The role of abortion, crime and inflation in the political campaign of sununu and Hassan: A perspective from Bolduc on the 2022 election

The race for the Senate is in the eye of the beholder less than six weeks from Election Day, with ads about abortion, crime and inflation dominating the airwaves in key states as campaigns test the theory of the 2022 election.

The Republicans thought that Sununu would run for Senate in a blue state and that they would have a popular candidate with abortion rights supporters. After his win in the primary race,Bolduc stated he would vote against a national abortion ban. But ads from Hassan and Senate Majority PAC have seized on his suggestion in the same interview that the senator should “get over” the abortion issue. Republicans recognize that abortion is a salient factor in a state Biden carried by 7 points, but they also argue that the election – as Bolduc said to WMUR – will be about the economy and that Hassan is an unpopular and out-of-touch incumbent.

The Democrats were encouraged by the legislative successes of Biden and the high court decision, but the political advertising leading up to and after Labor Day has made them wary of certain races.

Republicans, who have midterm history on their side as the party out of the White House, have hammered Biden and Democrats for supporting policies they argue exacerbate inflation. According to the latest Poll of Polls, Biden’s approval rating stands at 41% with over half of the people disapproving. And with some prices inching back up after a brief hiatus, the economy and inflation – which Americans across the country identify as their top concern in multiple polls – are likely to play a crucial role in deciding voters’ preferences.

But there’s been a steady increase in ads about crime too as the GOP returns to a familiar criticism, depicting Democrats as weak on public safety. This cycle has seen a lot of tv ads featuring law enforcement officers testifying on camera about their police credentials. Democratic ads also feature women talking about the threat of a national abortion ban should the Senate fall into GOP hands, while Republicans have spent comparatively less trying to portray Democrats as the extremists on the topic.

Retired Army Brig. After losing a GOP bid for the state’s other senate seat, DonBolduc won the Republican primary to take on Democratic Sen.MaggieHassan. The problem for him, though, is that he doesn’t have much money to wage that fight. Bolduc had raised a total of $579,000 through August 24 compared with Hassan’s $31.4 million. Senate Leadership Fund is on air in New Hampshire to boost the GOP nominee – attacking Hassan for voting with Biden and her support of her party’s health care, tax and climate package. But because super PACs get much less favorable TV advertising rates than candidates, those millions won’t go anywhere near as far as Hassan’s dollars will.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/03/politics/senate-race-rankings-october-elections/index.html

CNN Rankings of Democratic Representatives and Representatives in Georgia, with an Application to Senate Races in the Inaugural September 23rd & 24th

These rankings are based on CNN’s reporting, fundraising and advertising data, and polling, as well as historical data about how states and candidates have performed. It will be updated one more time before Election Day.

One potential trouble spot for the Democrat: More voters in a late September Franklin and Marshall College Poll viewed Oz has having policies that would improve voters’ economic circumstances, with the economy and inflation remaining the top concern for voters across a range of surveys. But nearly five months after the primary, the celebrity surgeon still seems to have residual issues with his base. A recent survey by Fox News showed a higher percentage of Democrats supporting Fetterman than Republicans, and that was due to lower support from GOP women than men. Fetterman supporters were more enthusiastic than Oz supporters.

In a place where average gas prices are now back up to over $5 a gallon, the Republicans tried to link the first term senator to Washington spending and inflation. Democrats are zeroing in on abortion rights and raising the threat that a GOP-controlled Senate could pass a national abortion ban. Former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt – the rare GOP nominee to have united McConnell and Trump early on – called the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling a “joke” before the Supreme Court overturned the decision in June. Democrats have been all too happy to use that comment against him, but Laxalt has tried to get around those attacks by saying he does not support a national ban and pointing out that the right to an abortion is settled law in Nevada.

The closer we get to Election Day, the more we need to talk about the Georgia Senate race going over the wire. The election will go to a December second round if neither candidate gets over 50% of the vote in November. There was no clear leader in the recent poll, which had Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Republican Herschel Walker both under 50% among those who say they definitely plan to vote.

Warnock’s edge from earlier this cycle has narrowed, which bumps this seat up one spot on the rankings. The good news for Warnock is that he’s still overperforming Biden’s approval numbers in a state that the President flipped in 2020 by less than 12,000 votes. And so far, he seems to be keeping the Senate race closer than the gubernatorial contest, for which several polls have shown GOP Gov. Brian Kemp ahead. He is hoping that the bipartisan image will help him hold on to what used to be a reliably red state. In one recent ad he was standing waist-deep in peanuts saying he worked with Tommy Tuberville to eliminate the regulations. Republicans have been attempting to tie the senator’s party affiliation to his votes in Washington, which they claim has caused inflation.

Democrats are hoping that enough Georgians won’t see voting for Walker as an option – even if they do back Kemp. Democrats have amped up their attacks on domestic violence allegations against the former football star and unflattering headlines about his business record. And all eyes will be on the mid-October debate to see how Walker, who has a history of making controversial and illogical comments, handles himself onstage against the more polished incumbent.

In a August poll, Barnes had a 7 point lead over Johnson, but in a September survey the gap was only 5 points. Notably, independents were breaking slightly for Johnson after significantly favoring Barnes in the August survey. The effect of the GOP’s anti-Barnes advertising can likely be seen in the increasing percentage of registered voters in a late September Fox News survey who view the Democrat as “too extreme,” putting him on parity with Johnson on that question. Johnson supporters are also much more enthusiastic about their candidate.

Barnes skated through the August primary after his biggest opponents dropped out of the race, but as the nominee, he’s faced an onslaught of attacks, especially on crime, using against him his past words about ending cash bail and redirecting some funding from police budgets to social services. Barnes has tried to answer those attacks in his ads by showing a retired police sergeant who said that Mandela doesn’t want to defund the police.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/03/politics/senate-race-rankings-october-elections/index.html

The Age of Republicans: The Case Against the Censorship of the First Black Senator, Ted Budd, and the Attorney General Robert J. Masters

The conservatives are spending money for Masters but still need to hurt Kelly, a well-funded incumbent who has a strong personal brand. Kelly led Masters 51% to 41% among registered voters in a September Marist poll, although that gap narrowed among those who said they definitely plan to vote. A Fox survey from a little later in the month similarly showed Kelly with a 5-point edge among those certain to vote, just within the margin of error.

Masters has attempted to moderate his abortion position since winning his August primary, buoyed by a Trump endorsement, but Kelly has continued to attack him on the issue. Democrats have reason to believe that Republicans endanger women’s reproductive rights due to a recent court decision allowing the enforcement of a 1901 state ban on nearly all abortions.

North Carolina slides up one spot on the rankings, trading places with New Hampshire. The open-seat race to replace retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr hasn’t generated as much national buzz as other states given that Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in the state since 2008.

But it has remained a tight contest with Democrat Cheri Beasley, who is bidding to become the state’s first Black senator, facing off against GOP Rep. Ted Budd, for whom Trump recently campaigned. When Trump narrowly won the Tar Heel state in 2020, the Chief justice of the Supreme Court lost his reelection by less than 400 votes. Democrats hope that she will increase turnout among rural Black voters and that more moderate Republicans and independents will see Budd as too extreme. One of Beasley’s recent spots features a series of mostly White, gray-haired retired judges in suits endorsing her as “someone different” while attacking Budd as being a typical politician out for himself.

Budd went after Biden in some ads that featured half-empty shopping carts, without even mentioning his name. Senate Leadership Fund is doing the work of trying to tie the Democrat to Washington – one recent spot almost makes her look like the incumbent in the race, superimposing her photo over an image of the US Capitol and displaying her face next to Biden’s. Both SLF and Budd are also targeting Beasley over her support for Democrats’ recently enacted health care, tax and climate bill. “Liberal politician Cheri Beasley is coming for you – and your wallet,” the narrator from one SLF ad intones, before later adding, “Beasley’s gonna knock on your door with an army of new IRS agents.” The law increases funding for the IRS. Democrats and the IRS commissioner say the intent is to go after the rich rather than the middle class.

A Granite State Poll was conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center and it shows that Hassan had a big lead overBolduc. Only 42% of Republicans said they were with the incumbent. Still, some of those Republicans, like those who said they were undecided, could come home to the GOP nominee as the general election gets closer, which means Bolduc has room to grow. He’ll need more than just Republicans to break his way, however, which is one reason he quickly pivoted on the key issue of whether the 2020 election was stolen days after he won the primary.

Trump, Portman noted, “got J.D. Vance through the primary, and then J.D. won the general election by eight points,” referring to the Ohio Senate Republican nominee, who beat Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. Portman said the Republican Party ran some candidates that “more independent-minded voters just couldn’t support.”

Democrats face an uphill battle against GOP Sen. Marco Rubio in an increasingly red-trending state, which Trump carried by about 3 points in 2020 – nearly tripling his margin from four years earlier.

Democratic Rep. Val Demings, who easily won the party’s nomination in August, is a strong candidate who has even outraised the GOP incumbent, but not by enough to seriously jeopardize his advantage. She’s leaning into her background as the former Orlando police chief – it features prominently in her advertising, in which she repeatedly rejects the idea of defunding the police. She has a law enforcement background, so she could be tied to the “radical left” in Washington.

But in his bid for a third full term, Bennet is up against a stronger challenger in businessman Joe O’Dea, who told CNN he disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. His wife and daughter star in his ads as he tries to cut a more moderate profile and vows not to vote the party line in Washington.

Bennet is arguing that whatever O’Dea says about abortion rights, he would give McConnell the majority he needs to pass a national abortion ban because he believes that O’Dea should have voted against the failed 2020 state ballot measure.

The Key Problem in the House of Representatives (Reply to Adam Laxalt, M. Cortez Masto, J. Fetterman, Mark Levinson, and Randy Warnock)

A month ago, Democrats had a 7-in-10 chance of keeping the majority in the US Senate in the midterm elections, according to a forecasting model built by the wizards over at FiveThirtyEight.

• In Pennsylvania, Democrat John Fetterman’s lead over Republican Mehmet Oz has narrowed, as concerns about the lieutenant governor’s health (he had a stroke in May) have persisted. President Joe Biden appeared with Fetterman during a visit to Pennsylvania on Thursday.

The GOP nominee in Arizona appears to be making up some ground on the democrat. There has been some change in the race and the incumbent is still the favorite.

• A CBS News/YouGov poll out in Nevada shows the Senate race is in a dead heat, with Republican nominee Adam Laxalt at 49% and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto at 48%.

• Democrats are beginning to point fingers in Wisconsin, where Lt. Gov Mandela Barnes has watched his lead over GOP Sen. Ron Johnson slip away over the last two months. “People are just hitting their heads against the wall. Tom Nelson, a Democrat who ran for the Senate nomination earlier in the year, asked how they were going to let this happen.

• Allegations regarding Republican Herschel Walker’s past relationships with women don’t appear to have doomed his chances against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, with most polling showing the incumbent with a low-single digit lead.

The point is that every race is a majority winner in the Senate. But with 19 days left before the election, the trend line is moving in the right direction for Republicans.

Even in the Senate, where control hangs in the balance, Senators Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mike Lee of Utah circulated a letter asking for a delay in leadership elections, amid calls from the former president to depose Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as the Republican leader.

The Failure of a Red Wave: When the Midterm Votes Failed to Materialize and What We Can Do to Improve Our Chances and Values in the Senate

“We are all disappointed that a red wave failed to materialize, and there are multiple reasons it did not,” they wrote. We need serious discussions within our conference about why we need to improve our chances and what can be done.

Senator Marco Rubio was re-elected to his seat in Florida. “We need to make sure that those who want to lead us are genuinely committed to fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like #Florida,” he wrote on Twitter, quickly receiving the backing of Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s presidential nominee in 2012, released his own prescriptions for the future, which strongly hinted that Republican losses reflected the party’s embrace of rage and recrimination over policy proposals. He counseled Republicans to work with Democrats in the coming Congress to slow inflation by curtailing spending on Medicare and Social Security, to open broader pathways to legal immigration, and to address climate change globally while increasing domestic energy production.

He wrote that the most tempting and historically more frequented road would be to pursue pointless investigations, threats, and government shutdowns.

Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican exiled by her party for her resolute opposition to Mr. Trump, called the midterm results “a clear victory for Team Normal,” but speaking on Friday afternoon at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, she signaled that Tuesday’s vote was “a step in the right direction.”

Republican senators are trying to understand why they failed to wrest control of the Senate from Democrats in the mid-term elections in 2022, despite fears about the state of the US economy and unpopularity of President Joe Biden.

At the same time, Senate GOP leaders are pressing forward with a mid-week vote to affirm their control of the conference, even though some conservatives are pushing for changes at the top.

Democrats not only held the 50-50 Senate, but could even strengthen their grip of it on December 6, when Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock faces Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff election.

Resolving the Growing Pains of First-Time Candidates in the GOP: A Conversation with Rep. Rob Portman and co-chair Spokesman Rob Cornyn

The Texas GOP senator said there was more than one factor behind the rising pains of first-time candidates, a confusing political environment and a combination of issues.

Thune said that they would have a candid conversation over the course of the next couple of days. “I think that there’s no question that we didn’t achieve expectations in this election.”

Looking forward is always a better strategy according to Capito. “Looking back to 2020 obviously didn’t work out. I think we need to look into the future. Some of our candidates just fell short of what they should have done.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman declined to blame Trump for the GOP’s underwhelming performance, stressing the need for “better candidate recruitment” and “sticking with the issues.”

In the end, Cornyn said that the Republicans had got control of the House. “I think that may be the cause of the Democrats’ excitement because they said it could have been so much worse.”

“I don’t know why the Biden administration considers that a victory,” Cornyn added. Being shot at and missed is kind of like the old saying that there is nothing more thrilling than being shot at.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/politics/republican-reaction-losing-senate/index.html

The Reaction of Republicans in the House and Senate: How Well Will We Win? An Idaho House Republican Senator, Mike Rounds, explains why he’s been on the mountain

Republicans are on the verge of holding a small majority in the House, which would allow them to flip the chamber.

The Senate and the House are not ready for another Trump presidency even though he is expected to announce a comeback bid on Tuesday.

South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds thinks that the former president is going to do whatever he wants to do, and that he will not listen to his thoughts on it. I need someone who is going to unify our party. That’s the way we win elections.”

Idaho GOP Representative Mike Simpson told CNN he wants to see who the GOP nominee is in four years. Personally, I don’t think it’s good for the party.”

Romney, who was a critic of Trump when he was in power, called the president an “albatross around Republican necks.”

“I think he’s been on the mountain too long,” added Romney. We have lost three races with him. And I’d like to see someone from the bench, come up and take his place and lead our party and help lead the country.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/politics/republican-reaction-losing-senate/index.html

What do the Republicans need to do now that we are moving America forward or holding it back, and how should we do it? A speaker on the Senate floor

Along with the Supreme Court’s June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Simpson said one of the reasons why some Republicans underperformed was their connection to the former president. “I think we had some candidates that were too tied to Trump,” said Simpson.

Thune said the party now needs to set its sights on winning the Georgia Senate runoff election, even as Democrats have already clinched the majority in the chamber.

He said that there is a huge difference between 51 and 50 and that it is where all efforts should be devoted.

“With our democracy at stake, with our fundamental liberties on the line, and with a clear choice between moving America forward or holding it back, the American people spoke loud and clear: Democrats will retain the majority in the Senate,” Schumer said.