What have the worst Senators ever written? The stories of Walker and the other senators whose policies influenced Donald Trump and his Senate seat
The people are near the finish line. Elections just about a month away. A ton of races to keep track of, but if you’re looking for diversion, you’ll find some of the Senate campaigns really … unusual.
Republicans want to gain control of the House and Senate, while Democrats want to hold on to power. And while we all have guesses of what will happen, the truth is that we don’t know what will play out.
Except, whoops, the Republicans have made a lot of terrible candidates. You’d almost think the party honchos met in secret and decided that running the Senate was too much of a pain, and that they needed to gather some nominees who would guarantee they could keep lazing around in the minority.
Walker won his Senate primary not because of his political chops or policy proposals. His football performance 40 years ago, and his friendship with Donald Trump, meant he couldn’t win a game for the opponents anymore.
Reply to “Comment on ‘Case of a Single Mom and a Baby’ by Brian Walker in Georgia’s Senate Race”
Georgia has a 12th Lieutenant Governor, who is a Republican. His views are his own in this commentary. Read more opinion articles on CNN.
Everyone in America deserves due process, and Walker vehemently denied the Daily Beast report suggesting he had paid for a woman’s abortion in 2009 after the two conceived a child while they were dating. Walker believes in the abolition of abortion rights. He threatened legal action against the publication as a means of recourse. The impact in the court of public opinion was immediate and intense. Even influential conservative personality, which is called a ‘Ko’ by some, described it as such.
The GOP Infrastructure must hold their breath and hope that Walker can weather the storm. To his political credit, Walker has faced other serious allegations, including domestic abuse, an exaggerated business career and an erratic personality. He has had a Teflon quality of surviving scandals. Walker’s newest test is his most serious yet, and it occurs in October.
Meanwhile, the Georgia governor’s race offers Republicans a better path forward as a party. What was billed as a blockbuster re-match between the incumbent GOP Governor Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams has turned into a relative snoozer. Since raising more than 28 million dollars and becoming a rising national Democrat, Abrams has failed to repeat the same magic.
Her share price took a big fall. She refused to concede her loss. Just days ago, a federal judge tossed out her group’s lawsuit claiming the election was decided improperly. She also faced an investigation by the State Ethics Commission about her fundraising practices in 2018, which was dismissed this past summer.
Kemp is breathing easier for factors that extend beyond the flaws ofAbrams. His record is one of the accomplishments that he has brought to the table. Georgia was recently named the best state for business for the ninth consecutive year by Area Development magazine. In a decision that has aged well over time, Kemp re-opened our state from the pandemic faster than many others, angering even then-President Trump. As more people and businesses have re-located to our state for our business-friendly climate, Georgia has taken meaningful strides toward becoming the technology capital of the East Coast.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/opinions/herschel-walker-scandal-georgia-senate-gop-duncan/index.html
What Do We Need to Know About the House and Senate? The Case of Rep. Raphael Warnock During the 2022 Midterms
There is a slim but steady lead over Walker in the case of incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock. He has done so despite voting more than 96% of the time with President Joe Biden in a state where just 44% of voters approve of the President, compared to 53% who disapprove, according to a recent Quinnipiac University survey.
Those numbers do not lie. Our Senate race should be a referendum on Biden and his agenda. In an evenly divided upper chamber, Warnock could have stopped every piece of flawed legislation that passed along party line votes, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act and the $750 billion Inflation Reduction Act, both often cited by conservatives as some of the culprits for inflation rates at four-decade highs.
If we want the American public to take us seriously, we need to take the first step by nominating candidates they should take seriously. That process goes beyond celebrity or fame. It’s important that leaders who want to win elections have a conservative vision for governing.
The Republicans are favored to take over the House of Representatives in November but the fight for the Senate is a close one, with advertisements blanketing the top battleground states.
It has been almost two decades since a wave of partisan waves began in the mid-term elections. Yet as the first mail-in ballots go out to voters, the outcome of the 2022 midterms on Nov. 8 appears unusually unpredictable — a reason for optimism for Democrats, given how severely the party that holds the White House has been punished in recent years.
For the Senate, all eyes are going to be on four states – Pennsylvania and Georgia in the East and Arizona and Nevada in the West. In Georgia, the libertarian on the ballot will likely be a place for protest vote, meaning neither the Democrat or Republican will meet the 50% threshold required to win the election.
What’s Happening in California and What Happens Tonight: Election Night with Early Voting, the Mail, and the Closure of Polls
Tuesday is Election Day, but with early voting, the more accepted use of mail voting, and the possibility of razor-thin races, it is actually Election Season.
Gird for many of these elections to go on for days, if not weeks. This is normal when there are close elections. It doesn’t mean that there is fraud – despite the lies about his 2020 loss that former President Trump has pushed and so many candidates he’s backed have promulgated.
Many of these races are expected to be close and will take a while to count all the vote. Competitive seats are abundant in California. California polls don’t close until 11 p.m. ET, so don’t expect many of those to be known on Election Night. In past years, that’s been the case, and it’s taken a long time to know results – days and weeks.
The Senate actually gets projected early Then there’s the other side of the spectrum. People are anticipating that we won’t know the winner of the Senate race until weeks after the election. That is not a certainty, but may be the case.
California, Oregon and Washington are some states that have heavy mail voting. This can delay the election in California, where the law allows for an extended period of vote counting if the ballot is not postmarked by Election Day.
There are some places that we’re expecting to see a pretty dramatic shift on Election Night. There will be less mail-in ballots than in 2020, but they will still take longer and cause confusion, so votecounting should be quicker this year. Beware of a “Red Mirage” and a later “Blue Shift”. Lots of mail-in ballots will be reported early, and we know that Democrats have been far more likely to say they will be voting early or by mail. It could initially seem like a Democrats’ lead, but after in-person ballot results come in, the Republicans will likely win the race. The rest of the results of the mail ballot will trickle in later in the evening because they take longer to tabulate and will likely favor Democrats. And Philadelphia simply takes a very long time to report its results. This is what always happens. It is not nefarious.
When polls open on Election Day, Wisconsin doesn’t allow election officials to begin processing mail ballots. Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin are more liberal and have a higher percentage of Black voters, so you may see another Red Mirage if they take longer to report.
As the hours went on, Trump’s favor trickled down to Arizona. Some years have seen the opposite. There will likely be one way that the shift will go this year. The 2020 presidential was called at almost 3 a.m. ET, but the vote counting continued for days and Biden’s lead, though it held up, continued to shrink. Ultimately, the state was decided by just 0.3 percentage points, and Arizona has recently switched to automatic recounts for any contest that’s separated by 0.5% or less. Arizona has been a leader in election denialism and was the center of a fake slate of electors in favor of Trump. The challenges and noise surrounding the legitimacy of the vote could cause even more chaos because of the close vote.
Georgia has seen a huge population shift in Atlanta and surrounding suburbs that have made it a blue state in recent years. It could be that there is another Red Mirage here, because suburbs report their results later than rural counties.
Nevada is a similar story to Georgia. It’s a growth state, and most of that boom has been in Las Vegas, which is in Clark County, the largest population center in the state and where almost 70% of all the state’s votes came from in 2020. Clark and Was Reno, which went for Biden in 2020, count more slowly than other rural counties that will overwhelmingly favor the Republicans. Also, post-pandemic, Nevada is one state that has moved toward mail voting. People still have the option to vote in person, but every resident in the state was mailed a ballot unless they chose to opt out of receiving one.
The Predictions for Next-to-Leading Order Senate Races in Georgia, Ohio, and Alaska, and Where to Find Them
Legal challenges and recounts can also lengthen the time before a winner is determined. Expect this to go on a while, so you have to be patient.
Stop me if you have heard this one before. You definitely have, if you follow politics to any degree. Unlike other states with close Senate races, Georgia requires candidates to receive a majority of the vote to win on Election Day. The top two candidates will go into a second round if no one else does.
The conditions are ripe for such a scenario. In the Georgia Senate polls, neither Republican Herschel Walker nor democrat Raphael Warnock has 50% of the vote. Chase Oliver was pulling in between 3% and 4%.
Another way this might happen is if there is a surprising result in the east. If Republicans have a very good night, they could take the New Hampshire Senate race from the Democrats. If Democrats have a very good night, they could win the Ohio Senate race, an open seat where Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan is facing off with Trump-endorsed J.D. Vance.
When the polls are close, we will get a good idea. Consider a race like that for Virginia’s 2nd District, a swing district centered in Virginia Beach. Rep. Elaine Luria would likely win if Democrats are to be competitive in the House. Republicans are likely to take over the House if she loses.
Frank Mrvan could also go down in Indiana if there is a big Republican night. Indiana requires voters to have an excuse to vote in the election, unlike other states.
In 2018, the election in California’s 21st District wasn’t decided until December 6, nearly a month after the November 7 election, because of the ballot count.
This year, there are at least 9 House races on the west coast that look like they could be close. When you combine these with Alaska’s at-large seat (which features both mail and ranked choice voting), it’s not hard to see how things could take a while to call.
It is likely that this one won’t happen because Republicans are enthusiastic about the generic congressional ballot. Still, it is a statistical possibility that the House ends up being really tight.
Results from Rank-Selective Voting in Maine’s Second Congressional District and Alaska’s House of Representatives in Alaska
The use of ranked choice voting requires that all ballots be counted to properly figure out whether more than one round is needed and the order of elimination for the candidates in those rounds.
The 2nd Congressional District in Maine is the lone swing district in the country, and the House race in Alaska is expected to be competitive after the death of Don Young, the Republican who had held the seat for decades. Both have had past elections where ranked choice voting determined a House winner.
It took until nine days after the election for Maine’s second district. In Alaska, ranked choice voting results take 15 days to be known.