First, it turns out that a major “ethical investment” venture capitalist was caught up in the scandal:
One of Silicon Valley’s most prominent private equity investors — and one of the tech sector’s leading proponents of how to invest ethically and for social impact — has been charged in an explosive college admissions scandal that was revealed Tuesday, March 12.
Prosecutors charged Bill McGlashan, a founder and managing partner at TPG Growth — which has made landmark investments in companies like Uber and Airbnb — on fraud allegations for trying to engineer the admission of his son to the University of Southern California.
What is particularly damaging for TPG is that McGlashan has positioned himself as a leading voice in Silicon Valley for social responsibility. In addition to overseeing TPG’s late-stage growth investing arm, McGlashan has partnered with other conscious leaders like Bono and Laurene Powell Jobs at The Rise Fund, a TPG investing arm that tries to make the world a better place through investments in things like dairy farms in India.
Want to guess what political party McGlashan donates to? That’s right: Democrats. He gave the maximum amount to Obama in 2007, as well as various other Democratic candidates nationwide.
Pretty much the same giving pattern as indicted actress Felicity Huffman:
You know what's funny?
I bet like 90% of the affluent parents indicted in #CollegeGate are liberals.
Bill Clinton once said that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to get ahead. It turns out that there are certain people who, having already gotten ahead, no longer feel a need to play by the rules anymore. These people seem to think that all else is secondary to merely getting their spawn into the strata of the elite by any means necessary.
In 2014, former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick wrote in Time magazine, “whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.”
Whether or not Bernick’s assessment is accurate, many Americans parents believe otherwise, as demonstrated by yesterday’s terrifically bizarre scandal involving a couple of Hollywood celebrities and a slew of lesser-known wealthy parents who bought their children admission to schools like Yale, Stanford, Wake Forest, Georgetown, and others — Including UCLA, the example of prestige Bernick selected.
As many suspected, just about every part of the college admissions process can be rigged to provide a leg up to those who are wealthy and unethical: bribing athletics coaches, faked learning disabilities, sending students copies of the SAT or ACT ahead of time, proctors correcting answers for students before submitting them for scoring, made-up honors and awards, “staged photographs of their children engaged in athletic activity” and falsifying students’ ethnicities and other biographical details to take advantage of affirmative action. (Elizabeth Warren was just ahead of her time, apparently.) This has been going on since at least 2011. Every single one of these students who had their admission obtained through bribes took away an opportunity that could have gone to better, harder-working student with more honest but poorer parents.
The full description is an epic portrait of graft, corruption, elitism, and sleaze that will leave you wanting to burn down the Ivory Tower. The cherry on top? The whole enterprise was granted tax-exempt nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Status since 2013. Those Tea Party groups couldn’t get nonprofit status, but these crooks could.
If you wanted to pour gasoline onto the fires of populism, this is how you do it!
Were those parents crazy? Or were they just astute about the risk-reward analysis and long-term benefits of getting into one of the top 25 schools, instead of one of the top 50 or top 100?
We’ve heard all the stories about the “Harvard mafia.” A few years ago, Ross Douthat wrote “elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”
New York Times writer Amy Chozick shared yesterday, “I was literally told early in my career – by a top magazine editor – ‘Your clips are great, but we really want someone who went to Harvard.’” The replies to her indicate her story is not all that rare. Lots of folks have observed that many big-name journalism institutions run unpaid internship programs that are considered “How to get your foot in the door” — which automatically rules out anyone who can’t afford to provide anywhere from 15 to 40 hours of free labor each week.
Said one mom I know: “I’d get pilloried for saying publicly, but my kids are at a serious disadvantage- straight, white males, middle class income. Colleges want ‘diversity.’ Scholarships for everything but us. Admissions for better schools are limited. It’s so frustrating. Admissions scandal really hits home.”
Part of the realignment that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016 had to do with ordinary Americans who felt they were being left behind by a game rigged against them. How do you think this scandal plays among average voters?
The best remedy to this problem might be to admit that college is, to some degree, a scam. Note that these parents were evidently unconcerned that their kids—who were often coached to fake learning disabilities so they could get more time on the ACT and SAT—might struggle with their course loads. It’s because college is a joke, and it’s easy enough for an academically disinclined grifter—an Olivia Jade, if you will—to get by studying nonsense subjects. They’re paying for the experience and the diploma, not the actual education.
This is a point that Bryan Caplan raises in his excellent book The Case Against Education. Caplan argues that most of the value of a college education is signaling rather than skills. Students don’t learn very much that will be useful to them in the job world, and even if they do, they quickly forget it. But a diploma signals to employers that the diploma-holder is competent in some abstract way—they jumped through a bunch of impressive-looking hoops, and are thus more worthy of a job than people who didn’t. The implication of Caplan’s research is that public funding of higher education is therefore a waste: It doesn’t actually benefit society to subsidize a signaling mechanism if there’s little relevant skill-gaining along the way. It just punishes everybody who, for whatever reason, doesn’t have access to the right hoops.
If we are going to continue to publicly fund higher education, taxpayers might rightly ask whether institutions that receive federal dollars should be permitted to privilege the wealthy, the donor class, the athletes (both faux and actual), and certain racial groups (resulting in abject discrimination against Asians) over applicants who might actually be interested in checking a book out of the library. But if higher education is really just about celebrity scions pretending to play water polo in order to gain admittance to an exclusive partying club, maybe it’s long past time to hit the defund button.
Now some related tweets:
White privilege? Here are some names of people arrested for allegedly giving bribes: Gamal Abdelaziz, Manuel Henriquez, Agustin Huneeus, I-Hin Chen, Homayoun Zadeh. I don't think those people are white. But they are rich. This is rich privilege, not white privilege. https://t.co/pyC3e4CvxE
Been thinking about the role of grade inflation in the college admissions scandal. I suspect parents might not be as motivated to bribe little Petunia’s way into Harvard if she might fail out or risk a transcript riddled with C’s and D’s.
The fake profiles were so extreme that CW-1 would literally alter applicants’ height. In one case, CW-1 asked an employee to create a basketball profile for a boy who wanted to be admitted to USC. Although the boy was 5’5″ (a fact he referenced in an original draft of his personal statement), his final athletic profile stated that he was 6’1″. Though it’s unclear how, exactly, the young man was expected to justify the discrepancy between his stated height and his actual height when he arrived on campus, he was admitted to USC nonetheless.
This week in the clown car update: Spartacus is In and LA mayor Eric Garcetti is Out. Oh, and Oprah’s spiritual advisor joined the race, because why the hell not?
This is the point in campaign cycles when key campaign staffers and donors stop returning the calls of undeclared longshots, either joining up with a declared campaign or waiting for a bigger fish (“Sure, Mike, I think you’d make a great President, but old Joe Biden and I go way back…”). Biden can wait. Bloomberg can wait. O’Rourke has enough residual fawning media afterglow and a big enough contributor list that he can probably wait as well. Beyond them, the train has already sounded the whistle and announced final boarding. There will be another one along in 2023…
538’s weekly roundup. And National Review‘s Jim Geraghty sorts the Democratic candidates by age. “To get a sense of the generational difference, when Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate, Buttigieg, Gabbard, and Castro had not been born yet and O’Rourke was two months old.”
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Maybe. All quiet on the Bennet front.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. Did Biden embrace segregation in 1975? Will being Obama’s Veep inoculate him from charges of racism? We all know the answer to that: If you’re inconvenient for Social Justice Warriors, nothing inoculates you from charges of racism.
Michael Bloomberg has bigger plans for 2020 than running for president. The billionaire and former New York City mayor has been openly dreaming of the White House for 25 years, and spent huge amounts of time and money four times over the past 10 years trying to figure out a way to get himself there.
But he has hesitations about this race, too. He’s not sure there is a realistic space in the Democratic primaries for his centrist record. And he almost certainly won’t run if Joe Biden does, members of his team believe.
Note that “centrist” has now come to mean “not completely insane on law and order issues” in Democratic circles…
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Website. Twitter. Spartacus is in. I predict we see a vicious series of attacks against Booker from a mainstream media desperate to keep him from eating into anointed favorite Kamala Harris’ base. Upgrade from Probably In.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. In an interview with New York magazine, he says the race is all about immigration, Because Trump. I’m sure he wishes it was, but I bet Democratic strategists who can actually read polls dread seeing that happen…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not. Never mind what Hillary herself said last week, Clinton toady John Podesta says she’s not running. Back in the crypt, Grandma Death. Downgrade from “Maybe.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. New York Timesnotices that the appetite for De Blasio rivals the popularity of [spins pop culture reference wheel] New Coke. Assuming the pitchman was still Bill Cosby…
Maryland Representative John K. Delaney: In. He was on Iowa public television, sounding disturbingly normal by Democratic Party chances, so I can only assume he’s toast.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. This week’s obligatory MSM “Tulsi Gabbard is doomed” piece comes via Politico, who claim her campaign is in “disarray.” You know, just like the all those 2017 stories on the Trump White House. Glenn Greenwald goes on to debunk another NBC hit piece: “NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out. “This is where I want to be, and this is a place where we have so much exciting work to finish.”
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Out. Just joined CNN. A downgrade from “Probably Out.”
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Probably in. Says he’s the guy to beat Trump rather than someone “far left.” Compared to any field but this one, Hickenlooper himself is pretty far left himself…
Addition: Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder: Leaning toward a run. Didn’t want to add him, but he’s speaking in Iowa. Maybe threatening to take votes away from Kamala Harris is the only way to get the MSM to do honest reporting on Fast And Furious…
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Leaning toward In. Get’s a semi-fawning profile from NeverTrumper George Will, with a slam at “skateboarding man-child” Beto O’Rourke along the way.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Maybe? Zero buzz.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Maybe? He evidently stopped raising money months ago. Also:
A Facebook Live chat he did in response to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration earlier this month began with about 2,600 viewers. By the end, after an hour of him walking around his El Paso neighborhood trying to show the calm reality of a border town, and looking at the decorations in friends’ homes, and then sitting on a couch and chatting at length, the viewers steadily dropped to just over 1,000.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning toward In. “I’m close to making a decision. I’ll be in New Hampshire tomorrow, so I’m excited for that.” Yes, nothing says “excitement” like midwinter New Hampshire…
Addition: Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. So let me get this straight: Oprah’s not running, but her spiritual advisor is? She most recently placed fourth in a California congressional race, but Team Kamala must be shitting bricks at the possibility that Oprah might endorse her.
Dear God, did the Senate Democrats’ strategy on Brett Kavanaugh backfire on them on an epic scale. I do think that before the Kavanaugh fight, the Democrats were on the path to that “Blue Tsunami.” And then they decided that rerunning the Neil Gorsuch fight wasn’t going to be enough; they had to fully embrace a bunch of accusations that had no supporting witnesses.
Claire McCaskill, gone. Finally. I laid out her devilish luck in yesterday’s Jolt; for at least twelve years, Missouri Republicans yearned for a chance to take her on in a relatively normal political environment with a candidate who wasn’t a walking Superfund site of toxicity. Lo and behold, with no political wind at her back, no good GOP rivals being knocked out by the political equivalent of anvils falling from buildings or alien abductions, Josh Hawley won . . . by about 144,000 votes. The old “Vote liberal for four or five years, veer back to the center in election years” strategy of red-state Democrats finally stopped working.
Taylor Swift could not deliver Tennessee for Phil Bredesen. In retrospect, the hype around the former governor looks like wishful thinking on the part of Democrats. He last won a statewide race in 2006, and as soon as Marsha Blackburn nationalized this race, it was over. Blackburn won by about 245,000 votes last night. You figure that Democrats will have a hard time recruiting a top-tier candidate anytime soon.
Rick Scott won in Florida! Never underestimate this man again. If aliens invade Florida in 2022, Scott will lead the forces of humanity to a narrow upset victory, because that’s what he does every four years — win something that nobody thinks he has a chance to win, by about one percent. Florida Democrats will console themselves that it was so close, but with the high turnout, four-tenths of a percentage point comes out to . . . about 34,000 votes. After the 2000 presidential election, that’s a Florida landslide.
As of this writing, Mike Braun is on pace to win Indiana’s Senate by 10 points, or about 189,000 votes. A lot of people are pointing to this result as a polling failure, but remember that because of Indiana’s strict anti-robocall laws, pollsters survey this state less frequently because they have to use live interviewers. The lesson here is, trust your instincts! A GOP candidate in a longtime Republican-leaning state, the home state of the current vice president, up against a Democrat who won with 50 percent in a presidential year and who votes against Kavanaugh a month before Election Day . . . has a really good chance to win and win comfortably.
Face it, we’re not even that upset that Joe Manchin won in West Virginia. His victory offers the lesson that any red-state Democrat could have improved their chances for reelection by voting for Brett Kavanaugh.
We should give Beto O’Rourke a bit of credit; coming within three points is better than any Democrat running statewide in Texas since . . . Ann Richards, I think? But that’s . . . not a victory, which is a fair expectation when you raise $70 million and spend $60 million. And because of the scale of the turnout, those three points amount to 213,750 votes. Turnout was more than 8.3 million votes, and I recall seeing O’Rourke fans insisting that if turnout surpassed 8 million votes, then their man was certain to win. Guys, there are a lot of Republicans in Texas.
Bad: Nancy Pelosi as Speaker again. Good: Getting to run against Nancy Pelosi again, since she’s now the highest ranking elected Democrat in the country.
I am happy to see the admirable Senator Ted Cruz reelected in Texas, where you can almost buy a Senate race but not quite. I like Senator Cruz a great deal (and I like him even more when he’s not campaigning) but I’d have enjoyed watching a reasonably well-qualified ham sandwich defeat Robert Francis O’Rourke, one of the most insipid and puffed-up figures on the American political scene.
Snip.
The Democrats have gone well and truly ’round the bend. I spent a fair part of last night with Democrats in Portland, Ore. — admittedly, a pretty special bunch of Democrats, Portland being Portland and all. The professional political operators are what they always are — by turns cynical and sanctimonious — but the rank and file seem to actually believe the horsepucky they’ve been fed, i.e., that these United States are about two tweets away from cattle cars and concentration camps. The level of paranoia among the people I spoke to was remarkable.
Fourth, and related: The Democrats don’t seem to understand what it is they are really fighting, which, in no small part, is not the Republicans but the constitutional architecture of the United States. The United States is, as the name suggests, a union of states, which have interests, powers, and characters of their own. They are not administrative subdivisions of the federal government. All that talk about winning x percent of the “national House vote” or the “national Senate vote” — neither of which, you know, exists — is a backhanded way of getting at the fact that they do not like how our governments are organized, and that they would prefer a more unitary national government under which the states are so subordinated as to be effectively inconsequential. They complain that, under President Trump, “the Constitution is hanging by a thread” — but they don’t really much care for the actual order established by that Constitution, and certainly not for the limitations it puts on government power through the Bill of Rights and other impediments to étatism.
“Noun. etatism (usually uncountable, plural etatisms) Total control of the state over individual citizens.”
Overall, Republicans had a tough night Tuesday. When all is said and done, Democrats look to have gained around 35 seats in the House, seven governorships and over 330 state legislators. Yet as rough as it was, it could have been much worse for Republicans. In Barack Obama’s first mid-term in 2010, Republicans picked up 63 House seats and 700 state legislative seats — numbers that were not out of the question for Democrats for a large portion of this cycle. In the Senate, Republicans actually expanded their majority — as it appears they will pick up 3 seats — whereas Democrats lost 6 seats in the 2010 midterms.
In many ways, it was a strange election. If you had told me in August that Democrats were going to win more than 30 House seats, I would have bet a large amount of money that the Senate would also be in play. I would have a difficult time accepting that Florida would elect Ron DeSantis governor and (as it now appears) Rick Scott as senator. The notion that Ohio’s Senate race would fall into the mid-single digits, that Mike DeWine would win the Ohio governor’s race handily, or that Michigan’s Senate race would be decided by fewer than seven points all would have seemed ludicrous. Martha McSally keeping Arizona close (and possibly winning) would not seem possible.
Snip.
1. The GOP got killed in the suburbs. We can place Republican losses into three broad buckets: “perennial swing seats” (Colorado’s 6th, Arizona’s 2nd), “sleeping/problematic candidates” (Oklahoma’s 5th, South Carolina’s 1st), and suburban districts. This last category is by far the broadest, and it accounts for around two-thirds of the Republicans’ losses. This is a significant long-term problem for the party if it continues.
2. This probably doesn’t count as a wave. If you look at the Index I referenced on Monday, our preliminary results suggest that things have moved about 23 points toward Democrats. That’s a substantial shift, but it falls short of even “semi-wave elections” such as 2014 (a shift of 26 points toward Republicans) and 2006 (a movement of 30 points toward Democrats). Obviously, as results trickle in this might shift further, but probably not by much.
2. Money. One of the ways to resolve the tension between what we saw in the House versus the Senate (and to a lesser extent, governorships) is that Democrats had a massive fundraising advantage in the lower chamber. This allowed them to catch a number of incumbent Republicans napping, and to spread the playing field out such that the GOP just had too many brush fires to put out. Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, for example, flipped in part because Michael Bloomberg’s team spent $400,000 on the air in the final week of the election. To the extent we wish to deduce anything about 2020 from these midterms, we should bear in mind that the next election will probably be fought on a more even financial playing field.
Snip.
This all takes place against the backdrop of a booming economy. Finally, it is important to note that Republicans should not have found themselves in this position amid a vibrant economy. It is quite unusual to have a result this bad in a time of peace and prosperity. Some of this is the suburban realignment, but some is driven by Donald Trump’s more extreme actions, which alienate suburban moderates.
On the other hand, if Trump can smooth out the rougher edges that turn suburbanites off, he could prove to be a formidable candidate in 2020. Most of his states from 2016 continued to support Republicans this cycle. But, on the other hand, he hasn’t shown much interest in smoothing out those edges. And if the economy slides into recession, all bets are off.
While Tuesday night was not a complete win for Republicans, there was no blue wave, either. By most measures, Republicans beat the odds of history and nearly everyone’s expectations, while Democrats were left disappointed as the fantasy of Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams and others winning fizzled. Not one new progressive Democrat was successful bursting onto the scene. It will take a few days to process the meaning of this year’s election returns, but the instant analysis is clear: Democrats may have won the House, but Trump won the election.
Let’s look at what won’t be happening, despite the fever dreams of the Democrats. First, there will be no big ticket legislative packages going through. No major immigration reform supporting the highest priorities of either party. No new tax cuts, but also no tax increases. No new gun control legislation. The fact is, these folks will be lucky if they can name a new Post Office.
The President isn’t going to be impeached. The Democrats would need to round up every one of their members in the House to get the ball rolling and too many of them are on record saying that would be too extreme. And even if they managed it in the House there is zero chance of a conviction in the Senate. Donald Trump will finish his first term at a minimum.
The wall isn’t going to be finished. That’s somehow become a badge of honor among Democrats, despite being one of the most doable solutions to immigration problems imaginable. If we’re going to get any money at all for additional wall construction, the new House majority will want a massive pound of flesh in return.
Kurt Schlicter: “Look For Democrats To Blow Their Meager Success By Being Jerks”:
No, they want all #resistance, all of the time, and they are going to do everything they can to appease their looney base by launching investigations and screaming and yelling. That’s not going to help the newbies keep those new House seats in 2020. It’s going to be especially funny when all these rookies who promised the suckers back home they would never vote for that San Francisco liberal monster get strong-armed into casting their very first vote for Mistress Nancy.
And if they decide to obstruct and agitate, then Trump can be in opposition to them and run against the do-nothing House in 2020. Nobody is better than Trump when he has an enemy. I’m kind of hoping the Democrats choose the path of jerkiness just for the nicknames he’ll bestow in his tweets.
Oh, and please, impeach him over Russia Treason Traitor stuff. Please. Toss the Trump in that briar patch and he’ll be president forever.
The national media portrayed Trump as a weight on Republicans. In fact, he was their source of energy. Had the Florida GOP been ambivalent about Trump and kept him out of the state, Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott would have lost. Journalists mocked DeSantis for “tying himself to Trump,” but they now fall silent as it becomes clear that that was perhaps his only winning strategy.
The press propagandized relentlessly for Gillum, who was flush with money from George Soros and Tom Steyer, while kneecapping the scrappier DeSantis over minor lapses, and Gillum still couldn’t win. Notice also the media’s silence about Obama. Yet again the darling of journalists shows himself to be a crappy campaigner for others. In his narcissistic shade nothing grows.
The media’s excited talk of a “blue wave” in Florida never struck me as very convincing as I walked around various cities in Florida. The media’s giddy keenness for Gillum was never reflected in any of the conversations I ever heard. In mid-October, I walked around the Volusia County mall in a MAGA hat as an experiment to test the media’s claims of a spreading anti-Trump backlash. Nobody seemed to care in the slightest. In fact, a self-described independent who said that he “had voted for Jimmy Carter” made a point of walking over to me as I sat in the mall’s food court to express his support for Trump’s policies. “I didn’t vote for him,” he said, “but he is delivering results.”
Dems are currently up 30 seats in the House, which puts them up to 225.
They show North Dakota Democrat incumbent Heidi Heitkamp as gone, which already brings Republicans up to 50 seats with victories in Tennessee (likely) and Texas (even more likely).
The races they have as tossups are:
Arizona: The late John McCain’s seat. I expect former fighter pilot and Republican Martha McSally to beat Kyrsten “Meth Lab of Democracy” Sinema based on the latter’s baggage and blunders, and the importance of border control to Arizona residents.
Florida: Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson is in a very tough fight with Republican Governor Rick Scott, but Republican turnout seems to be surging. Keep in mind that in 2014, Scott beat the odious Charlie Crist by only 64,000 votes. It being Florida, it may not be decided until the recount.
Indiana: Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly (D), the last of the Stupak Block Flipper still in office, has been in a virtual tie with Republican challenger Mike Braun. Trump walloped Hillary by 19 points in 2016, while Donnelly managed to eek out 50.04% of the vote in the very Democrat-friendly year of 2012. I think he’s toast and Braun wins.
Missouri: Republican challenger Josh Hawley has lead polls against incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ever since the Kavanaugh vote in a state Trump won by 18 points in 2016. Stick a fork in her.
Montana: Incumbent Democrat Jon Tester should be in deep trouble in a state Trump won by 21 points, but polls show him with a small but sustained lead over challenger Matt Rosendale. Chalk this up as the toss-up Senate race Republicans are most likely to see slip away.
Nevada: Polls show Republican incumbent Dean Heller slightly behind challenger Jacky Rosen. See the mention of big crowds at Trump rallies further down in a state Hillary won by just over two points. Heller eked out a two point win in face of Obama’s big 2012, and I think he survives by the skin of his teeth this year as well.
West Virginia: You would think that Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin would be in deep trouble in a state where Trump walloped Hillary by 42 points, but he’s maintained a small but persistent lead over challenger Patrick Morrisey. The Last Blue Dog may survive 2018, but I suspect this one will go down to the wire.
Any “Likely Democrat” races Republicans can pull an upset off in? Maybe New Jersey where, despite substantial leads, Democrats have been pouring last minute funds in to save indicted sleazebag Robert Menendez. But that’s a pretty high mountain for Republican challenger Bob Hugin to climb.
Vegas oddsmaker Wayne Allyn Root, who correctly predicted Trump’s upset win two years ago, similarly sees another GOP win in the offing:
Don’t look now, but it’s all happening again. Nate Silver says Democrats have a 80%+ chance of winning the House. Cook Report says Democrats will win the House by 40 seats. All the experts say it’s over- Democrats will win. I’ll go out on a limb and disagree again.
I see Florida Democrat Governor candidate Andrew Gillum holding a rally with Bernie Sanders and the whole place is empty.
Barack Obama could not fill a high school gym in Milwaukee.
I witnessed firsthand Joe Biden and Obama at separate events here in Las Vegas playing to small crowds.
Meanwhile I was opening speaker for President Trump’s event in Las Vegas last month- with 10,000 waiting in line for hours in a place where no one cares much about politics. This is a phenomenon.
Does that sound like the GOP is losing 40 seats? Dream on delusional Democrats.
One of the seats he see’s flipping is the Texas 32nd Congressional District, currently held by Republican Pete Sessions. The district went very narrowly (1.9%) for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but went for Romney by over 15 points in 2012. I tend to think Sessions barely wins reelection, based on a strong economy, the long-time Republican nature of the district, and incumbency.
My prediction: Republicans keep the Senate, and we won’t actually know if they keep the House until most of the recounts are done.
Remember all that breathless talk on how Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was going to beat incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz as part of a giant “blue wave” against President Donald Trump?
New polls say: Not so much.
According to a New York Times poll, Cruz leads Democratic challenger O’ Rourke by nine points. The crosstabs further down the page show a 10 point Republican-over-Democrat edge among respondents, 38% to 28%, which much more closely mirrors previous exit polls than any of the other 2018 Texas Senate race polls I’ve covered. The piece also shows different results based on different turnout models; if the electorate looks like it did in 2014 (the last midterm election), Cruz lead is closer to 16 points. (Hat tip: Empower Texans, which notes that early October polls for Texas races like this have understated Republican support by 4-5 point.)
There is no way Robert Francis O’Rourke, alias “Beto,” a.k.a. the no-doubt gleaming future of the Democratic Party is as delusional about his prospects for success as his followers. That would be impossible.
The Texas congressman is your average 46-year-old liberal failson politico, the grandson of a secretary of the Navy, the son of a judge, a hanger-on in his party who graduated from playing in an amazingly bad hardcore punk band to a seat on the El Paso City Council. After that, he challenged Rep. Silvestre Reyes, an eight-term Democratic incumbent and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, with the help of outside cash and endorsements from both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The two issues of crucial importance to reviving the fortunes of the working class on which O’Rourke fought his campaign were support for same-sex marriage and drug legalization, both of which Reyes, a Catholic, opposed.
Now O’Rourke is the Democratic nominee facing off against Sen. Ted Cruz. This is not some prize that party leadership granted to its favorite son. Defeating a sitting Republican senator in the Lone Star State is the kind of impossible job you give to someone you know slightly but don’t much care about, someone minimally competent but ultimately expendable, someone whose particular qualities don’t matter all that much because it’s a just a slot that needs to be filled and you’re just happy someone is bored or desperate enough to fill it — the kind of job you give, in other words, to Beto.
Snip.
No single article or tweet could do justice to the brain-destroying tedium of hyperbole, the willful exaggeration, the gushing faddishness, the hipster capitalist complacency, the novelty songwriting contest banality, the experimental filmmaker commercial-directing pseudo-profundity, the sheer late-night TV-level humorlessness of the Beto cult. In a recent column Dana Milbank promised to reveal the ingredients behind “the special sauce that flavors Betomania.” Here they are:
“O’Rourke’s cool factor: skateboarding at Whataburger, playing the air drums, doing his laundry on Facebook Live, and scoring appearances with Ellen DeGeneres and Stephen Colbert …”
Fifty thousand people attended a — free — Willie Nelson concert at which he appeared.
“His partisan jabs are delicate.”
He sometimes says “pendejo.”
Snip.
It’s worth recalling that excitable rank-and-file Democrats do this to themselves every few years, especially in Texas. Remember Wendy Davis and the famous shoes with which she was going to vault from the floor of the Texas Statehouse to the governor’s mansion, the White House, and, presumably, to infinity and beyond? The last I heard, after losing the governor’s race in a spectacular landslide she was doing wine-and-cheese one-offs with F-listers at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, where she signed the electric pink Nikes for a lucky fan who had purchased them with his own money years earlier at her estate sale.
Jim Geraghty points out the obvious. “And no, Beto O’Rourke does not look like he’s going to win in Texas, which will raise tough questions about whether the $23 million donated to O’Rourke’s campaign could have been better spent elsewhere.”
Beto’s likely downfall: lack of Hispanic enthusiasm for him. Leads Cruz 56%-38% w/ Hispanics, but that’s just not good enough for a D to win statewide in TX. https://t.co/llFcScAtM2
Evidently dozens of fawning profiles in national liberal publications doesn’t actually translate into winning over Texas voters. Who knew? Well, besides Wendy Davis…
In advance of President Donald Trump announcing his nominee to the Supreme Court to replace retiring justice Anthony Kennedy tonight, here are a few links of interest on the subject:
According to press reports, rollout packages have been prepared for four potential nominees, all of whom sit as judges on U.S. Courts of Appeals: Brett Kavanaugh (D.C. Circuit), Raymond Kethledge (6th Circuit), Amy Coney Barrett (7th Circuit), and Thomas Hardiman (3rd Circuit). All four potential nominees are on Trump’s list of 25 potential SCOTUS nominees, and all four are highly qualified jurists of the sort the President said he would appoint.
The way Senate Democrats treated Barrett last autumn — in particular, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s argument that Barrett was simply too religious and too devoutly Catholic to serve on the bench, declaring, “the dogma lives loudly within you,” revealed an argument this country needs to have: whether the country accepts deeply religious people in positions of legal authority.
(It’s kind of amazing that a country that has freedom of religion, that was founded in part by Pilgrims, was a beacon for those seeking religious freedom for generations, and that has had George Washington, John Adams, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush as presidents would even need to have this debate. But it is illustrative of how different the modern Left is from previous generations.)
Yes, there are plenty of progressive and Democratic Catholics in this country. But I don’t think you have to look too hard to find progressives who believe, more or less, that devout Catholics — perhaps devout Christians of any stripe — simply can’t be trusted to rule on the law and should be prevented from serving in the judiciary whenever possible. A Catholic judge can insist, loudly and often, that they believe their role as a judge is to rule on the law and the Constitution alone, and that while their faith no doubt shapes their values and their worldview — as much as any religion, philosophy, or atheism shapes the values and worldview of any other judge — and some progressives will insist it’s all a ruse. Some are determined to see any religiously active Christians as theocrats in black robes. (As this 2007 cartoon demonstrates, the arguments are sometimes not that subtle at all; merely an affiliation with a Catholic faith makes you an agent of the Pope.)
You know that if Barrett is the nominee, someone on the Left will make an openly sexist criticism. You know her seven children will be discussed in depth. You know that someone will inevitably make an argument that amounts to, “Look, if we’re going to allow Catholics to be judges, they at least have to be lapsed Catholics.”
Why do some progressives see Catholics and/or Christians as aspiring dictators from the bench, eager to toss away any established rights, established traditions, and impose an oppressive doctrine on the entire country and stifle dissent and differing points of view?
Because that’s how some progressives see the role of the judiciary.
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois thinks other Democratic senators should be just fine and dandy with losing their own senate seats in order to defeat President trump’s Supreme Court pick, whoever it is. I wonder what that would accomplish, given that President Trump could just resubmit them to a more Republican senate for approval come January…
Via Adler comes news that there’s a FantasySCOTUS page where people can vote for their preferred pick. Barrett is leading there.
“Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) said Thursday the upcoming fight over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee was about whether the country would ‘criminalize women.'” OK, you caught us! At our Secret Patriarchal Oppressor Tribunals (SPOT), we often opine “Hey, what if we just threw everyone with two X chromosomes into prison! That would solve all our problems!” Good times, good times…
This morning, following yet another special election defeat, chastised Democrats are doing a lot of soul searching as to why voters keep rejecting their message.
Ha, just kidding! They’re calling voters “toxic bigots.”
First up: Feminist Jill Filipovic, who is not happy at all that Karen Handel has shattered a “glass ceiling” by becoming the first woman from Georgia elected [Correction: First Republican woman] to the U.S. House of Representatives:
At what point is this not a failure of Democrats but toxic, vindictive voters willing to elect hateful bigots? https://t.co/EYNDuzxzGL
Democrats and progressives were convinced they had a chance to win this race, and the fact that they didn’t suggests that their real problem is that they don’t actually know where they can win. They’re walking around with a false sense of their own electability — just seven months after they were convinced Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election easily.
Yes, there’s a lot of road ahead, and there will be easier districts for Democrats to win in 2018. But when you add up all the spending and use the most recent numbers reported in the New York Times, it calculates to a $9 million advantage for the Democrats. ($23.6 million raised by Ossoff + $7.6 million spent by outside groups preferring him = $31.2 million; $4.5 million spent by Handel + $18.2 million spent by outside groups preferring her = $22.7 million.)
If you fall short in an open-seat special election, in a district Trump barely carried, with a candidate who avoids gaffes and with a giant spending advantage . . . just where the heck are you going to win?
Democrats show show no sign of learning a lesson from this defeat: “I don’t think Democrats understand that their *Resistance* strategy is not working. But they are so emotionally invested in it, they can’t see their way out.”
Another big loser from last night: Planned Parenthood. “By tacking a $735,000 price tag onto Ossoff’s failed effort, Planned Parenthood has revealed its own futility at influencing elections.”
Six reasons Democrats lost GA-6. Including carpetbagging and nationalizing the race with outside money. “Ossoff received more money from California than Georgia. Voters took it as an insult, and acted accordingly.” Also: “The GA-6 may be an upscale, suburban district, but voters there still aren’t interested in Alyssa Milano’s take on politics.” (Hat tip: Big Gator 5’s twitter feed.)
Mr. Ryan, who tried to unseat Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, as House minority leader after the November elections, said she remained a political drag on other Democrats. Ms. Handel and Republican outside groups tied Mr. Ossoff to Ms. Pelosi in campaign events and television ads, casting him as a puppet for what they described as her liberal agenda and “San Francisco values.”
“They’re still running against her and still winning races, and it’s still a problem,” Mr. Ryan said.
More on the same theme: “Republican operatives say that 98 percent of voters in the 6th District already had an impression of Pelosi when they conducted their first internal poll, and she was 35 points underwater. When presented with the choice of whether they wanted a representative who would work with Paul Ryan or Pelosi, six in 10 picked the Speaker and three in 10 picked the minority leader.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
As long as Democrats’ desire to win elections takes a backseat to their need for moral preening over their own “tolerance” and their emotional need to label voters who reject their policies as racists and bigots, expect them to continue losing elections…
Here’s Jim Geraghty’s piece on how to survive Thanksgiving with relatives who have been freebasing those “how to talk down to your racist redneck JesusLand freak relatives about Trump” articles from Salon and Vox.
And to celebrate, here’s the classic “Turkeys Away” segment from WKRP in Cincinnati:
Edited to Add: Via Ace of Spades comes an alternate take on the subject: “How to Talk to Your Pansy Marxist Nephew at Thanksgiving.”
You know how American leftists claim socialist Denmark is paradise on earth? Yeah, not so much. “Denmark’s suicide rate has averaged 20.8 per 100,000 during the last five decades, with its highest level of 32. The American suicide rate averaged only 11.1 during the last five decades, and has never exceeded 12.7. Danes are deeply deprived, driven by severe narcissism, and so more than 11 percent of adult Danes – the supposed happiest people in the world – are on antidepressants.”
The Arab–Israeli conflict is a bitter and ugly one. My own view of it is that the Palestinian Arabs have some legitimate grievances, and that I stopped caring about them when they started blowing up children in pizza shops. You can thank the courageous heroes of the Battle of Sbarro for that. Israel isn’t my country, but it is my country’s ally, and it is impossible for a liberty-loving American to fail to admire what the Jewish state has done.
And that, of course, is why the Left wants to see the Jewish state exterminated.
Greece approves new “austerity” measures that they’ll no doubt continue to cheat and ignore while spending money they don’t have.
Speaking of Greece, “More than one in five school-aged refugee children in Greece have never been to school, a study has revealed. Child refugees stranded in Greece have been out of school for on average 1.5 years, and many of them ‘cannot even hold a pencil.'”
Why feminists hate sex: “The new feminist puritans see heterosexual sex as confirming and reinforcing outdated gender roles. That men and women not only have sex but enjoy it is a threat to the notion that both gender and sexuality are merely social constructs, to be crafted and rejected as instinct takes us.”
Why did 16 Republican Senators save the agency that’s hell-bent on creating instant public housing slums across America?
More proof that Social Justice Warriors hate everything, no matter how cute.
World’s oldest woman, and last living American born in the 19th century, dies. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Listeria outbreak among frozen fruits and vegetables. “Some of the affected products were sold under brand names such as Earth’s Pride, Panda Express, Signature Kitchens and Trader Joe’s.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Rehab for Internet addiction. “The program costs $25,000 for 45 days at the center.” Obviously I can’t be addicted to the Internet, because there’s no way I could afford the rehab…
It seems that Bernie Sanders supporters are finally waking up to the fact that Democratic Party “Superdelegates” are designed to screw over mere voters unwilling to toe the party line. And this year, that means “Bernie Sanders supporters.”
Every Democratic member of Congress, House and Senate, is a Superdelegate (240 total). Every Democratic governor is a Superdelegate (20 total). Certain “distinguished party leaders,” 20 in all, are given Superdelegate status. And finally, the Democratic National Committee names an additional 432 Superdelegates—an honor that typically goes to mayors, chairs and vice-chairs of the state party, and other dignitaries.
Here is where I would put a paragraph detailing the process by which the DNC goes about selecting Superdelegates…except I can’t find any online. As far as I can tell, DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is 100% in the tank for Hillary, gets to give her up to an additional 432 delegates. Or almost as many delegates as those chosen by all the actual Democratic Party voters in New York and Pennsylvania combined.
As of this writing, Hillary Clinton has 387 superdelegates. Bernie Sanders has 16.
“This is what makes Clinton so powerful in the Democratic race — even while she and Sanders battle it out among rank-and-file voters, she has a massive lead among superdelegates. Altogether, she already has 394 delegates and superdelegates to Sanders’ 44 — a nearly ninefold lead.”
(Interestingly, among them is a Wendy Davis, but not the Texas Wendy Davis. This Wendy Davis is a city commissioner for Rome, Georgia, a small city of some 35,000+ people. And yes, she’s backing Clinton…)
Also note that list of 20 “Distinguished Party Leaders,” in addition to your Bill Clintons, Walter Mondales and former DNC heads, includes David Wilhelm, whose claim to being distinguished is…running Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign.
There’s a good chance that Sanders, the candidate whose popularity comes in large measure from complaining that the game is rigged against the little guy, is going to get screwed out of the nomination because the Democratic Party Presidential nomination process is rigged against the little guy…
