Don Surber
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Thursday, October 27, 2022
DC media learns the wave is coming
This has not been a good year for bald Democrat Senate candidates, has it? John Fetterman crashed and burned in his only debate. Now word comes from DC that Mark Kelly’s re-election bid in Arizona is in trouble.Real Clear Politics of course said that months ago because the people who run the site know what they are doing.
But DC is filled with national reporters who never leave the DC area. They talk among themselves and their deep state sources — gossips. They know everything.
This morning, their world was shattered when the Cook Report flipped Kelly’s race from Leans Democrat to tossup. You could almost see the latte spit-takes as they read the news.
The Hill reported, “Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate and governors editor, said the nonpartisan election handicapper was shifting the race back to a toss up because recent private polling has shown the race between Sen. Mark Kelley (D) and Republican Blake Masters tightening up despite the fact that Democrats are outspending Republicans in the state by a 2-to-1 margin.”
Nonpartisan is DC-speak for a Democrat organization that gets along with RINOs.
The reason Cook and the rest missed it is they hate Trump. The reason they hate Trump is they realize making America great again makes DC less relevant. These cats are not stupid. Most of them are highly intelligent. They just are too lazy to leave DC.
They looked at Arizona, saw Biden carried it, and wrote off Blake Masters as a Trump supporter which meant he was doomed.
Thus the Cook Report change shocked them.
The Daily Beast reported, “When Arizona Republicans nominated Blake Masters to run against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), there were signs it marked the beginning of the end of the GOP’s chances to flip one of their most coveted Senate seats.
“The 36-year old protégé of far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Masters made it through a contested primary with the backing of Donald Trump. He’d run a campaign so hard-edged and stridently Trumpian that it bordered on dystopian, in the words of Chuck Coughlin, a GOP pollster in Arizona.”
Here is what they missed: Trump lost by a mere 12,000 votes.
That is why another Trumplican, Kari Lake, appears to be rolling her way to the governor’s office in Arizona.
Politico also flipped the Arizona Senate race to a tossup.
It said, “Masters is being buoyed by the electoral environment and relative strength at the top of the ticket. While it’s true that Kelly and Lake are running stronger campaigns than their opponents, Lake and Masters are running as more of a ticket than the Democrats. Billboards and yard signs dotted around the Phoenix metro area read ‘VOTE LAKE & BLAKE.’ And at Lake’s well-attended campaign events, she often shouts out the Senate candidate in her stump speech.”
The name checking helps and could carry him across the finish line.
In explaining its flip to tossup in the Arizona Senate race, the Cook Report said, “All of this has been despite the fact that many national Republicans had begun to write off this contest and GOP nominee Blake Masters’s lackluster campaign and candidate baggage. The writing was on the wall, or so it appeared after the McConnell-backed Senate Leadership Fund pulled their remaining ad buys from the state. A patchwork group of coalitions have made up some of the distance, including groups backed by the Heritage Foundation — and Masters’s mentor, billionaire Peter Theil, did finally pledge another $5 million to the race after having spent heavily to help Masters win the primary.”
McConnell pulled the money not because he thought Masters would lose. McConnell fears Masters will win and become another vote in the Republican caucus against McConnell and his leadership team.
Real Clear Politics has called Arizona a tossup all along. Its projections list Arizona, Georgia and Nevada flipping red to give Republicans a 53-47 Senate majority. That’s old news which DC ignored.
But the Cook Report flip today was like the ride of Paul Revere: The Red Wave Is Coming! The Red Wave Is Coming!
The race Cook Report and everyone else is missing is the Alaska Senate race. Sure, a Republican will win but there is a night-and-day difference between Kelly Tshibaka and incumbent Lisa Murkowski.
The Washington state Senate race is getting some attention.
The Daily Wire reported, “Democrats have poured millions of dollars into the Washington Senate race, a deep-blue state that recent polls suggest Republicans may take back the seat that a GOP member hasn’t occupied since 2001.
Sen. Pat Murray, the state’s Democrat leader seeking a sixth term, has been campaigning against political newcomer Republican Tiffany Smiley.”
But Arizona is where the action is today in DC. To its credit, the Daily Beast actually had a reporter in Scottsdale, Arizona, for its report. It found respect for the incumbent but the votes were for the Republican.
The Daily Beast reported, “While strategists in both parties increasingly see control of the evenly split chamber hinging on three states—Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia—the outcome in Arizona will have significant implications.
“Republicans don’t strictly need to beat Kelly to win the majority, but if they do, a GOP majority of 52 seats or more could not only stymie Biden’s agenda but perhaps block it entirely. If elected, Masters is poised to inject a new style of right-wing politics to the Senate, displacing a compromise-oriented Democrat senator.”
Kelly voted with Biden 100% of the time. Democrats seek compromise only when they are the minority party.
It is not a good year for Democrats, especially the bald ones.
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Posted by Don Surber at Thursday, October 27, 2022
