas was about $4.49 in the second quarter of 2022, according to Statista, indicates the SPR release only slightly lessened the price consumers paid.

“The impact of the SPR on gasoline prices tends to be modest,” Lutz Kilian, senior economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told McClatchy News. “The SPR is not well suited for managing global oil price risks. That would take a much bigger reserve. [It is] at its best in dealing with short-run supply disruptions such those caused by hurricanes or shipping accidents.”

Finally, you may recall Biden traveling to Saudi Arabia in July and fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — a major humiliation considering how the president had pledged to make Saudi Arabia “a pariah” back when he was running for president. He went back on this pledge in hopes of getting the Saudis to produce more oil. Now that it’s October, however, we can conclude that the Saudis took Biden to the cleaners:

The U.S. has asked OPEC+ to pump more oil to help bring down the price of gasoline. OPEC+ accelerated some production cuts over the summer ahead of President Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia and made a small increase in August but has since worked to reverse those moves.

In the past months, the U.S. has responded to rising oil prices by tapping into its strategic stockpiles. Christyan Malek, global head of energy strategy at JP Morgan, said Saudi Arabia’s support for a cut to production could be a response to lower gas prices for U.S. consumers, which he partly tied to a U.S. decision to release stockpiled oil. . . .

The Saudis have pursued a more aggressive oil policy this year as oil prices rose during the Ukraine war. Higher oil prices have helped Saudi Arabia become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies this year and infused with cash an ambitious economic overhaul launched by the kingdom’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Mohammed bin Salman got his fist-bump, Biden got a bunch of vague promises that were eventually broken, Gavin Newsom got to denounce oil companies as “greed,” and you got gas at $3.79 per gallon in October. Everybody won except you.

ADDENDUM: Right now, FiveThirtyEight puts Indiana’s incumbent GOP senator Todd Young’s chances of reelection this November at 97 out of 100. But this morning, a new poll puts Young barely ahead of his Democratic challenger, Tom McDermott, 39 percent to 37 percent. File this one away, because either this race is going to be closer than anyone expected, or this is another poll with an awful sense of who’s going to show up in November. Back in 2016, Young beat Evan Bayh, 52 percent to 42 percent.

On the menu today: Politico recognizes what some of us have been saying for a long time — Democratic gubernatorial candidates Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams are not only failing to live up to the enormous hype that has been steadily building around them since 2018, but the hype probably hurt them in their efforts to win conservative-leaning states such as Texas and Georgia. The glossy magazines of the media ecosystem would love nothing more than to discover the next big Democratic rising star, but what thrills the editorial staffs of Vogue and Vanity Fair is not what appeals to the electorate as a whole — never mind red states. Sooner or later, Democratic rising stars must decide whether they want to be actual governors or senators, or whether they’re happier being celebrities. The thing is: The life of a political celebrity is pretty sweet. Meanwhile, Republicans lay out their policy agenda . . . or at least, the broad contours of one.

Magazines Don’t Make Governors

Rarely have I appreciated paragraphs in Politico as much as these, in a piece by Calder McHugh looking at how Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams have largely flopped this cycle:

Their anointment as the future of the Democratic Party — young, dynamic and erudite — led to glossy magazine profiles and soft press coverage that may have burnished their national profiles, but did little to advance their prospects among voters who weren’t already inclined to support them.

O’Rourke announced his candidacy for president in 2019 with an Annie Leibowitz-shot Vanity Fair cover. Abrams was the subject of a Vogue profile that asked whether she can ‘Save American Democracy.’ A Washington Post piece styled her like a superhero, with a cape, and asked whether she’d be vice president despite never holding elected office above the Georgia House of Representatives.

Insert all the correct-answer sound effects from game shows here. What it takes to wow the editors of Vanity Fair and Vogue is not what it takes to win a majority of voters in Texas or Georgia or a lot of other states. Sooner or later, a southern Democratic Party rising star faces a time for choosing* where he must decide which group to prioritize.

If you’re a Democrat who wants to win a statewide race in a red southern state, you would be wise to study the playbook of Louisiana governor Jon Bel Edwards. Edwards is (relatively) pro-life and (relatively) pro-gun. By not antagonizing socially conservative Louisianans on those two key issues, Edwards earned himself a lot of leeway to enact the progressive policies he wants elsewhere. Vogue, Vanity Fair, and most national, left-leaning publications are unlikely to ever run a glossy, glowing profile of Edwards.

But you know what Edwards gets instead? He gets to run the executive branch of the Louisiana state government from the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge. It’s a nice consolation prize for never quickening the pulse of Anna Wintour.

Besides the big mainstream-news institutions — the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Time magazine, etc. — there’s an adjacent series of cultural publications: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, the New Yorker, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, and a few others.

Those publications want Democratic heroes to celebrate. They’d like to be David Maraniss, writing profile pieces about the then-little-known Bill Clinton in 1992, or William Finnegan, writing a New Yorker profile of a relatively unknown state senator back in 2004, with the prescient quote, “In Republican circles, we’ve always feared that Barack would become a rock star of American politics.” The subtext to a lot of the glossy covers and lengthy profiles featuring these Democratic Party figures is, “We’ve found him! This is it! This is the guy! This is the one you’ve been waiting for!”

These cultural publications are staffed by people who live in New York, who largely went to good schools, and who are almost always way further to the left than the average American. Their interest in actual policy varies a lot, and they often have a wildly unrealistic sense of how legislation actually gets passed; they may not have taken many political-science courses, but they’ve watched a lot of episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Perhaps most importantly, their sense of what is good, intriguing, and worthy of being saluted is often out of whack compared to the tastes of the overall American electorate. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has misled a lot of candidates over the years.) They are the kinds of people who can get genuinely excited about Kirsten Gillibrand and convince themselves that she’s the Next Big Thing in national politics. (In the end, all Americans wanted was some ranch dressing.)

In other words, the kinds of people who decide which Democrats deserve the glossy-profile treatment don’t think like the general American public, and they really don’t think like the electorates of southern states.

O’Rourke and Abrams are in the Great Southern Democratic Hope Hall of Fame, alongside Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-leaning state but who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national-media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.

Now, if the place you represent has enough Democrats, you can court and embrace the glossy-magazine world all you like. If you represent a heavily Democratic House district in New York, you can appear on the cover of GQ. First ladies can appear on the cover of Vogue with minimal fuss. But appearing on the cover of Men’s Vogue didn’t do John Edwards any favors. (Admittedly, he had a lot of other problems.)

The glossy magazines can’t make you a senator or a governor, but they can make you a celebrity. And being a Democratic Party celebrity is a pretty sweet role to play. You’re on television all the time, you often get at least one lucrative book deal, and teaching gigs and the speaking circuit usually come calling. The only catch is that celebrities don’t do as much as elected officials do. Celebrities say a lot about what should be done; legislators vote on legislation and governors are the chief executives of their states. Celebrities look like they’re influential because they get a lot of attention, but they can’t change what the federal or state governments do.

Also, celebrity status is a gradually diminishing asset. When’s the last time you heard about Michael Moore? Keith Olbermann? Year by year, you slide from the A-list to the B-list to the C- and D-lists, and finally, you just slide into the cacophony.

*Yes, Reagan’s on my mind, as the National Review Institute held its Buckley Prize Dinner at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last night. It was awesome.

The House Republicans’ Commitment to America

House Republicans have laid out their agenda, what they’re calling their Commitment to America. They have four broad themes: An economy that’s strong, a nation that’s safe, a future that’s built on freedom, and a government that’s accountable.

The policy agenda is . . . varied, and not exactly awash in details, but just about every item will be popular in most districts:

• Cut the time it takes to obtain oil- and natural-gas-drilling permits in half.
• Move supply chains away from China.
• Fully fund effective border-enforcement strategies, infrastructure, and advanced technology to prevent illegal crossings and trafficking by cartels.
• End catch-and-release loopholes.
• Require proof of legal status to get a job.
• Support 200,000 more police officers through recruiting and retention bonuses.
• Crack down on prosecutors and district attorneys who refuse to prosecute crime, while permanently criminalizing all forms of illicit fentanyl.
• Establish a Select Committee on China.
• Advance the Parents’ Bill of Rights.
• Expand parental choice so more than a million more students can receive the education their parents know is best.
• Defend fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports.
• Improve access to telemedicine.
• Provide greater privacy and data-security protections for Americans.
• Equip parents with more tools to keep their kids safe online.

Some right-of-center folks might want a more specific agenda; a lot of this consists of goals, rather than concrete policies.

The Contract with America had more specifics, but it’s easy to forget that the Contract with America didn’t pledge that everything would become law; the aspiring House Republican majority could only promise to bring the proposals to a floor vote.

ADDENDUM: I must give credit for this line to Matt of the NRPlus Facebook group, reacting to former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s having no real issue with Vladimir Putin’s atrocities: “Of all the things Herr Schröder misses, it’s his conscience he misses least.”

On the menu today: Was anyone asking for a five-part docuseries about the Lincoln Project? Whether you want one or not, Showtime unveiled the trailer yesterday. So fine, let’s talk about the Lincoln Project — its scandals, its bad decisions, its hypocrisy, how it embodies a lot of what it denounces, how it deserves no credit for Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and how it is most useful as a cautionary tale for other ambitious minds in politics.

Let’s Talk about the Lincoln Project

Yesterday, Showtime unveiled the trailer for a five-part docuseries about the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump super PAC formed in late 2019 by Stuart Stevens, Steve Schmidt, George Conway, John Weaver, Rick Wilson, and a handful of others.

Let’s give credit where it’s due. The lines “We’re going to have to have a talk about John,” “Why were we trying to cover it up if it didn’t matter?” and “I started to get suspicious about, where did the money go?” indicate that the series will at least spend some time on the major controversies surrounding the group: John Weaver’s pattern of sexually pursuing and harassing young men, and whether the gargantuan sums of money raised by the group were mostly going to the leaders’ own pockets. (The trailer didn’t offer any sign that the series will mention the group’s attempt to make it appear that white nationalists were supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in 2021.)

Who knows, maybe documentary filmmakers Fisher Stevens and Karim Amer hoped to get the Lincoln Project’s leaders to inadvertently expose themselves as self-important, narcissistic blowhards by following them around with cameras. Certainly, the trailer indicates that this is not quite the straightforward, heroic narrative that the Lincoln Project probably expected it would get when it agreed to the documentary.

“We have a particular set of skills,” one of them boasts, which suggests that some of these egomaniacs think of themselves as the political equivalent of Liam Neeson in Taken.

“We have the opportunity to save the g****** country,” someone says, shortly before cutting to a voiceover of Wolf Blitzer announcing Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and Democrats celebrating. There’s something spectacularly arrogant about this group, which mostly ran television ads in the Washington, D.C., market designed to get Trump to throw a tantrum on Twitter, implying it was the one who put Joe Biden over the top.

How do Democrats feel about this? How does the Biden campaign feel about this? How do the labor unions and environmental groups and all the other parts of the Democratic coalition feel about a bunch of Republican and ex-Republican campaign consultants showing up and boasting, “Look at us! We’re the ones who saved the country from Trump”?

There are some signs that some figures on the left, such as Stephen Colbert, got sick and tired of folks such as Rick Wilson and Co. acting as if they were the heroes of the story, and of some liberals’ eagerness to embrace the group the moment its members started criticizing Trump.

The decision to make a documentary about the Lincoln Project, and Showtime’s decision to air it, represents something of a declaration that the Lincoln Project is important and consequential. As I write this, the first comment under the YouTube trailer is, “Nice! You know you’re doing something right when Showtime makes a documentary.” Perhaps that person is being sarcastic, but I think a lot of people believe something along those lines: Someone important enough to warrant a full documentary must be doing something consequential.

But . . . are they? Studies conducted by a Democratic group during the election indicated that the Lincoln Project’s ads didn’t really work — they may have made Democrats who already supported Biden feel better about themselves, but they were unpersuasive to undecided voters:

The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money. They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain — the Lincoln Project — and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for. . . .

According to Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics — likes and retweets — and persuasion was -0.3, “meaning that the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.” The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads — a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times — turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested.

It will be interesting to see if that report ends up in the documentary. It raises the question of just how the Lincoln Project defined success — was the goal to persuade undecided voters, or did it just want to make sneering ads that would thrill progressive grassroots donors who would then contribute more money to the Lincoln Project? Yes, the Lincoln Project ads made Trump angry, but how big of an accomplishment was that? What did that change? As that Colbert interview with Rick Wilson sarcastically jabbed, “Wow, Trump is not usually so sensitive! How did you get under Trump’s thick, rhino-like skin?”

There are some fascinating aspects of the Lincoln Project, but focusing on those aspects wouldn’t make such a flattering documentary. Considering how suddenly and vehemently the likes of Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson turned on longtime allies . . . just how committed were those consultants back when they were running the campaigns of GOP candidates? If you can turn on a dime and unleash cannon fire on your old friends, were you ever all that committed to anything? For all the group’s talk about “saving the country,” haven’t these guys proven themselves to be mercenaries?

There’s a line at the end of the trailer from Stu Stevens, “It’s not about ideology. It’s about money. It’s about power.” Whom is he describing? Trump and his inner circle, or the Lincoln Project itself?

Then again, maybe the documentary will acknowledge that the Lincoln Project isn’t as morally distinct from its foes as its members like to believe. There’s a quote from an unseen woman, “I feel like I’ve become a victim of what I was fighting against.” Maybe the filmmakers couldn’t ignore the ironies piling up so high — accusations of grifting, accusations of sexual misconduct, sexist and homophobic language, as well as claims from several witnesses that one founder saw the organization as vehicle to achieve “generational wealth.”

Back when Rick Wilson wrote Everything Trump Touches Dies, Washington Post book reviewer Carlos Lozada wasn’t afraid to point out that Wilson embodied a lot of what he denounced:

[Wilson writes] in the crudest terms. First there is Trump, whom Wilson never ceases to insult. “A monster from the laboratory of a jackass mad scientist . . . the living, s—-y embodiment of a culture that’s more Real Housewives and less Shining City on a Hill . . . a self obsessed Narcissus in a fright wig” with a “Liberace-meets-Saddam decorating style” — and all that’s just on Page 86. He also trashes the Trump fans within the base he helped shape: “I know you’re in an oxy stupor much of the time, so I’ll try to move slowly and not use big words.” Wilson attacks Reince Priebus, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence, and he says Newt Gingrich “started twerking [for Trump] faster than a five-buck stripper.” Such sexualized put-downs abound in Wilson’s book. White House adviser Stephen Miller “needs to spend a week getting laid.” Wilson finds Trump campaign adviser Carter Page “reeking of late-stage virginity.” And the white-nationalist alt-right movement is a bunch of “pudgy white boys from lower-middle-class suburbs who couldn’t find a woman’s clitoris with a GPS and a magnifying glass.”

Maybe some people find this funny or edgy, perhaps on Twitter, where Wilson has nearly 450,000 followers. But it’s just revolting, even more so at book length. Oblivious, Wilson then laments the “fashionable cruelty” of the Trump era, with its “endless stream of dick-joke-level insults.” Write what you know, I suppose. He concludes that our outrage politics are “juvenile, repellent, and self-limiting.” So is his book.

The Lincoln Project guys may not have been so effective at selling a candidate, but they were indisputable all-stars at selling themselves. Working on those Republican campaigns all those years meant they all had thick rolodexes of reporters and media people, and they offered several big mainstream-media outlets exactly the story that they wanted to hear: Longtime Republican strategists, who worked for the Dark Side of the Force all those years, suddenly had an moral awakening and were ready to redeem themselves by Doing the Right Thing™ and helping elect Democrats. It’s like Severus Snape being a good guy all along!

Finally, I hope the documentary does mention that Lincoln Project stunt that put together five staffers in khakis holding tiki torches and attempted to tie Glenn Youngkin to the violence in Charlottesville in 2017. Even the Terry McAuliffe campaign couldn’t run away from the stunt fast enough: “What happened today in Charlottesville is disgusting and distasteful and the McAuliffe campaign condemns it in the strongest terms. Those involved should immediately apologize.” That moment may have cost McAuliffe the election by ensuring that the final days of the campaign would be spent discussing this stupid, racially incendiary dirty trick instead of anything else. In a way, the episode represents the distillation of the Lincoln Project down to its essence: desperate for attention, angry, clumsy, and self-defeating.

As I wrote at the time:

Since it appears there was no secret, sophisticated strategy behind it all, the simple answer seems to be the accurate one. The folks at the Lincoln Project are just stupid. Really, really stupid. They’re in the political public-communications business, and yet they have no idea what kind of political public communications generate good responses and bad responses. If you gave money to random people picked off the street, they would probably never come up with an idea as spectacularly foolish and harmful as this one. You need real experience in politics to reach the twisted mindset where you think dressing up and reenacting a white nationalist rally is a good idea.

And in light of all that . . . do we really need a five-part documentary series about these guys? Only as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris.

ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, there’s a reason why the White House can’t admit that Joe Biden forgets things.

On the menu today: As natural gas continues to leak from the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines running from Russia to Germany, European officials increasingly suspect Moscow took action to sabotage the lines. As the preeminent symbol of German and European dependence upon Russian energy supplies — a trend that American presidents going back to John F. Kennedy opposed — this is the result of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder effectively selling out his country’s energy policies to Vladimir Putin. Finally, we’ve got to give credit where it’s due: Former president Donald Trump had this issue nailed, and when he warned the Germans, they just scoffed and dismissed him.

The Upside of Nord Stream Failing

Let’s get a few things straight:

• It would be odd, to say the least, for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to warn a number of European nations, including Germany, in June that the two Nord Stream gas pipelines which carry natural gas from Russia could be targeted in forthcoming attacks, if the U.S. was secretly planning to attack the pipelines in late September.
• For what it’s worth, it sounds like European governments strongly suspect that Moscow sabotaged the lines: “Five European officials with direct knowledge of security discussions said there was a widespread assumption that Russia was behind the incident. Only Russia had the motivation, the submersible equipment and the capability, several of them said, though they cautioned that they did not yet have direct evidence of Russia’s involvement.”
• Among the many reasons it is unlikely that President Biden would order covert action to attack the infrastructure running to a NATO ally, leaking natural gas is bad for the environment. Which government seems more likely to take an action and not care about the impact on climate change: the Biden administration or the Russian government run by Vladimir Putin?
• Our Mark Wright offers an astute analysis, examining the possibility that this was a Russian shot across Europe’s bow: “Destroying Russian-owned infrastructure in international waters wouldn’t be an attack on NATO countries or NATO assets — with all the fallout that might entail — but could still be seen as a capability demonstration and a threat to Western energy infrastructure, such as to the major pipeline systems originating in Norway that provide much of the U.K.’s and Western Europe’s remaining gas supplies.”

Maybe this is a giant Russian middle finger to Germany and Europe. But it is one that reduces the likelihood of a return to the status quo of European dependence upon Russian energy for a long, long time, and in the process makes billions of dollars of Gazprom expenditures worthless. There were a whole bunch of European elites, in both the public and private sectors, who had staked their literal and metaphorical fortunes on Russia’s being a long-term source for European energy needs, and who were likely still holding out hope that within a year or two, the war on Ukraine would end and the continent’s policies could start creeping toward the pre-war status quo. Those hopes are now going glub-glub-glub.

One of the fascinating responses to yesterday’s Corner post was the social–media fury at the notion that I could possibly be chuckling over the damage — and suspected sabotage — of natural-gas pipelines running from Russia to Germany. The pipelines have already been damaged; how I react to the damage isn’t going to change anything.

I don’t have sources well-placed enough in the national-security community to know for sure whether the U.S. did this. I wish I did, as it would be good for book sales.

And in the end, I’m just one (hopefully good) writer at one (very good) publication. U.S.–Germany relations, U.S.–Russia relations, and Germany–Russia relations will be shaped by forces much larger than me. What we see on social media is solipsistic emotion-policing; how dare I feel about an event differently than these folks.

European dependence on Russia for energy was always a bad idea because of the character and behavior of the regime in Moscow. No one worries about Germany’s dependence on Kazakhstan or Norway for crude oil, or its dependence on Norway and the Netherlands for natural gas. But the notion that greater economic interdependence with Europe would tame Russia’s inclination toward geopolitical aggression is a long-in-the-works proven failure, much the way that greater U.S. economic interdependence with China has not tamed Beijing’s inclination for geopolitical aggression.

European dependence upon Russian energy sources is not a new concern. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan opposed the construction of a new pipeline running from the Soviet Union to Eastern Bloc satellite states.

Germany chose to build pipelines instead of liquid-natural-gas terminals in its ports, up until recently: “Germany does not have its own regasification terminals for LNG and imports enter through neighboring countries’ terminals, especially Belgium and the Netherlands. Germany also receives some LNG via road freight.” If your country gets natural gas through sea terminals, you can import it from any of the ten or so countries that are major LNG exporters. If, for some reason, your country has a problem with the government of Qatar, it can reduce or stop imports from there and increase imports from Australia or Malaysia. If your country builds a pipeline to get natural gas, it’s dependent on the country where that pipeline starts.

The U.S. warned Germany; the Germans didn’t listen. One of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline’s biggest cheerleaders was former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and 17 days after leaving office, Schröder received a call from Vladimir Putin with a job offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany. By 2017, Schröder had joined the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft, and was making $600,000 per year. Over the years, his ties to Russian energy companies have made Schröder millions of dollars.

This is akin to former presidents Bush or Obama approving the Keystone XL pipeline and then taking a job on the board of TC Energy Corporation — but even this metaphor misses the moral dimension. We would need to imagine if the Canadian oil giant was effectively run by and for a former KGB officer with an abominable human-rights record.

In other words, those pipelines running from Russia to Germany are a symbol of the German government and its energy policies effectively being purchased by Vladimir Putin.

And Schröder doesn’t even feel bad about how things turned out:

In the interviews, Mr. Schröder, now 78, spoke with undiminished swagger, cracking jokes but arguing in essence that, well, if he got rich, then so did his country. When it came to Russian gas, everyone was on board, he pointed out, mocking his detractors over copious amounts of white wine.

“They all went along with it for the last 30 years,” he said. “But suddenly everyone knows better.”

Mr. Schröder scoffed at the notion of now distancing himself personally from Mr. Putin, 69, whom he considers a friend and sees regularly, most recently last month in an informal effort to help end the Ukraine war.

[As of April] Mr. Schröder refuses to resign from his board seats on Russian energy companies, despite calls to do so from across the political spectrum, not least from Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a fellow Social Democrat, who worked closely with Mr. Schröder when he was chancellor.

By May, Schröder had resigned his seat on Rosneft’s board, but he still has his lucrative position with Nord Stream. After everything Russia has done in the invasion of Ukraine — after Bucha, the bombings of theaters and schools, the shelling near nuclear-power plants, the bombing of the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial — Schröder still hasn’t seen anything that makes him say, “Sorry, I can’t work with these guys any longer in good conscience.”

Are you starting to see why I’m not all that torn up about those leaking underwater pipelines? You might as well build a giant statue of Putin overlooking the Brandenburg Gate.

Brace yourselves for words you do not often read in this newsletter: Former president Donald Trump got this issue 100 percent right, and he demonstrated considerable foresight on the matter back in 2018:

One of them captured the amused reactions of the German delegation as Trump said: “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.”

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas could be seen smirking alongside his colleagues.

During a NATO summit in July, he took aim at the Germans for the same reason, specifically singling out a planned 800-mile pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea called Nord Stream 2. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump told NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, also speaking on camera at the time. “We have to talk about the billions and billions of dollars that’s being paid to the country we’re supposed to be protecting you against.”

Angela Merkel responded, “I’ve experienced myself a part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, and I’m very happy today that we are united in freedom.”

Good call, chancellor, good call. Way to nail that one.

ADDENDUM: If you will be attending the National Review Institute’s William F. Buckley prize dinner at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., honoring Larry Kudlow, the Young America’s Foundation, Ron Robinson, and former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, I’ll see you there, shortly.

If you won’t be attending, but it sounds like fun to you, think about supporting the National Review Institute, and maybe I’ll see you next year!

On the menu today: As the midterm elections get closer, it’s worth keeping some key lessons in mind while perusing the latest polls. First, a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll buried the lead, which shows Republicans well ahead in the key swing districts — and this tells us a lot more than the usual generic-ballot numbers. Second, it’s getting a little late in the cycle for polls of registered voters, but they keep showing up, and there’s good reason to think that the polls are using a way-too-generous definition of a “likely voter.” Third, even if the midterm outlook isn’t as good for Republicans as it was in the early summer, that doesn’t mean the outlook is bad. And finally, NBC News commentator Jen Psaki, Biden’s former White House press secretary, offers some surprisingly blunt truth for her party and former boss.

Checking the Numbers . . .

There are a few things to keep in mind about polling as the days grow shorter and September turns to October:

One: The generic-ballot question isn’t focused on the districts that matter most.

The generic-ballot question is an imperfect measurement because it’s just asking people across the country whether they’re voting for Republicans or Democrats. We don’t know if they live in a swing district, a heavily Democratic district, or a heavily Republican district. When we want to know which party is going to control the House, we care a lot about those swing districts and districts that lean just a little toward one party or the other. We don’t care that much about New York’s 14th congressional district because we know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is getting reelected by a wide margin. We don’t care that much about Wyoming’s lone House seat because we know Harriet Hageman is going to win it by a wide margin. And we don’t really care about the margins in those safe districts. If a Democrat wins a heavily Democratic-leaning district with 90 percent instead of 60 percent, that doesn’t change anything.

RealClearPolitics rates 32 House races as “toss ups.” It rate s22 districts as “lean Republican,” 17 as “likely Republican,” and 179 as safe Republican. It classifies 17 districts as “lean Democratic,” 20 seats as “likely Democratic,” and 185 seats as safe Democratic. One of the reasons analysts feel fairly comfortable projecting that the GOP will win the House is that even if you put all of the “toss up” districts in the Democratic pile, Republicans still have a bare majority of 218 seats.

It’s a similar story at FiveThirtyEight, although it puts only 13 seats in the “toss up” category. The site rates 195 seats as solid Republican, 14 as likely Republican, and five as lean Republican — showing Republicans knocking on the door of a majority at 214 seats. FiveThirtyEight rates 167 seats as solid Democrat, 30 as likely Democrat, and twelve as lean Democrat.

When you see someone talk up Democrats’ chances of keeping the House, that’s mostly wish-casting. Democrats need to win just about every competitive seat and not have any lean-Democrat seats slip through their fingers.

If anything, the numbers point to Republicans’ winning a slew of those competitive seats. The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll this weekend buried the lead*:

Among those living in congressional districts that are rated as at least somewhat competitive by ABC’s FiveThirtyEight (neither solid Republican nor solid Democratic), registered voters favor Republican candidates by a wide 55-34 percent — nearly as big as the Republican lead in solid GOP districts (+24 points). Democrats lead by 35 points in solid Democratic districts, pointing to a potential overvote where they’re most prevalent.

If Republicans really are leading in competitive districts by 21 percentage points, then this is indeed a red-wave election, and we should see some unexpected Democratic losses.

My back-of-the-envelope math suggests that this would come out to a GOP majority of 235 seats — a pickup of 21 districts.

Two: It’s getting a little late in the cycle for polls of registered voters.

Right now, in the RealClearPolitics average of the generic ballot, Democrats barely lead — by three-tenths of a percentage point. That number comes from averaging out most recent results from eleven polling firms: CBS News, Emerson, Rasmussen Reports, ABC News/Washington Post, Economist/YouGov, Politico/Morning Consult, NBC News, Fox News, New York Times/Siena, Trafalgar Group, and Harvard-Harris.

But some of those firms are polling registered voters on the generic-ballot question, and others are polling likely voters on the generic-ballot question.

Once you sort out the pollsters using registered voters from the pollsters using likely voters, a clear pattern emerges. CBS, Emerson, Rasmussen, ABC, and Trafalgar are using likely voters, and their results average out to Republicans leading by 2.8 percentage points.

Economist/YouGov, Politico/Morning Consult, NBC News, Fox News, New York Times/Siena, and Harvard-Harris are using registered voters, and their results average out to Democrats leading by 2.83 percentage points.

In other words, there’s probably a bunch of registered-but-not-likely voters out there telling pollsters they’re likely to vote for the Democrat in their district’s House election . . . but it’s anybody’s guess as to whether they’ll actually show up and cast a ballot.

We know that not all registered voters will cast ballots in the midterms. In 2018, voter turnout was extremely high for a midterm election . . . and that was 50.3 percent of the voting-eligible population. The “voting-eligible population” is not the same as “registered voters.” In Virginia that year, 59.5 percent of registered voters cast a ballot. In Ohio, 55.7 percent of registered voters cast a ballot. In North Carolina, 53 percent of registered voters cast a ballot.

In the CBS News Battleground Tracker poll, which has Republicans ahead by one percentage point, 74 percent of registered-voter respondents said they would definitely vote, and another 13 percent said they probably would vote. Based upon history, it seems exceptionally improbable that 87 percent of registered voters will actually turn out and vote this year.

It’s the end of September. Pollsters probably should have put a likely voter screen on their samples around Labor Day, and those likely voter screens probably aren’t tight enough.

(Considering that four states have started early voting, maybe it’s time to ask, “Have you voted already?”)

Three: Republicans may need just a modestly good outlook for November.

Nate Silver contends that the polls do not show much of a GOP “bounce back” in recent weeks. No doubt, this is not the near-ideal environment for Republicans like it was in early summer, when gas prices were at record highs, and before the repeal of Roe v. Wade fired up the Democratic grassroots. Silver warns that:

We’ve reached that part of the election cycle where you ought to be wary of media narratives about which party has ‘momentum.’ There are a lot of competitive elections this cycle, and since Labor Day, we’ve started to see a lot more polling. It’s very, very easy to cherry-pick your way into a story that fits your preconceived notions about the race.

Okay, but how many races do you need to examine before you’re no longer “cherry-picking”?

• I’m not sure that GOP Pennsylvania Senate nominee Mehmet Oz is going to win, but he’s now down by increasingly modest single-digit margins — a far cry from those eleven-point and 13-point John Fetterman leads we saw earlier in the summer.
• Out in Nevada, Republican Adam Laxalt has quietly been building a small but consistent lead over incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto.
• In Wisconsin, incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson, who was supposed to be a dead man walking — just like in 2016! — keeps enjoying one small lead after another.
• In Ohio, J. D. Vance enjoys a modest lead in most, but not quite all, of the recent polls. (The Siena poll that has Tim Ryan ahead of Vance by three percentage points also has GOP incumbent governor Mike DeWine leading by 23 points. Are we really going to see a 20-point split between the Senate race and the governor’s race?)
• In North Carolina, Republican Ted Budd isn’t out of the woods yet, but he’s looking a little safer.
• In Georgia, maybe you can argue that incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock is ahead, but it’s not by much.
• The much-touted Val Demings challenge to Marco Rubio in Florida’s Senate race isn’t amounting to much so far.

It’s not all coming up roses for Republicans, however. Blake Masters is turning in a terrible performance in Arizona, unless Trafalgar is seeing something in that state that no one else is. It’s a similar story in Colorado and Washington’s Senate races. In New Hampshire, Don Bolduc does not appear to be giving Maggie Hassan any serious stress.

It is still fairly easy to envision a scenario that gets Republicans to 51 Senate seats. Beyond that, you need something unexpected to fall in their laps — perhaps a win in Pennsylvania or in one of the western races.

*I know most journalists spell it “lede” in this context, but no one knows what the heck we’re talking about when we do that.

ADDENDUM: Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, dished out a bit of unexpectedly blunt honesty on Meet the Press this weekend:

Yeah, look, I think that Democrats, if the election is about who is the most extreme, as we saw Kevin McCarthy touch on there with Marjorie Taylor Greene — I’ll say her name, sitting over his left side — then they’re going to win. If it is a referendum on the president, they will lose. And they know that.

On the menu today: Remember how, at the end of July, President Biden and his team insisted that two consecutive quarters of shrinking GDP didn’t mean the country was in a recession? Well, companies big and small are announcing layoffs more frequently these days, indicating that we’re in a period of not-so-subtle belt-tightening. Meanwhile, the projections for energy costs ahead of this coming winter are increasingly ominous, the decline in unleaded-gasoline prices has stopped, and a long-simmering national housing shortage may be catching up with us. But hey, apparently Biden intends to tout his economic record as the midterm elections approach.

The Quiet Recession

About two weeks ago, a smart friend of mine who works on supply-chain issues observed that, “Based on what I’m hearing throughout all the industries that I work with, this month’s job report might be brutal. People are getting skinny everywhere they can, so that they don’t lose their [butts]. Unfortunately, that means huge groups of people getting fired.” (“Getting skinny” means cutting operating costs.)

And, like everything else, once you start looking for something, you start seeing signs of it everywhere.

Meta — you know, Facebook — plans “to cut expenses by at least 10 percent in the coming months, in part through staff reductions.” Google is eyeing similar cuts, with CEO Sundar Pichai characterizing it as “being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade.” Twilio has announced plans to lay off 11 percent if its workforce, and Snap has announced plans to lay off 20 percent of its workforce.

A lot of big companies, even outside the tech sector, are announcing the elimination of executive positions. The Gap is eliminating 500 corporate jobs. Boeing has announced that it will eliminate about 150 positions in finance and accounting in October. Last month, Walmart announced that it would eliminate 200 corporate jobs.

FedEx is enacting a hiring freeze and closing more than 90 FedEx Office locations.

It’s not just big brand companies: It’s also an ice-cream plant in New York; it’s also a slew of hospitals nationwide. God help you if you work in real estate: “Some of the biggest players in the real estate industry, including RE/MAX, Redfin and Wells Fargo, have announced layoffs in recent months totaling thousands of jobs. Industry analysts are projecting the cuts could eventually be on par with what was seen during the housing crash of 2008.”

None of these individual company moves, by themselves, are likely to make a big difference in the national jobs numbers, and you can find companies announcing layoffs in any month. But cumulatively, these announcements suggest that we’re in a period of not-so-subtle belt-tightening. Businesses doesn’t know what to expect in the coming months, except higher costs to heat their facilities this winter. The stock markets are jittery. Sooner or later, those rising interest rates will reduce customer demand — which should reduce inflation, but will also lower sales, profits, and eventually, jobs.

Of course, in some people’s minds, the economy can’t be sputtering, because the guy they like is in the White House, and the party they prefer controls Congress. And the pressure to align an assessment of the economy with partisan needs is never stronger than in the final months and weeks before Election Day.

Last week, President Biden attended a Democratic National Committee event held at National Education Association headquarters — yet another sign of how those two organizations are now so symbiotic that they’re becoming indistinguishable — and took a victory lap about how well the economy is doing:

We passed the American Rescue Plan, which lifted this nation from economic crisis to economic recovery. And every single Republican voted for it. [Note: Biden meant every single Republican voted against it.] Nearly 10 million more jobs have been created since I’ve been President — the highest number of jobs in that period of time of any President of the United States of America. We have a 3.7 percent unemployment rate, the lowest in 50 — more than 50 years; a record number of new — record number of new small businesses created; and over 668,000 new manufacturing jobs in America.

The same day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered this remark:

This is one of the strongest job markets that we have seen on record. And, and so, what we are seeing – and I’ve said this before; you’ve heard this from Brian Deese — is a transition to a more steady and stable growth. And that’s what we’re currently seeing and in the process of moving the economy into.

That “steady and stable growth” she’s referring to is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The White House message is, “You’ve never had it so good.”

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. We understand why there’s too much money sloshing around in the economy — the government keeps borrowing more and spending more, giving people more money to spend when the supply of goods isn’t increasing as quickly. But what is making the supply of goods so limited? The president himself said that the pandemic is over, so the only remaining pandemic-related supply-chain problems should be seen in sectors that rely on imports from China.

But as fall turns to winter, the sputtering U.S. economy may be buckling under two large-scale problems.

First, energy prices. We just endured a summer of record gasoline prices; now we’re entering a winter of significantly rising electricity and heating prices. The U.S. Energy Information Association calculates that the average price of electricity for residential consumers is up 7.5 percent from last year:

Higher retail electricity prices largely reflect an increase in wholesale power prices driven by rising natural gas prices. The Southwest region has the lowest forecast wholesale prices in 2022, averaging $69 per megawatthour (MWh), up 25 percent from 2021. The highest forecast wholesale prices are at more than $100/MWh in ISO New England (up 96 percent from 2021) and New York ISO (up 124 percent from 2021).

The National Energy Assistance Directors Association projects that:

The average cost of home heating is estimated to increase by 17.2 percent since last winter heating season, from $1,025 to $1,202. This would be the second year in a row of major prices increases. Between 2020-21 and 2021-23, the cost of home energy would increase by more than 35 percent. . . . These are the highest prices in more than 10 years.

Because unleaded-gasoline prices are down from their mid June record highs, one might think that those who heat their homes with oil might be in better shape. But supplies are strikingly low, particularly in the northeastern states:

Diesel fuel and heating oil, which comprise the distillate category, are 63 percent below the five-year average in New England and 58 percent below the same average from Maryland to New York, according to a survey by the Department of Energy. Gasoline inventories are not as bad, but are still at their lowest levels in nearly a decade along the entire East Coast.

(Note that the decline in unleaded gasoline prices stopped last week. The national average for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline declined to $3.67 on September 18, and since then, it has climbed a few cents to $3.72. That is still really high by historical standards!)

Lower supply of natural gas and oil mean higher prices; higher prices for natural gas and oil mean higher electric bills for both homes and businesses, with businesses passing along those costs to customers. This exacerbates inflationary price hikes.

The second large-scale problem is housing and land: There’s compelling evidence that the U.S. is experiencing a worsening housing shortage that started in big cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., but spread to more and more parts of the country in recent years. Higher demand and stagnant supply for housing mean that home-sale prices and rents increase, sometimes dramatically. Freddie Mac found that 60 percent of renters and 24 percent of homeowners spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing, and almost half of all respondents are concerned about making housing payments.

And once again, this is largely a consequence of policy choices. This morning, the Wall Street Journal offers the ominous headline, “The U.S. Is Running Short of Land for Housing,” and lays out how the shortage is a consequence of policy decisions:

Land-use restrictions and a lack of public investment in roads, rail and other infrastructure have made it harder than ever for developers to find sites near big population centers to build homes. As people keep moving to cities such as Austin, Phoenix and Tampa, they are pushing up the price of dirt and making the housing shortages in these fast-growing areas even worse. In the Sunbelt, the average price of vacant land per acre more than doubled in the past two years through the second quarter.

Meanwhile, this weekend, the New York Times spotlighted the trend of developers tearing down residential buildings to build new high-rises . . . with fewer units than the old building, actually reducing the amount of housing available in the city. “The builders argue that the cost of land and construction is too high for almost anything but luxury condominiums, without new tax incentives or more favorable zoning.”

When you combine policies that throw money into the economy and make energy more expensive with policies that limit or even reduce the availability of housing, what do you think you’re going to get? Something like our current circumstances — in which people are spending more and more of their paychecks on housing and energy bills while the price of everything else keeps rising.

Oh, and this line over in today’s Politico Playbook caught my eye: “For perhaps the first time in his presidency, Biden has a positive economic story to tell.”

ADDENDUM: Check out NR’s Editors ripping into the Biden administration’s kid-gloves approach to Iran:

To stand with Iranians, Biden ought to make clear that he won’t deal with the butchers in charge and that he understands that [Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa] Amini’s murder was carried out by a brutal theocracy that menaces its own people and the world. The brave Iranians marching in defiance of their country’s dictatorship deserve no less.

On the menu today: For the better part of the year, we in the West have been watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine and wondering whether Vladimir Putin might grow desperate enough to use a tactical nuclear weapon. Now we learn the U.S. government has been sending “private communications” to Moscow, emphasizing the “grave consequences” of using a nuclear weapon in the conflict. This raises some difficult questions about what constitutes an effective deterrence policy and whether a man like Putin can reach a point where he can’t be deterred at all.

Is Putin Thinking the Unthinkable?

You figured something like this was happening behind the scenes, but it’s still a little unnerving to see it in black-and-white, in the Washington Post:

The United States for several months has been sending private communications to Moscow warning Russia’s leadership of the grave consequences that would follow the use of a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. officials, who said the messages underscore what President Biden and his aides have articulated publicly.

The Post also reports that “Biden administration officials have emphasized that this isn’t the first time the Russian leadership has threatened to use nuclear weapons since the start of the war on Feb. 24 and have said there is no indication Russia is moving its nuclear weapons in preparation for an imminent strike.”

But if the U.S. is sending these messages both publicly and privately, it means the U.S. government, watching Russia closely, thinks Vladimir Putin and the Russian government need to hear these warnings. In other words, people within our government aren’t quite convinced this is just routine saber-rattling. (For more background on how Russia could use a small-yield tactical nuclear weapon, see the March 16 edition of the Morning Jolt. A nuke set off in any way is horrific if you’re in the neighborhood of the blast, but the effects can vary quite a bit depending on whether the nuclear weapon is detonated underground, at ground level, in the air, or at a high altitude.)

It’s easy to see why Russia might be getting desperate enough to think the unthinkable. A war that was supposed to end within a few days or at most weeks is now in its eighth month, and the Ukrainians are still advancing. The allegedly new and improved Red Army is the same as the old, slow, poorly equipped, insufficiently trained, tactically flawed Red Army. The Russian economy hasn’t collapsed from sanctions, but it is slowly and steadily being worn down. As of July, CIA director William Burns estimated that the Russian military had suffered about 15,000 killed and about 45,000 wounded.

Clearly, the mood in Russia is changing rapidly. Putin’s mobilization of 300,000 “reserves” — with serious questions about how well-trained and experienced those reserves are — has a lot of Russians terrified that a draft is coming. It sounds like a significant number of Russian men are fleeing the country. The BBC reports that, “on the border with Georgia, miles-long queues of vehicles have formed including men trying to escape the war. Some of those heading into the neighboring country have used bicycles to bypass lines of cars and evade a ban on crossing on foot.” (Just think, all this time the Georgian defense ministry feared a different surge of Russian men coming across the border.) The BBC also reports that “the call-up sparked protests in major Russian cities including Moscow and St Petersburg on Tuesday, resulting in a reported 1,300 arrests.”

The president, discussing Russia on 60 Minutes this past weekend:

Scott Pelley: As Ukraine succeeds on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin is becoming embarrassed and pushed into a corner. And I wonder, Mr. President, what you would say to him if he is considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons.

Joe Biden: Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. You will change the face of war unlike anything since World War II.

Pelley: And the consequences of that would be what?

Biden: I am not going to speculate —

Pelley: What would the U.S. response be?

Biden: You think I would tell you if I knew exactly what it would be? Of course, I’m not gonna tell you. It’ll be consequential. They’ll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been. And depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur.

Our Mark Wright is underwhelmed: “‘If I knew’ . . . ‘depending on the extent’ . . . ‘consequential.’ If you can explain to me what that means and, more importantly, what that means to the Kremlin, please do.”

Putin and Russia are already pariahs. How much of a deterrent is “becom[ing] more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been”? The real fear is that Putin — whose thinking was opaque even at the best of times, before the two years of extreme isolation that some world leaders think drove him bonkers — has now concluded that if he’s in for a penny, he’s in for a pound. If the rest of the world hates him for invading Ukraine, nothing will change much when they hate him for using a nuclear weapon.

International condemnation, by itself, is not a deterrent. It is a consequence of the failure of deterrence:

Western officials have repeatedly said that Russia has become isolated since invading Ukraine in February. Until recently, though, that was largely wishful thinking. But on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, much of the international community spoke out against the conflict in a rare display of unity at the often fractured United Nations.

The tide had already appeared to be turning against Putin even before Thursday’s U.N. speeches. Chinese and Indian leaders had been critical of the war at a high-level summit last week in Uzbekistan. And then the U.N. General Assembly disregarded Russia’s objections and voted overwhelmingly to allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be the only leader to address the body remotely, instead of requiring him to appear in person. . . .

Numerous world leaders used their speeches on Tuesday and Wednesday to denounce Russia’s war. That trend continued Thursday both in the assembly hall and at the usually deeply divided U.N. Security Council, where, one-by-one, virtually all of the 15 council members served up harsh criticism of Russia — a council member — for aggravating several already severe global crises and imperiling the foundations of the world body.

If Vladimir Putin feared being a pariah or inviting international condemnation, he wouldn’t have launched the invasion.

Writing in NR, Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, argues that real deterrence requires the threat of the use of force:

The West should respond together in a clear NATO declaration: Any introduction of nuclear weapons, or for that matter any weapons of mass destruction, on the European plain will result in a full response from the alliance. NATO aircraft will not just establish a no-fly zone, but rather instantly come to the aid of Ukrainian forces and go on the offensive against Russia. NATO ships will quickly move to sink any Russian ships in Ukrainian ports or operating in the Black or Baltic Seas. Likewise, it will blockade any ships in Russian ports. Meanwhile, NATO troops, who have been quietly pre-positioned in the east over the past seven months, will enter Ukraine. Lastly, key Russian military positions — including command-and-control nodes, fuel dumps, and ammunition depots that sit on the Russian side of the Ukrainian border — will be eliminated.

Only by being this stark can we hope to deter a panicked man at the end of his rope. It must be made “clearer than truth” — as the great Democrat secretary of state Dean Acheson said at the beginning of the Cold War — to those near and around Putin, that should they choose wholesale war, what follows automatically will be upon their heads.

This is more or less treating Ukraine as though it is a NATO member, which it is not. Then again, once Moscow gets comfortable setting off mushroom clouds, everybody’s tolerance for risk shrinks dramatically.

A statement such as the one Hendrix suggests would no doubt get Putin and the Russians to sit up and take notice. But Mark Wright doubts it will ever happen: “Such a policy would, of course, have the benefit of putting forward the strongest possible deterrent wrench into Putin’s calculations — a redux of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine of the Cold War — but such a grave decision should not be undertaken without the consent of Congress. Unfortunately for us all, I’m doubtful that congressional leaders will move on this or any such proposal.”

The Hendrix proposal would also require that every government in NATO feel comfortable getting into a shooting war with Russian forces.

There is a fair but disquieting critique that a lot of U.S. foreign policy — or at least its rhetoric — is built on a naïve belief that policy-makers can avoid hard choices, and that for every problem around the globe there is some sort of happy win-win scenario. We can stand up for our values and maintain our alliances. We can engage with our adversaries, diplomatically and economically, and they’ll change their ways. We can have stable, productive relationships with the world’s most unsavory and ruthless regimes. Back in 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that the term “rogue states” was outdated, and that “we are now calling these states ‘states of concern’” — as if the U.S. label had any impact on the character or nature of those regimes.

Sometimes, the world is bedeviled by some powerful, ruthless, cold-blooded, and/or potentially delusional dictator, hell-bent on conquest in the most brutal and bloodthirsty manner — and no amount of vague warnings is going to make him think twice.

And we’re left with the same hard question we faced all the way back during the Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border: What are we, as Americans, and the world as a whole, willing to do to stop him?

ADDENDUM: Whenever I write something like this Corner post, contending that once-endangered boring Democrats are looking okay for November, while the much-more-hyped not-boring Democrats are flopping, I run into responses — usually from social-media users, not regular NR readers — that require some reminders of what strikes me as obvious:

• What is happening right now is not necessarily what will continue to happen. Michael Bennet, Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, and Patty Murray could lose! But right now, they don’t look like they’re losing. The fact that things might be different a month from now doesn’t mean I shouldn’t tell you what’s going on this week.
• What is happening is not necessarily what I want to happen. I prefer rightward government to leftward government, but I don’t see my job as telling you that everything is coming up roses and that your favorite guy is going to win.
• A general trend may have exceptions. I have no doubt you can find some “boring Democrat” candidate who is trailing in the polls and who is likely to lose. You can probably find some hyped candidate — John Fetterman? — who is likely to win. But I think it’s significant, and perhaps even instructive, that some of the bland, lesser-known, once-endangered Democrats like Kelly and Hassan are doing fine, while Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke are underperforming again.
• A particular election outcome may have more than one cause. The quality of the GOP opponent no doubt plays a big factor in what’s happening in these races.

On the menu today: California governor Gavin Newsom is not-so-subtly positioning himself to run for president if Joe Biden can’t or won’t run for reelection, and the sharp-eyed journalist Josh Barro argues that Newsom would be a catastrophically foolish choice for the Democratic Party. In theory, Barro is right, but there’s little evidence that partisans are really all that bothered by hypocrisy and double standards. Newsom represents California progressivism at its purest and most insufferable — entitled, sleazy, self-aggrandizing, virtue-signaling, and ineffective when it matters most. From the perspective of the right, that might make Gavin Newsom the perfect representative of the modern Democratic Party in the coming election cycle.

The Dirty Secret: Voters Rarely Have a Problem with Hypocrisy

Josh Barro takes a funny crowbar to California governor Gavin Newsom, contending that Newsom’s not-so-subtle, quasi-presidential campaign is a colossal disaster in the making for Democrats, and wondering how anyone in the party could possibly take the idea of “Democratic presidential nominee Gavin Newsom” seriously:

Gavin Newsom looks like the kind of guy who would have an affair with the wife of his close friend and campaign manager. Or who, when he was 39 and mayor of San Francisco, had a girlfriend who was too young to drink. Or who would dine with a group of 12 at The French Laundry just hours after warning Californians not to gather for the holidays due to COVID. Or who would marry Kimberly Guilfoyle. Or who would pose with Guilfoyle like this on Ann Getty’s rug. . . .

Of course, Newsom looks like that kind of guy because he is that guy. He did all those things! He’s practically the opposite of Relatable Joe from Scranton — an effete, sleazy, high-handed liberal from San Francisco who seems like he might hit on your wife, if she’s hot.

Kamala Harris would be a better candidate.

Back in 2018, I wrote that the then-aspiring-governor with the slicked-back hair embodied California liberalism:

The perfect appearance, the bear-hug embrace of identity politics, the celebration of Silicon Valley moguls tempered by hand-wringing about income inequality, the grandiose, fanciful plans for building the state into a modern utopia. . . . His has been a life of privilege that would get a typical Republican office-seeker torn to shreds.

“It may take future social scientists to explain why current California voters were so willing to give this guy a pass on all the things we know about him. . . . The 50-year-old lieutenant governor and former mayor of San Francisco is the living embodiment of privilege, and people seem to be OK with that,” Sacramento Bee columnist Marcos Breton marveled back then.

We on the right can hope for Newsom to become the Democratic presidential nominee because we see him as such an insufferably preening, under-performing governor and the walking embodiment of the hypocrisy and double standards of modern progressivism and/or modern California. But one angle that really matters is that Democrats don’t see Newsom that way at all. They like him. Last month, 82 percent of California Democrats approved of the job he was doing, and 54 percent of self-identified independents concurred. Ninety percent of self-identified Democrats said that they intend to vote for his reelection.

The thing is, if the typical Democrat has any problem with hypocrisy and double standards, they hide it really well. Maybe there was some brief bipartisan irritation with officials who enacted sweeping pandemic restrictions and then turned around and violated them, but that seems to be long forgotten by now. The typical Democrat doesn’t spend much time complaining about self-described environmentalists who fly around in private jets and who have huge houses and massive carbon footprints. The typical Democrat shrugs off exceptionally wealthy people who publicly bemoan economic inequality, and they’re similarly unconcerned by white guys who talk about how it’s time for those who have benefited from society’s deep-rooted philosophy of white supremacy and patriarchy to step aside and empower women and minorities. (California Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, while running for president in 2019: “I may be ‘another white guy,’ but I know where there are gaps in my knowledge or my experience and I know when to pass the mic.” Good news, minorities! President Swalwell will intermittently pass the microphone to you!)

It’s also unlikely that the typical Democrat would get all that irked by Newsom’s consensual relationships when so many Democrats choose to believe that former Minnesota senator Al Franken got a raw deal. Even after #MeToo, an elected lawmaker is entitled to a little bit of sexual harassment if he votes the right way on “women’s issues.”

And let’s face it: The Republican Party embraced a billionaire because he sounded so populist, and Christian social conservatives embraced a man who was a notorious womanizer. Heck, the evangelist preacher hiding an awful scandal is now a cliché. When it comes down to a Republican candidate against a Democratic candidate, a lot of Republicans can make their peace with a candidate who exaggerated his military service, or who expressed nutty views in the past, or who has no real past connection to conservative politics and causes. Once a candidate wins that primary, his past sins get washed away and he becomes the avatar of “our team.”

A lot of people in each party’s grassroots can avert their eyes and pretend to not notice a lot, and/or engage in complicated mental acrobatics to explain why the seeming hypocrisy isn’t really a problem.

It’s not hard to grasp why a lot of folks on the right would like to see Newsom have that debate he proposed with Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor is an emblematic incarnation of modern conservative governance, and Newsom is his rough equivalent on the opposite side. A Newsom–DeSantis debate would not be a rerun of Donald Trump and Joe Biden shouting over each other — yet another sequel to Grumpy Old Men. It would be a sharp-elbowed, full-throated, well-articulated contrast between conservative governance and progressive governance. Conservatives think they have a better vision and better policies, and the proof can be found in how life in Florida contrasts with life in California.

(The governor who conservatives think best represents the Democrats is not the governor who Democrats think best represent Democrats. A governor such as Jared Polis in Colorado, recently praised by George Will, stands out because of his deviations from modern progressivism — he helped found charter schools and supports school choice, he endorsed the conclusions of the Simpson–Bowles deficit-reduction commission, he opposed a ballot initiate to create a state-run universal-health-care system, and he was relatively modest in his enforcement of pandemic restrictions.)

Barro thinks that Democrats would be insane to drop Biden and nominate Newsom, because Biden is likeable and relatable, and the California governor isn’t. But one aspect of that argument isn’t going to be persuasive to those on the right: There are few conservatives who look at the president and see “Relatable Joe from Scranton,” as Barro characterizes him. Biden’s critics and even mainstream-media reporters have laid out how his self-told tale of rising from humble beginnings was part of a carefully contrived image.

For starters, Biden’s family moved to Delaware when he was ten; the last time the president actually lived in Scranton, John F. Kennedy was a newly elected senator. When the president talks about his youth, he describes a modest working-class upbringing, with his parents struggling to pay the bills and having to sacrifice things when the price of gasoline increased. The New York Times, in a 2008 profile, suggested that Biden’s background would be more accurately described as middle-class: “In those years the Bidens were neither rich nor poor. Mr. Biden’s younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens, said she always had as fine a dress for school dances as her wealthier classmates at Ursuline Academy, the Catholic girls’ school she attended. The difference, she said, was that her parents bought them on layaway.”

Just last month, The New Yorker offered more details:

The anecdotes I heard about Biden’s father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., told a different story. He was working at a car dealership when his son was elected to the Senate, in 1972, but according to Jimmy Biden, one of the President’s younger brothers, his father’s idea of casual attire was a sport coat and an ascot. Biden, in his memoir, wrote about opening a closet and finding his father’s polo mallet, equestrian boots, riding breeches, and hunting pinks — items that suggested a past life of privilege. At one point, Biden, Sr., had a lot of money, but he lost it all, for reasons that went mostly unexplained. “I never asked him much about his life, and he didn’t offer,” Biden wrote.

Biden repeatedly insists that his Senate colleagues looked down on him for his lack of wealth and called him “Middle-Class Joe,” saying things like, “It’s not meant to be a compliment. It means I’m not sophisticated.” There’s no record of anyone calling Biden “Middle-Class Joe” other than Joe Biden. By the time Biden was elected to the Senate, he was making $44,600 per year, which is $267,935.63 in today’s dollars. By 1977, he was making $57,500 per year, which is $281,020.34 in today’s dollars. Biden’s belief that he is middle class reflects his perspective of serving alongside multimillionaires, not his actual membership in the middle class as it could be reasonably defined.

One of Biden’s big “relatable guy” schticks during his Senate career was that he “took the train to work every day” when the Senate was in session. But this wasn’t the subway or commuter rail; this was the Acela, which was always among the most expensive options Amtrak offered. And a lawmaker’s travel to and from his district is usually paid for out of office funds.

In short, a lot of conservatives see Joe Biden as a shameless phony. By that measure, Gavin Newsom is somewhat refreshing: He’s wealthy and privileged, he’s always been wealthy and privileged, and he’s never really pretended otherwise.

ADDENDA: If you look closely, you can see that even instinctively sympathetic journalists in Texas are starting to get tired of Beto O’Rourke’s schtick and can’t imagine that his 2022 gubernatorial bid will be any more successful than his 2018 Senate bid, in which he fell three points short of victory. If anything, they think he’s likely to do worse this time around.

It’s been a little while since I reminded you about the thriller series, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the first book, Between Two Scorpions, is up to 354 reviews on Amazon!

Donald writes, “I have read all of this series and this one stands out from the rest. The characters have more depth- they’re more complex. The story is very creative in its concept and takes one on a globetrotting adventure. Great beach read that leaves the reader with something to think about. Can’t wait for the next one.” And WDM writes, “Kept me up late two nights, and I enjoyed the read.” Thanks for the kind words.

On the menu today: This is one of those mornings when, by the time I’ve finished writing the Jolt, I’m irked and irritated, because there’s mounting evidence that we’re still in the middle of a long, difficult bout with inflation, not almost done with it. Meanwhile, our president thinks he isn’t getting enough credit because in the past few months, “Inflation hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even.” Stuck around the worst inflation rate in 40 years is a terrible place to be, and this president is indignant that people aren’t being more appreciative of the amazing job he’s doing.

Pouring Gasoline on the Inflationary Fire

There’s a good reason to be worried about inflation.

The Consumer Price Index measures how today’s prices compare to the prices twelve months ago. If you see 2 percent inflation as normal or stable as the Federal Reserve does, then when the CPI number gets well beyond 2 percent, that’s when we worry. If you look at the month-by-month numbers, the Biden presidency started with normal numbers, then jumped to 4.2 percent in April 2021, and then 5 percent in May. With the country emerging from Covid and people getting out and spending more, and also struggling with a shortage of goods because of supply-chain issues, maybe we shouldn’t have been that surprised to see demand getting higher, supplies getting lower, and prices rising.

But it didn’t turn out to be a short-lived issue of product shortages or pent-up demand. The CPI rate remained between 5 and 5.4 percent from May to September of 2021 — and it was in July 2021 when Biden declared that:

“There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” In other words, by July, people were already starting to notice that inflation was getting high and that it hadn’t been a one or two-month blip.

When we look at the CPI numbers for August 2022 — 8.3 percent — that figure is telling us the increase in prices compared to the numbers of August 2021, which had already taken an inflationary jump of 5.3 percent compared to August 2020. With each passing month since March, we’ve seen 8 percent to 9.1 percent inflation, and that’s on top of the higher prices we were starting to pay last summer and fall! After last year’s prices took a significant jump, this year’s price increases should look smaller by comparison. But they don’t! Instead, they look bigger, indicating that inflationary pressures are getting worse, not better.

This week, Ford Motor Company announced lower-than-expected earnings, and warned of “inflation-related supplier costs that will run about $1 billion higher than originally expected.”

Today, the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates again, this time by three-quarters of a percentage point; some people who understand rates and markets much better than I do contend that the Fed’s current approach is like ripping off a Band-Aid really slowly.

I’ll let the professional economists hash that out, but I’ll note that the Fed is trying to reduce the amount of money sloshing around in the economy, while the federal government and certain state governments are trying to throw even more money into the economy. If the Fed isn’t seeing the results it wanted to see by now, maybe it’s because the White House and Congress are rowing their oars in the wrong direction?

Even Vox conceded that the American Recovery Act — proposed by the Biden administration and passed entirely by Democrats — exacerbated inflation; this is about as close as you’re ever going to find to a “mea culpa” over there:

It’s true that the American Rescue Plan wasn’t the primary cause of today’s inflation. But if inflation was always going to be a problem, then it’s important to avoid policies that could make it a much worse problem.

In retrospect, it seems that Democrats simply didn’t take this seriously enough back in early 2021. They wrongly concluded that a stimulus far in excess of what models said was necessary was the less risky option. They thought they were still in the “money printer go brrr” era, where there was less pressure to be judicious about where that money was going — so instead of targeting help to those who needed it, they sent hundreds of billions of dollars to well-off Americans and states doing just fine, for political reasons.

Back in March, economists at the Federal Reserve analyzed the numbers and concluded that, “Among other reasons, the sizable fiscal support measures aimed at counteracting the economic collapse due to the COVID-19 pandemic could explain about 3 percentage points of the recent rise in inflation.”

Now throw in the $1.2 trillion in new spending of the infrastructure bill — “More than $850 billion in funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is currently making its way to state and local governments” — and the massive spending contained within the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” which the Penn-Wharton budget model concluded would have “no meaningful effect on inflation in the near term.” The roughly $1 trillion or so in student-loan forgiveness will also make certain recipients feel like they’ve been given $10,000, which will make them spend more.

But wait, there’s more! Next month, the state of California will send checks ranging between $200 to $1,050 as “inflation relief payments” to everyone making less than $250,000 and to joint filers who make more than $500,000 annually.

In other words, to fight inflation, which is too much money chasing too few goods, the state of California is giving everyone more money.

But the other nagging reason for worry stems from what we can discern from Biden’s comments on 60 Minutes this past Sunday:

SCOTT PELLEY: Mr. President, as you know, last Tuesday the annual inflation rate came in at 8.3 percent. The stock market nosedived. People are shocked by their grocery bills. What can you do better and faster?

BIDEN: Well, first of all, let’s put this in perspective. Inflation rate month to month was just — just an inch, hardly at all–

PELLEY: You’re not arguing that 8.3 percent is good news?

BIDEN: No, I’m not saying it is good news. But it was 8.2 percent or — 8.2 percent before. I mean, it’s not — you’re ac — we act — make it sound like all of a sudden, “My God, it went to 8.2 percent.” It’s been—

PELLEY: It’s the highest inflation rate, Mr. President in 40 years.

BIDEN: I got that. But guess what we are. We’re in a position where, for the last several months, it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even. And in the meantime, we created all these jobs and — and prices — have — have gone up, but they’ve come down for energy. The fact is that we’ve created 10 million new jobs.

Let’s put aside the usual criticism of Biden. If you’re Biden and his team, you must know that Pelley is going to ask about inflation, and you had better have a good answer. One might expect the president to say something like, “My team and I know inflation is still too darn high, and Americans are feeling it. That’s why we’re doing X, Y, and Z.”

Instead, Biden’s response was, “For the last several months, it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even” — in other words, it’s not that bad. But it is that bad! Biden’s other maneuver is to point to the low unemployment rate. But Americans are understandably unimpressed with low unemployment when they’re living with month after month of the highest inflation in four decades.

In Biden’s mind, inflation is almost completely fixed; people like Pelley are being unreasonable by bringing it up as a problem, “making it sound like all of a sudden, my God, it went to 8.2 percent.” Biden’s answer suggests that he thinks the Fed has got this problem licked. And a president can’t solve a problem he can’t see — or perhaps it is more accurate to say he won’t see it.

As for Biden’s contention that prices have “come down for energy,” he presumably means gas prices . . . except, according to AAA, gas prices just stopped declining; yesterday the national average increased by a penny, from $3.67 to $3.68 — and by historical averages, that’s still really high!

Back in November 2021, Biden expressed surprise at how high gas prices were getting: “Did you ever think you’d be paying this much for a gallon of gas? In some parts of California, they’re paying $4.50 a gallon!” This morning, the average price of a gallon of gas in California is $5.49. Biden continues to spike the football at the slightest bit of good news, ignoring the bigger picture.

And even if gas prices are down, we’re shifting from summer driving season to winter heating season — and that’s going to be brutal:

Americans are in store for an expensive winter when it comes to paying their heating and electric bills.

The average household will pay about 17 percent more this winter to heat their property, reaching a 10-year high of about $1,200 per home, according to a forecast from the nonprofit National Energy Assistance Directors Association. Electric bills are also set to rise, with the U.S. residential price of electricity expected to jump about 7.5 percent from 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

And yet Biden is on national television, insisting that prices “have come down for energy.”

(Our Dominic Pino notes that Biden’s entire characterization of the economy is an alternate universe: “Inflation cannot continue to decline when, by the president’s own characterization, it is ‘basically even.’ And the economy cannot continue to grow when it has, in fact, been shrinking for two consecutive quarters. Whether that counts as a recession is debatable, but whether negative numbers count as growth is not.”)

I listen to sports radio, and right now, they’re running a promo for the Tony Kornheiser Show that goes something like this — “I was in a fast-food joint, and I hadn’t been in one in a while. I get a burger, fries, and drink, and the guy behind the counter tells me, $13.72. I was like ‘13-72? What is that, my order number?’”

ADDENDUM: You’re going to want to read Dan McLaughlin’s piece on pollster Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar and why his surveys show Republicans competitive even in some of the bluest places. Trafalgar’s record is solid enough — the firm has an A- rating from FiveThirtyEight — that Cahaly can’t be dismissed:

The most recent Trafalgar polls released between August 31 and September 18 show Kari Lake winning by 4 points in Arizona, with Blake Masters down by just 2; Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano each down 2 points in Pennsylvania; Lee Zeldin down 5 in the New York governor’s race; Tiffany Smiley down 3 in the Washington Senate race; Brian Kemp up 7 and Herschel Walker up 1 in Georgia; Ted Budd up 3 in North Carolina; Gerald Malloy down 7 in the Vermont Senate race, with governor Phil Scott up by 53; and Republicans up 6 in the generic ballot. . . .

As Cahaly told me, the most common question he gets from poll respondents is, “How long will this take?” Ordinary, average Americans may be willing to answer a seven-question survey while they’re making dinner for the kids or between innings of the ballgame, but the longer a survey is, the more the sample will be dominated by people who are highly politically engaged, highly educated, extremely online, or just lonely and happy to talk to a stranger on the phone. Cahaly scoffed at seeing polls reporting that half or more of the sample has a college degree, when no statewide electorate in the country will look like that.

On the menu today: President Biden told 60 Minutes, “The pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” The problem is that a bunch of his administration’s policy and budgetary priorities — including the student-loan-forgiveness plan! — are based on the premise that the pandemic is not over. Grandpa gets confused, and once again, the president’s words and his administration’s actual policies are no more than distant cousins. Elsewhere, we say farewell to a friend.

Biden’s All-Purpose Pandemic

You may have noticed that Joe Biden doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what he says until after he says it — e.g., “minor incursion,” “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” “You ain’t black,” his repeated insistence that the U.S. has an established commitment to defend Taiwan where one doesn’t exist, etc. This past weekend, Biden’s habit of blurting out the first thing that pops into his mind once again made a hash of his administration’s policies.

In that 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Biden was eager to take a victory lap, boasting:

The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so, I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.

The problem is that several Biden-administration policies rest upon the argument that the pandemic is not over. Much like Schrödinger’s cat being both simultaneously alive and dead, the pandemic is both over and not over, depending upon what Biden and his administration need at any given moment.

As our Charlie Cooke observed, this off-the-cuff comment abrogates the entire justification for Biden’s student-loan-debt cancellation:

Why does Biden’s statement matter so much? I’ll tell you: It matters because the memo that the Biden administration released to justify his order rested entirely upon there being an ongoing emergency, and because, as Biden has just confirmed, there is no ongoing emergency.

Back in August, Biden’s lawyers argued with half-straight faces that the 2003 HEROES Act — which, as Bloomberg Law has noted, was passed not as a generalized enabling act but “to help borrowers serving in the military in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks” — could be twisted to apply to any national emergency, including pandemics such as Covid-19. This, of course, was nonsense. Among the specific problems with Biden’s argument was that the 2003 HEROES Act does not cover debt cancelation (i.e., transference to taxpayers); that its “direct economic hardship” language does not allow for mass relief; that the application of its “or national emergency” language clearly violates the major questions doctrine; and that the administration’s insistence that the act was designed to allow the executive branch “to act quickly should a situation arise that has not been considered” was flatly contradicted by the fact that the president waited until two-and-a-half years into the pandemic before acting, and then gave relief to the most privileged people in America. But, even if one were to ignore all that, one could still not get past the fact that the powers to which Biden laid claim can be applied only when there is an active emergency, and that the active emergency Biden is citing has now passed.

The U.S. federal government’s official position is that a public-health emergency is still ongoing. The Department of Health and Human Services has stated it will give 60 days’ notice before ending the state of emergency. And yet, HHS secretary Xavier Becerra, caught between his department’s policies and health experts on one hand and his boss on the other, issued a statement in response to Biden’s 60 Minutes remarks declaring that declaring that, “The president is correct.”

The president says the pandemic is over, yet his administration is keeping the state of emergency in effect and apparently the plan is to hope that no one notices.

Here’s the administration, laying out its budget request for next year, 18 days ago:

Second, our COVID-19 response efforts continue to require additional funding. . . . While we have made tremendous progress in our ability to protect against and treat COVID-19, we must stay on our front foot. Doing so requires additional resources, which is why today we are updating our previous funding request. The updated request is for $22.4 billion to meet immediate short-term domestic needs, including testing; accelerate the research and development of next-generation vaccines and therapeutics; prepare for future variants; and support the global response to COVID-19. This funding is vital to our ability to protect and build on the progress we’ve made.

The president says the pandemic is over, but he needs another $22 billion to fight it.

Twelve days ago, White House officials told Politico that they were bracing for a perilous winter, and that “COVID is not over and our response continues to be active, comprehensive, and led out of the White House. That is not changing right now or soon.”

Biden’s Department of Justice is still fighting in court to defend the CDC’s authority to issue mask requirements on airplanes.

Both on the campaign trail and in the early days of his presidency, Biden pledged that he would always follow the science and listen to the experts. Apparently, Biden didn’t consult with Dr. Anthony Fauci before declaring the pandemic to be over.

“We are not where we need to be if we are going to quote ‘live with the virus’ because we know we are not going to eradicate it,” Fauci said Monday. “We must be aware,” he said later, “that it is likely, that with the combination of the evolution of variants as well as the seasonal aspects that as we get into this coming late fall and winter, it is likely that we will see another variant emerge. And there’s already on the horizon one that looks suspicious that it might start to evolve as another variant, and that’s the BA.2.75.2.”

Also note that the administration is trying to get people to receive their updated Omicron boosters, in a rollout that the New York Times characterized as “methodical but muted.” Unsurprisingly, people are less motivated to go out and get their fourth shot than they were to get the first three. How motivated will people be to get them now that the president has appeared on television and declared that, “The pandemic is over”?

Finally, while the cases are down, it is worth noting that they were relatively low in September 2021, too, and then in late autumn and winter, the Omicron wave arrived and cases and hospitalizations spiked to their all-time highs. A year ago at this time, cases were on the downward slope, after a rise in southern states, where people were spending more time indoors in air conditioning.

Between past infections (more than 95 million reported cases since the start of the pandemic), vaccinations, and boosters, there are probably very few Americans who don’t have any protection against the virus at all. Most of us will be fine, and maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll realize your most recent infection was asymptomatic.

But the cold weather makes people spend more time indoors, which means that they are closer together, and all kinds of contagious viruses spread faster and more easily — this is why winter is called cold-and-flu season. We’re going to have more Covid-19 cases this winter; hopefully, an overwhelming number will be mild, indistinguishable from the usual mundane winter cold, and won’t require hospitalization. But we still have the elderly and immunocompromised among us, and like with any viral infection, they may well have a harder time fighting it off.

Considering the track record of this president — who assured us that the surge of migrants at the border was a routine seasonal pattern, that the Afghan army was well-trained and well-equipped and deserved our confidence, that we wouldn’t see helicopters evacuating people from the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan, that inflation was transitory, that the U.S. would not enter a recession, that the supply-chain crisis didn’t occur, that Covid testing would be easy and plentiful last winter, and that the infant-formula shortage would get resolved quickly — maybe he should avoid confident declarations that the pandemic is over.

If the measuring stick of a pandemic being over was the virus’ influence on daily life, then the beginning of the end of this pandemic came at the tail of the Omicron wave, and the end itself came with the with lifting of the Covid-testing requirement for international travel in June. (You know what moment I would choose to characterize the end of the pandemic? When Virginia’s state legislative Democrats surrendered to Glenn Youngkin on school mask mandates.)

We know why Biden doesn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. You never know when he’ll give a “four or five days ago, man” to George Stephanopolous, a “You’re being a wise guy” to Lester Holt, or rambling remarks about interracial couples in commercials to Jimmy Kimmel. Joe Biden is not who he used to be, physically or mentally, and he wasn’t the most mentally or verbally disciplined guy even back when he was in his prime. He’s not going to get any better after he turns 80 this November.

ADDENDUM: It had been too long since I had chatted with Greg Pollowitz, who used to write for us here at NR before moving on to Twitchy. And now I won’t get that chance. The world lost a good one earlier this week, and it will be a sadder, less snarky, less funny, less sharp-eyed place without him.

On the menu today: A British historian offers a poignant statement about the British “silent majority,” standing in line for 24 hours or more to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II. Closer to home, both Republicans and Democrats believe they’re the voice of the “silent majority” and that the midterms will bring a stinging rebuke to the opposition party. But there’s good reason to think that neither party represents much more than a brief, tenuous majority — and that talk of a “silent majority” is only politically consequential if that silent majority is willing to show up and make its voice heard at the ballot box.

The ‘Silent Majority’ Matters More If It’s a Voting Majority

The notion that your view is much more popular than it seems, and that it is shared by a large group of people in a country or region who do not express their opinions publicly, is a deeply reassuring one. The belief that you are part of a “silent majority” means you’re not alone or part of a shrinking minority. It means that the opposition’s power is ephemeral, and its popularity is illusory. The opposition has only temporarily won by being louder and more outspoken than you and your allies. You and those like you — mild-mannered, humble, reserved, laconic — actually outnumber them by a wide margin, but the public, and often the media, misinterpret the state of public opinion by paying attention to the noisiest and most shrill voices.

When you are part of a silent majority, a correction or comeuppance is always just around the corner.

Sometimes there really is a silent majority; the fact that people have been willing to stand in line for 24 hours or more to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II indicates that there was a widespread, deep, and abiding affection for the queen that wasn’t easily captured by public-opinion polls. Across the Atlantic, British TV host, archeologist, historian, and author Neil Oliver offered a poignant and articulate assessment of what the country was witnessing in this mass grief:

I wonder if it’s a glimpse, at least in part, of the silent majority we hear so much about, but seldom see. It would be wrong to generalize, to imagine we could know the motivations of every person in that long line, but so many people moving as one, in the same direction, at the same time, surely suggests something shared. My hunch, for what it is worth, is that many are also grieving the passing of the world they grew up in — a world of long-lived certainties — old certainties that seem to have died too at some point in the past few years.

Over and over again, the silent majority, whoever they are, wherever they are, seem to defy expectations, much to the annoyance and frustration of those who wish they would simply disappear, once and for all. Brexit defied those expectations; so too an 80-seat majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. The silent majority won’t do what they’ve been told, that much is clear.

They are silent, that majority, but they are still there, silent yes, and stubborn too, and from time to time they stand up and make their point about what Britain means to them, indeed, what they mean by Britain, and British, and how they want things to be. I say this is one of those times — and what those people, some of them at least, are making clear, not by words, but by deeds, is that they want the way things used to be — and could still be, should still be.

Here in the U.S., Richard Nixon popularized the phrase, and the term popped up again in the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and the 1994 Republican Revolution. Donald Trump even adopted the slogan intermittently, both on the stump and on Twitter.

Was Trump the voice of a silent majority? He did overperform his polling numbers in both 2016 and 2020. In my neck of the woods, Fairfax County, Va., Trump won 168,401 votes cast in 2020, and Trump yard signs were few and far between. Joe Biden, meanwhile, won more than 419,000 votes, and believe me, it seemed like every last one of those people had a Biden yard sign. No doubt, there are quiet Republicans or silent Trump supporters who only make their views known on Election Day.

But the results suggest that Trump stood for more of a silent plurality. On Trump’s watch, Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the White House, had fewer elected governors, and lost about 245 state legislative seats across the country — while still enjoying an overall majority of legislative seats (about 54 percent).

Democrats often contend that they’re the real silent majority, and that’s disputable, too. Biden won several key states by margins of less than one percentage point — Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin — by under one percentage point, and he fell just short of winning a majority of votes cast in each of them. He won exactly 50 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania and 50.1 percent in Nevada. Democrats only won 50 Senate seats, for the slimmest Senate “majority” possible, and with 222 House seats at the beginning of this cycle, this was the smallest House Democratic majority since the 1870s.

Sometimes, Democrats contend that the true “silent majority” is nonvoters, and that those individuals are more likely to support the Democratic Party’s policies. The fact that Trump did well while bringing in new voters in both 2016 and 2020 suggests that this is an overgeneralization. (Among 2020 voters who hadn’t voted in 2016 or 2018, Biden barely won, 49 percent to 47 percent.)

After the 2014 midterms served up another shellacking of the Democrats, President Obama said, “To everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.” Obama was consoling himself with the notion that if every registered voter had chosen to vote, his party would have done much better. But that’s not how our system works. If you want your side to have a governing majority and to enact its preferred policies, you have to get up off the couch and vote.

(Why should the views of nonvoters carry as much weight as those who did their civic duty and voted? Not voting is a de facto acceptance of the status quo.)

If your silent majority doesn’t show up to vote in large numbers, it doesn’t have that much say in how this country is governed. We could even argue that a silent majority that doesn’t vote might as well not exist at all.

Recent elections have given each party a little bit of evidence to contend that its support is broader and deeper than public-opinion surveys would suggest. Last year, Republicans surprised many by winning big in Virginia, nearly knocking off a heavily favored Democratic incumbent in New Jersey, and winning a slew of down-ticket races and ballot-initiative fights. This year, Democrats surprised many by resoundingly defeating the Kansas abortion referendum and by winning a closely watched special House election in New York, thus allowing them to claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given them new strength in unexpected places.

It is likely that each party is fooling itself about how popular it is. When surveys ask the views of all adults, no individual national politician or party’s approval rating is particularly high. Maybe that silent majority doesn’t like to answer the phone or answer a lot of questions from pollsters. There are also, of course, the many past races in which the final results differed wildly from pre-election polling — we all remember the reelection bids of Senator Ron Johnson in 2016 and Senators Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham in 2020. But we can extrapolate too much from the most vivid polling failures; we remember those races because the polls were so far off from the final results. In Michigan last cycle, incumbent Democratic senator Gary Peters won by a smaller margin than the final polls suggested, but nobody is all that shocked if an incumbent who is ahead by about five percentage points ends up winning by 1.6 percentage points.

If a silent majority is going to hand Joe Biden and the Democrats a stinging rebuke, it must show up — and the time to show up is coming soon. In Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia, early voting starts Friday. Absentee ballots are being mailed out this week in Wyoming. Early voting starts about a week from now in Illinois and Michigan, and as well as in more states, week by week.

As Yogi Berra famously said, “It gets late early out there.”

Tax Hikes for Thee, but Not for Me

As a follow-up to Friday’s edition, Morning Jolt reader Matt observes that the tax increase that Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert praised in his August essay on LinkedIn is a 15 percent minimum tax on corporate profits for businesses that earn at least $1 billion a year. Patagonia’s annual revenue ranges from $100 million to about $200 million. In other words, Patagonia was calling for a tax increase it was unlikely to ever have to pay.

ADDENDA: Thanks to Gilion at Rose City Reader, who noticed the, er, unusual opening sentence of Gathering Five Storms — “By every measure, the operation was a success, but it marked the first time Katrina Leonidivna had ever vomited on her target” — and who wrote, “Hubby read the first two and liked them. They are fast-paced, wise-cracking thrillers set right this minute.”

Yesterday’s Jets v. Browns game ended on such a stunning, quick, and unlikely reversal, I can’t even bring myself to trash-talk Cleveland Browns fans. It is as if the football gods decided to smite all of Cleveland for one group of fans’ particularly tasteless display in the pregame tailgating, relating to the scandals involving suspended quarterback DeShawn Watson. (If you saw pictures of it on social media, you know; if you haven’t seen pictures of it, you would probably rather not.) To my readers in northern Ohio, it’s just week two. To my Jet-fan readers . . . doesn’t it feel weird for everything to go right for once?