Now that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates are popping up in races all over the country, actual Democrats are starting to get questions from a nervous media which wonders how all of this happened.
The post Jesse Watters Points Out That the ‘BIG TENT’ Talking Points Have Gone Out as Democrats Try to Explain Away the Rise of the DSA (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
It's hard to believe, but apparently "the entire GOP political ecosystem" is now dedicated to the idea that what worked in 2024 is going to work in the coming congressional elections. Every level is focused on "building a turnout operation with the sole focus of identifying, engaging and ultimately persuading 'low propensity' voters," according to Alex Roarty.In a story in NOTUS today, Roarty reported that operatives have been planning to run the same play "from almost the moment the 2024 campaign ended." By focusing on nonvoters – people "who maybe cast a ballot two years ago but often skip midterm elections" – the aim is "solving a traditional problem for parties in power during midterm elections when their voters become more complacent and turn out in lower numbers than their opposition’s."Why is this hard to believe? First, because the fundamentals for 2026 are arguably the same as they were in 2024, but dramatically worse, in which public opinion turned sharply against the party in power due to inflation, prices, wages and the economy generally. The obvious difference is the party in power is not the one that Donald Trump and the Republicans ran against two years ago. A new poll puts his overall approval at 30 percent, with 82 percent saying that they expect conditions to get worse over the coming year. Importantly, people keep telling pollsters that they hold the president personally responsible for their misery.But there's another reason the GOP's "plan to win" is hard to believe – it depends on a paradox. On the one hand, operatives believe that Trump supporters who usually vote are not going to show up. On the other hand, they believe Trump supporters who usually do not vote – "low propensity voters" – will show up to replace Trump voters who are not going to show up. In other words, "the entire GOP political ecosystem" believes that voters won't vote but nonvoters will. Everyone sees this house of cards but no one is ready to admit it. "We kind of compare notes on everything, making sure that we’re all seeing the world the same way. Which we do,” CLF’s Joe Pileggi told NOTUS. “There’s no fragmentation in our thinking.”I guess unity is the play you make when you don't have a better play. After all, Republican consultants gotta get paid, too.It used to be that casual voters supported Democrats during presidential elections, then disappeared until the next one. That gave the GOP the advantage during midterms. Trump changed that. He chased away educated and mostly white middle- and upper-middle class voters, and replaced them with working-class voters who were more racially diverse but less prone to voting. Democrats have had the advantage since. Even the 2022 midterms, when Joe Biden was president, did not produce a red wave. The Republicans took the House but barely. The economy was in better shape back then. Last week, the Post released a review of 990 races, over three cycles, in 25 states. It found that "turnout is rising in Democratic primaries even when they aren’t hotly contested and the nominee has little chance of winning in the general election." The Post looked at all the Democratic House primaries held so far this year and found that, in more than 90 percent of them, "voters cast more ballots than during 2022, when Republicans flipped the House. So far this year, people cast 12.6 million ballots in Democratic House primaries compared with 8.6 million in GOP primaries" (my italics).
A Republican lawmaker who usually supports President Donald Trump publicly split with his own party leader on Monday over housing affordability.“He's calling a bill that would address housing affordability — one that you support — a yawn,” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) on Monday. “Your thoughts?”Lawler separated from the president on this issue.“Obviously I disagree,” the New York Republican told Tapper. “This is an issue that I have been leading on since coming to Congress. Six of my bills are included in the overall bill, and I think housing affordability is one of the biggest issues that we could tackle as a country.”After criticizing Trump’s Democratic predecessor, former President Joe Biden, by saying that under his administration “mortgage interest rates reached a 30-year high, we have cut that in half,” Lawler added that “there is more work to do. We need to increase supply, we need to increase access to capital, and we need to reduce overall costs. And that's what this bill does. It's the first bipartisan housing bill in 36 years that really tackles the issue in a substantive and serious way.”He concluded, “I'm proud of the work that we did, and I certainly encourage the President to sign it.”Earlier on Monday, Trump supporters and former White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley defended the president’s statement on MS NOW, only to be met with laughter.After playing a clip of the president speaking with reporters, Hunt then turned to Hogan Gidley, a former White House deputy press secretary for Trump, who defended the president’s dismissive remarks about affordable housing.“It is a political win, and I think he is going to take the victory lap in some form or fashion,” Gidley explained. “I do think, though, he is focused on making sure that our elections have some semblance of faith, trust and confidence, which they have been losing in this country for decades. You'll remember around 65 percent of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden won the election.”Later Gidley said that Trump is “not obsessed” with false claims of voter fraud, prompting more laughter.Republican lawmakers have complained that Trump is burdening them with an “impossible task” by insisting that they pass the SAVE America Act, which would rewrite election laws in a manner that critics claim would disenfranchise millions of voters, as a prerequisite for signing affordable housing legislation. While the SAVE America Act does not have the votes to both pass and survive a filibuster, affordable housing is a popular issue."You know, I have people telling me I need to implement the SAVE Act immediately in North Carolina, in a state that has voter ID," Sen. Thomas Tillis (R-NC) told host CNN’s Jake Tapper. "[Why] do I, over the next four months, have to try to pursue the impossible task of implementing a bill that simply can’t be implemented in that timeframe?"He added, "Why are we doing more things that undermine our confidence in elections rather than getting the strong message out that will win for Republicans this year?... Win by the good results that Republicans have produced and stop undermining the confidence in the elections. This is a bedrock of our 250-year history of success as the democracy that changed the world. Let’s not mess with that between now and November."Speaking to AlterNet earlier in June, Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause, said that Trump’s ultimate goal is to rig the 2026 midterm elections by disenfranchising Democratic voters.“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña explained to AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”Vicuña added, “I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal. You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal.
President Donald Trump reacted to a major Supreme Court loss Monday by pressuring five Republican senators to flip their positions and vote to pass the SAVE America Act. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration and upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted if they’re postmarked by Election Day […]
Donald Trump has insisted six people have been arrested and many more have been given citations for vandalizing the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This allegedly includes carving a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant, and in a dark and angry tirade, Trump just described these people as akin to enemies of the state. But The New York Times just obtained a new statement from federal prosecutors. While they confirmed some citations, the Times also reports that administration officials and prosecutors are refusing to provide a single detail about what happened, refusing to divulge anything about who’s been targeted or what their offenses were, and refusing to confirm any arrests of any kind. As former prosecutor Ankush Khardori tells us in today’s episode, this is deeply strange. We discuss why it’s unusual for officials to clam up about such a high-profile claim, how this raises unnerving possibilities about the unhinged despot in the Oval Office, and why it all points to a deeper rot of Trumpian corruption. Listen to this episode here.
The leftist purity test has claimed another victim: California State Senator Scott Wiener. Democrats continue to eat their own in their quest to venture further and further […]
