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There Will Be Blood

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There's a panic in the air as the midterms quickly approach.  It is now just two months before that fateful day in November where voters get to throw the bums out of Congress and their states as well.  The only problem is that the retention rate is usually pretty high, and very rarely do we see the upheaval we imagine.

Social media is leveling the field to a certain degree.  It no longer takes a huge war chest to be competitive in a campaign.  But, some persons still get out there the old-fashioned way, going door to door as Beto is doing in Texas.  He has Ted Cruz sweating bullets, calling on no less than Donald Trump himself to get him over the finish line in what has become a very close race.  David Hogg wants Texans to remember what Trump said about Ted during the 2016 campaign.  You might call it a billboard outside Lubbock, Texas.

Across the country, many Congressional races are unusually close.  The fact that Ted has to defend himself means that conservative PACs can't spend as heavily unseating vulnerable Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp or Bill Nelson.  This is an election where Republicans should gain seats in the Senate, given the Democrats have to defend so many seats.  Seeing Ted having to battle an upstart like Beto O'Rourke, who has firmly aligned himself with labor, is not what Texas conservatives expected.

Beto has helped to take some of the heat off Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who the Republicans have been trying to turn into the poster girl of the new Democratic Left.  The Conservative PACs had been making Nancy Pelosi into the Wicked Witch of the West, but have been so overwhelmed by all these new "Democratic Socialists" that they don't know which way to turn.

Fear is the prime motivating factor for conservatives, but how much of a base does Trump have left at this point?  His favorite poll, Rasmussen, only shows that 35% of Americans strongly approve of his performance.  Other polls have that number at less than 30 per cent.  That might be enough to hold onto reliably Republican seats, but when it comes to close races, that might prove to be a tipping point in favor of Democrats.

The midterms are generally seen as a referendum on the President's performance and typically the party in power loses seats.  Fact is many of these elections are won at the local level, particularly US Representative seats.  It doesn't matter too much where you stand on Trump or Pelosi, local voters want a person who represents them.  Cortez will win her reliably Democratic district despite her "socialist" roots, just as Duncan Hunter will probably hold onto his reliably Republican California seat despite the corruption charges being leveled against him.  What's interesting is that there are far less "safe seats" this time around for Republicans than in any previous election.

The special elections illustrated that point very well with close races in Georgia, Ohio and Arizona, and Conor Lamb pulling off a stunning upset in a conservative district of Pennsylvania.  At the state level, Democrats scored some big turnovers in the assemblies, most notably in Virginia.  For once, Democrats appear to be tailoring their candidates to their specific districts, rather than conceding conservative districts to Republicans.

Trump and his allies would like us to think there will be riots in the street if the Democrats win the House in November.  This is probably the first time a President ever threatened violence as a means of scaring persons into voting for his party.  This appears to be the only card he has left in trying to strong arm Evangelical leaders into getting their parishioners out to vote.  This is wrong on so many levels.  Not only does it represent a clear breach of the separation of church and state, but pastors should be above this petty call to violence.  They are acting like this is ancient Rome, although Trump resembles Nero moreso than he does a Christian warrior.


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