RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democrats-2018-senate-candidates-trouble-poll/

Insert all the appropriate caveats: It’s only early May, this is one poll, candidate quality matters, we don’t know what big issues or scandals or events will alter the political landscape between now and November, etcetera.

But this poll from Morning Consult should have the National Republican Senate Committee doing cartwheels, as this is a terrific time to be a GOP challenger with a “it’s time for a change” message, running in a red state against a Democrat incumbent. The “deserves reelection” numbers for these incumbents are abysmal:
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Does this mean that those Democratic incumbents are toast? Nope. A bunch of these senators have managed to hang on in much tougher political environments than this. But it is conceivable that in a tumultuous year with low presidential approval ratings and a ton of House Republican retirements, the GOP does pretty well in the Senate races.

Indiana (May 8) Democrat Senator Joe Donnelly is up for re-election. The Republicans are embroiled in a nasty fight, and a Trumpian Mike Braun may upend them. Also Republican Gregg Pence brother of Vice President Pence is running in District 6.

Ohio (May 8) Terminally boring Republican governor John Kasich is retiring and Dennis Kucinich (remember him?) is among the challengers. Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown is seeking reelection and so far appears safe.

West Virginia (May 8) Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, who was opposed to the Obama Iran deal is facing a tough fight.

Idaho (May 15) Republican Governor Butch Otter is term limited and retiring. A Republican is likely to win.

Nebraska (May 15) Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) is pretty safe for reelection.

Oregon (May 15) Democrat Governor Kate Brown appears safe for re-election.

Pennsylvania (May 15) Democrat Senator Bob Casey Jr.is a safe bet for re-election.

Arkansas (May 22) Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson is another safe bet for re-election.

Georgia (May 22) Republican Governor Nathan Deal is retiring with three worthy Republicans vying to replace him.

Kentucky (May 22) Republican Senator Rand Paul and Republican Senator Mitch McConnell are not running this year. There are five Republicans and one Democrat running for re-election to Congress.

TEXAS (May 22) Republicans Ted Poe, Jeb Hensarling, Joe Barton , Lamar Smith , Blake Farenthold are retiring. New faces will emerge from the primaries. Republicans Sam Johnson , John Culberson , Michael McCaul , Pete Olson , Will Hurd , Roger Williams , John Carter and Pete Sessions will see who their challengers are.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/01/indiana-senate-republicans-messer-rokita-braun-560708

GOP Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita — personal and political rivals going back to their college days — have been locked in a bitter two-way fight for more than a year for the right to take on one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats seeking reelection this fall.

Then along came Mike Braun.

The self-funding businessman emerged seemingly out of nowhere last fall and is now on the brink of dispatching Rokita and Messer by portraying them as a pair of interchangeable D.C. swamp creatures. Powering Braun’s effort is nearly $6 million of his own money that he’s loaned or given to his campaign to capture the nomination to face Sen. Joe Donnelly in the fall.

If Braun prevails next week — he is seen as the nominal favorite and has vastly outspent his opponents — it would stand as one of the first real surprises in a Republican primary this election cycle. It would also serve as a blunt demonstration of how anti-Washington, anti-incumbent sentiment could shape the outcome of the November elections.

“There’s not a lot of daylight between any of them on the issues,” GOP pollster Christine Matthews, who served as a strategist for former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, said of the three candidates. “What Braun has been able to do is say, ‘The difference with me is I’m not a professional politician.’”

Take a gander at the Democrat supposedly in line to oust Devin Nunes By Monica Showalter

According to a top polling forecaster Larry Sabato, House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes is no longer in a “safe” seat for re-election. He might just lose his seat to a Democrat named Andrew Janz.

According to The Hill:

Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics moved Nunes’s seat to “likely Republican” as his Democratic challenger, Fresno County Deputy District Attorney Andrew Janz, continues to have fundraising success.

Nunes, a staunch defender of President Trump, is still considered a favorite in the race, but the Crystal Ball notes that he will likely face a stronger challenge than expected[.]

Now, anything could happen, I suppose, and Sabato was right in forecasting Donald Trump’s victory. But with the press drumbeat about the supposed “great blue wave” next November, I am suspicious that this might just be psychological warfare to boost Nunes’s opponent.

Start with Andrew Janz, who, far from being a Bernie Sanders-style firebrand standing in stark contrast to the conservative standard of Nunes, is actually a mealy-mouthed milquetoast.

The press sees strength in his candidacy, despite his not being a strong candidate, based on the fact that he has raised a lot of money. Yeah, sure.

Let’s start with the money. According to OpenSecrets, Janz has raised $1 million from contributors – impressive, yes. Nunes, however, has raised $2.5 million. Advantage: Nunes.

At a time of ugly race-baiting in politics, a good laugh is like a ray of sunshine. For the funniest candidate of the day, conservatives owe a big vote of thanks to a gentleman named Shiva Ayyadura (pronounced ah-yah-DOO-rah) in the Commonwealth of Mass., a man who is both a real Indian (from India!) and a real American (from America!) – unlike Fauxcahontas Warren, the current senator from that benighted state.

So Mr. A. is running against Liz (Fakey) Warren for Senate, and naturally, the local leftist thugs are trying to shut him up.

Liz Warren is the most ridiculous senator since Foghorn Leghorn, because she is such an obvious affirmative action cheat. When anybody objects that she doesn’t have an particle of Indian DNA, her answer is to accuse other people of racism. (Of course!)

Well, this is a chance for payback.

The left has sliced and diced U.S. voters into blocs of blacks against whites, women against men, young against old, Amerindians against other Americans, on and on, regardless of sanity and common sense. The media protect race-baiting Democrats, which is why American politics has gone mad.

GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) — It took a big money push from the Republican Party, tweets by the president and the support of the state’s current and former governors, but the GOP held onto an Arizona U.S. House seat they would have never considered endangered in any other year.

Tuesday’s narrow victory by Republican Debbie Lesko over a Democratic political newcomer sends a big message to Republicans nationwide: Even the reddest of districts in a red state can be in play this year. Early returns show Lesko winning by about 5 percentage points in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District where Donald Trump won by 21 percentage points.

“Debbie will do a Great Job!” the president tweeted Wednesday.

The former state senator defeated Hiral Tipirneni, a former emergency room physician who had hoped to replicate surprising Democratic wins in Pennsylvania, Alabama and other states in a year where opposition to President Trump’s policies have boosted the party’s chances in Republican strongholds.

Republican political consultant Chuck Coughlin called Tuesday’s special election margin “not good” for national Republicans looking at their chances in November.

“They should clean house in this election,” said Coughlin, longtime adviser to former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. “There’s a drag on the midterms for Republican candidates that’s being created by the national narrative. And it would be very hard to buck that trend if you’re in swing districts, much less close districts, if you can’t change that narrative between now and November.”

When D.C. Councilmember Trayon White came under fire for blaming Jews for controlling the weather, dumping a Holocaust Museum tour and donating to an anti-Semitic Nation of Islam event, the loudest voice in his defense came once again from the Working Families Party. The WFP is a spinoff of ACORN.

Rafael Shimunov, the WFP’s Creative Director, claimed that each exhibit of the Holocaust Museum was a “new trap” as the “under educated Black man was followed by rich white people waiting for him to say something offensive.” Shimunov, a member of the anti-Israel hate group If Not Now, had previously also defended Keith Ellison and Linda Sarsour over their own anti-Semitic comments and history.

White isn’t an “under educated Black man” victimized by the Holocaust Museum’s exhibit “trap.” He has an MA in Public Administration and a BA in Business Administration. He’s a bigot. Not a victim.

But why would a senior figure in the WFP waste his time defending Trayon White’s anti-Semitism?

Before Trayon White made headlines for his bizarre claims of Jewish weather control, he had been backed by lefty activist groups that are political allies of the WFP. White had been endorsed by D.C. for Democracy along with other anti-incumbent insurgents. He also received the backing of Jews United for Justice. There aren’t a whole lot of Jews in Trayon’s district, but, despite its name, JUFJ isn’t really a Jewish group. Like the WFP, it’s a Soros organization. And it kept trying to cover for Trayon.

But this sort of thing keeps happening to the Working Families Party.

Laurie Cumbo, a WFP endorsed New York City Council candidate, explained black anti-Semitic violence by claiming that Jews with “bags of money” were trying to force black people out.

She is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough,” said the president of the United States in 2013. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”

That would be former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, and now the state’s junior U.S. senator. As it happens, Barack Obama was not the first prominent Democrat to be dazzled by the UC Berkeley beauty.

As speaker of the California State Assembly from 1980 to 1995, Willie Brown was by far the Golden State’s most powerful shot-caller. In 1994 Brown, 60, met Kamala Harris, a full 30 years his junior, and she became “the Speaker’s new steady,” Brown’s “girlfriend” and “frequent companion.” The two-year relationship worked out well for Harris.

Willie Brown appointed Harris to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which paid $97,088 a year. She served six months and Brown then appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, which met only once a month but paid Harris $72,000. Call it “poontronage,” a politician’s appointment of his steady girlfriend, frequent companion, and main squeeze to a lucrative government position requiring little work.

Brown also raised money for Harris in her run for San Francisco district attorney in 2003. She defeated her former boss Terence Hallinan but promised never to seek the death penalty. She kept that promise the next year when gang member David Hill used an AK-47 to gun down San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza. Even Dianne Feinstein took Harris to task, as she alienated police across the state.

In her 2009 Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make us Safer, written with ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, Harris found the number of nonviolent offenders “truly staggering” and put them at the top of her “crime pyramid.” The next year, Harris ran for state attorney general and the Sacramento Bee endorsed her Republican rival Steve Cooley. Harris won by less than one percentage point, but as the Bee saw it, “she could be more aggressive on public corruption cases, though her handlers might worry that would cause friction with fellow Democratic politicians.”

The new span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge—10 years late, $5 billion over budget and riddled with safety issues—had whistleblowers calling for a criminal investigation. Duly apprised of the fathomless corruption, Harris failed to launch any criminal probe. With voter fraud and violent crime she simply looked the other way.

Imagine a combination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and you’ve got Kamala Harris, the current seat-warming senator from California who, like Obama, is using the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body as a resume-puncher before swiftly moving on to bigger things: the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination. Even as a nobody senator, she’s been the subject of dozens, perhaps scores of speculative stories about her future, so now — lest they build her up too quickly — Politico and other Democrat cheerleaders are cautioning her to get her ducks in order before heading out on the hustings:

Kamala Harris has been called “the female Barack Obama.” She’s built a national following with her outspoken criticism of Donald Trump and prolific fundraising for fellow Democrats. But the California senator’s rapid rise — she’s just 15 months into her first term — has created an awkward issue: Even as progressives tout her as one of the top 2020 contenders, Harris remains something of a mystery back home.

Her approval ratings are solid, but not stratospheric. And 28 percent of California voters say they don’t know or have no opinion about Harris, according to a recent Morning Consult poll — placing her in the bottom 10 of name recognition among U.S. senators in their home states. A Berkeley IGS Poll in September found California voters — by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 49 percent to 22 percent — would rather Harris stay in the Senate than run for president in 2020.

Since Jon Ossoff nearly snatched away a safe Republican congressional seat in suburban Atlanta last summer, Democrats have been certain a “Blue Wave” midterm election is coming.

Democrats are hyping every electoral pickup—an Alabama Senate seat, a close Pennsylvania congressional race, a Wisconsin supreme court justice—as proof that American voters are repelled by President Trump and will return them to power this November. A special counsel, an onscreen prostitute, and a rabid niche of anti-Trump Republicans are helping boost those prospects.

The tide seems even more favorable for Democrats as a record number of incumbent Republicans, including the speaker of the House, will not run for re-election. But less than seven months out, a strong undercurrent is pulling the Blue Wave out to political sea. A trove of new polling shows the once-formidable lead Democrats had in the generic congressional ballot is nearly gone.

Wedge issues, such as gun control and immigration, are not working in Democrats’ favor. In fact, thanks to Trump even independent voters believe Democrats are using the children of illegal immigrants for political purposes rather than legitimately protecting their welfare. Although Trump’s job approval ratings remain underwater among Democrats and Independents, voters give him props for a number of achievements, not the least of which is a strong economy, proving it is politically possible to dislike a man but like what he does.
Let’s Look at Those Polls in Greater Depth