The First Day of Labor Day: Why Joe Biden and Donald Mastriano Cannot Have a Spokane? The Case of the Pennsylvania Senate Race

Donald Trump narrowly won the presidential elections in Pennsylvania in 2016 and Joe Biden did the same four years later. The state is expected to be one of the most competitive states in the years to come.

That huge edge for Shapiro comes even as Pennsylvania’s US Senate race is much more competitive, with Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman leading Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz 51% to 45% in CNN’s poll.

Now, it’s worth noting here that Mastriano was running explicitly as the Trump candidate in the Republican primary – and won the endorsement of the former President as well.

Mastriano has walled himself off from the public as he tours the Commonwealth to make sure he only comes into contact with true believers. …

Republican leaders had hoped that Mastriano’s campaign would evolve over the summer so that he could reach out to undecided voters. The opposite has happened. Labor Day did not happen.

It was a hard task to beat him. Even as there were doubts about his willingness to reach out beyond the hardcore GOP base, national Republicans did not try to sway voters away from Mastriano, even though they were unnerved by getting sideways with Trump.

The Rise and Fall of Donald J. Trump in 2024: The Story of the GOP and the Superpower That Has Been Done For So Many Years

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is an author and editor of several books, one of which is about the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. You can follow him on his account. The views of this commentary are of his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Donald Trump is planning on running for the White House again. On Thursday, Trump told his followers to “get ready” for his return to the presidential campaign trail – and top aides have been eyeing November 14 as a potential launch date, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Trump, it seems, is hoping to be the first person since President Grover Cleveland to win two non-consecutive elections.

While Trump has been hinting at another run for months, the news would certainly send shockwaves through the political world. Trump is arguably one of the most controversial and destabilizing political leader in contemporary US history. And as we have seen with recent Supreme Court decisions like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – as well as the toxic rhetoric and support for conspiracy theories within the GOP – his presidency was enormously consequential.

But the 2024 election will be as much about Biden as it will be about Trump. While Biden can tout a successful legislative record that includes the Inflation Reduction Act and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, he will go into 2024 with the baggage that plagues any incumbent. The problems that he has struggled with, including inflation and the fallout from the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will be part of the conversation in a way that they were not four years ago. Biden is the boss if he runs and will no longer be campaigning for it.

The Republicans remain a unified party even if the Democrats show anything. Very little can shake that unity. After Trump left the White House, the party didn’t change in substantive ways and the “Never Trump” contingent failed to emerge as a dominant force. Indeed, officials such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney were purged from the party.

Even with unconventional and deeply flawed candidates such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz running for key Senate seats, recent polls are showing that the GOP is in relatively good shape overall going into the midterm election on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Democrats are scrambling to defend several seats and even candidates in reliably blue states such as New York are at risk.

If Republicans do well next week, possibly retaking control of the House and Senate, members of the party will surely feel confident about amping up their culture wars and economic talking points going into 2024. A strong showing in the November elections will likely help the GOP unify behind Donald Trump, because of the number of election-denying candidates. Although there has been copious speculation about the rise of other Trump-like Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, it’s likely they will look “liddle” once the former President formally reenters the political arena – as his formidable opponents learned in the 2016 Republican primaries.

A GOP victory would be a big boost for Trump. At this point, he has not been held accountable. Despite criminal investigations and the House select committee investigating January 6, Trump is still a viable political figure.

If Trump runs, the Department of Justice is considering the possibility of appointing a special counsel to oversee the two investigations into his campaign and actions as president. But that’s unlikely to stop Trump; we’ve seen his relentless attacks on former special counsel Robert Mueller, who oversaw the Russia investigation. It will be more difficult to prosecute Trump once he is a candidate. Trump, a master of playing the victim, is sure to claim (as he has in the past) that any investigation is simply a politically motivated “witch hunt” intended to take him out of the running.

It would be a big blow to the President if he were to avoid prosecution, since he could still be struggling with a shaky economy and divisions within his own party. And if election deniers enter positions of power after the midterms, and Trump escapes any punishment for January 6, it’s likely he will take advantage of the loyalists who have infiltrated state and local election offices to make sure that victory is his. Since Trump has been to this rodeo before, he can perfect the rhetoric that put him into office. And now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, Trump could be reinstated – giving him a way to direct and shape the media conversation once again. (Trump, who founded Truth Social, where he has been active since he was banned from Twitter, has not publicly indicated that he will return).

Anatomy of the Trump-Biden era: The Challenge to Democratic Reelection Campaigns on the Ladder of the 2020 Midterm Election

The midterms have shown that the Democrats’ focus on the radical nature of the GOP and the dangers posed to democracy are not necessarily enough to rally voters. In his closing speech Wednesday, Biden outlined the dangers, and Democrats are struggling to maintain power.

Of course, the fact that Trump poses a very serious threat in 2024 doesn’t mean he will win. Trump had turned off many independents and even some Republicans by 2020 and it remains unclear if he can win their support in crucial swing states. And as we have seen with President Barack Obama’s run against Mitt Romney in 2012, presidents who have faced tough reelection campaigns can still find a path to victory.

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She writes a column for The Washington Post and is a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The key question of who will control Congress during the next elections has not been answered. On this day after, we can make some initial conclusions.

There was only a red wave, and it was not a big one. There were predictions of a huge Republican victory at the polls. The election was a big disappointment for the GOP. In addition, it was a disastrous day for former President Donald Trump, who had hoped a Republican landslide would place him on a glide path to the nomination to become the party’s presidential candidate in 2024.

The challenge to democracy isn’t over. The election deniers made a lot of money. The winners performed worse than the non-election-deniers. In other words, by parroting Trump’s lies about 2020, they pushed away voters who had supported other Republicans.

28% of voters said they chose their vote to oppose Donald Trump in an exit poll. And just 37% said they had a favorable view of the former president, the presumed GOP front-runner, at least before this election. That should alarm the party.

Trump believes that if the Republicans win, he should be given all the credit. I should not be blamed if they lose. The evidence clearly shows he deserves much of the blame.

Why Did Herschel Walker Win a House of Representatives? The Case of Kevin Pelosi, Mehmet Oz, and Brian Kemp

The opposition party gained an average of 29 seats in the House of Representatives over the past 100 years. The GOP needed just five seats to take control of the Senate, a goal that was so easy to clear due to the high inflation rate and low approval of Biden. But Republicans are struggling to clear that low bar.

They may well do it. Nancy Pelosi might be replaced by Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, but that doesn’t make her performance any less amazing. The party in power after 9/11 did their best performance since 2002, under the leadership of Biden.

Biden says he decided to run for president in order to save US democracy. Even though his party is losing control of Congress Tuesday, he can take solace in the fact that he has made progress in achieving that goal. These elections were a victory for democracy.

The football star Herschel Walker could still win a game. But anyone who heard him campaign or learned about his past knows he should never have been on the ballot. Trump apparently thought fame would do the trick, just as it did for him. So, he also backed TV star Mehmet Oz for the Pennsylvania seat. Oz lost to John Fetterman, who after suffering a stroke struggled to regain his verbal prowess, a key skill for a political candidate.

At the victory rally, supporters made clear that they felt his winning platform was a stepping stone. The group of people who had gathered in the Room chanted, “two more years!” to signify they would rather see their candidate in the White House than in the governor’s mansion.

Within hours, Trump’s mob tactics became known, threatening to reveal “things” about the man if he runs. The former president said he knew more about him than anyone else.

Then there was Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, another Republican who won reelection, in a rematch with Stacey Abrams. Trump despises Kemp because, like other Georgia officials, he refused to overturn the 2020 vote, despite enormous pressure from the then-president.

Trump plans to announce his candidacy soon. Most Democrats find the prospect hard to stomach, but most Republicans would also like him to just focus on his golf game. As the midterms showed, he is a threat to the party.

The Dawn of DeSantis: a Disruptive Candidate Whose First Presidential Aspirations Has Been Done Well

Soon, Americans will probably have to begin enduring another season of presidential campaigning by the most disruptive candidate in living memory, a man who has shown only disdain for democracy. It is good to know that the nation took a step toward sanity this week and that democracy did well.

They weren’t the only ones. Across right-wing media outlets the day after the election, commentators heaped praise on DeSantis while excoriating former President Donald Trump. Recriminations came swiftly. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board headline said it all, “Trump is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loss”, and it was echoed on Fox News and right-wing radio shows in the days after the election.

But before declaring this the dawn of DeSantis, remember: It is just as likely the next few weeks will be the high-water mark of his presidential aspirations. The spotlight can very quickly become the hot seat, and DeSantis is both untested as a national candidate and as a Trump adversary. Those who believed that an easy pivot from the era of Trump to the age of DeSantis was doable are likely to suffer another wave of disappointment.

He has married that political style with a strongman persona. He has targeted universities, public health workers, and corporations for their opposition to his policies. He has sent police to round up voters with felony convictions who are confused by the state effort to remove their voting rights after voters reinstated them a few years ago. He has pushed the Florida legislature to his will, pushing anti-gay statutes, a new boundaries map and a bill against Disney for complaining about the state’s “don’t say gay” bill.

His attention to public opinion helped strengthen his popularity in Florida. He introduced a gas-tax holiday in the month before the election, and focused on effective hurricane relief rather than campaigning in the wake of the recent storm. As a result, he appears to have won not only traditional conservatives in the state but also made more headway with Latino voters and voters in more Democratic areas like Miami-Dade. If the dream for many on the right was Trumpism without Trump, DeSantis seems to be the ideal politician to carry them into that future.

But as Sen. Marco Rubio, a one-time frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, knows, neither success in Florida nor success in theory naturally translates into national victory. Part of that is due to the particulars of Florida. It’s no wonder that there is more conservative electorate in the country because they’ve been more conservative in recent years, even as the country has coalesced around center-left policies.

Meanwhile, unlike the national party, the Democratic Party in Florida is in tatters, struggling to field and support candidates and to organize and mobilize voters. Unlike most other states, Florida has a particular mix of Hispanic voters who are overwhelmingly supportive of immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela.

Then there is the issue of fellow Florida resident Donald Trump. The dump Trump crowd, which has grown larger than any other time since 2016, does not seem to know that the cult of personality around the president is still alive and well in parts of the party.

The Electoral Campaign in Pennsylvania: The Democratic Advantage and the Republican Failure to Overturn a Prescription for Abortion Rights in New York and Michigan

Democrats excelled in Pennsylvania. They ran as well as Mr. Biden did. The seats in the House were swept. John Fetterman won by a much larger margin than Mr. Biden did in the state. Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, won in a big way.

In New York, the two issues weren’t as critical. There was no danger that the Democratic Legislature would overturn abortion rights. There is no indication that anyone will try to overturn the New York victory of Mr. Biden in 2020. As a result, Republicans focused the campaign on crime. And it paid off.

State by state, the abortion and democracy issues appeared to be the most obvious differences. The Republicans nominated Doug Mastriano, a candidate who was central to efforts to change the presidential election results in the state. Democrats feared that a Mastriano victory could risk a constitutional crisis and a threat to democratic government. The state Legislature was controlled by Republicans, who were against abortion, so it could have threatened another long-held right.

There are exceptions, of course — like Democratic strength in Colorado or Republican durability in Texas. Most of the impressive showings fit together well.

The Republican landslide in Florida was the result of a stop-the-steal movement that never sought to overturn an election result and a governor who refused to go further than a 15-week abortion ban. In the state of Michigan, where abortion referendums were on the ballot at different points this year, Democrats swept the most competitive House districts.

Pat Toomey and the Republicans: Is Tuesday’s election a final straw for Trump? An analysis by Pat Doomey on Truth Social

Pat Toomey will be leaving his Pennsylvania Senate seat at the end of the term. But before he goes, he is speaking some hard truths to his party.

CNN asked Thursday about how the Republicans lost the contest to replace him, and he said that President Trump was never going to be helpful.

TudorDixon lost to the Democratic Gov. of Michigan by 11 points and that led to a blue wave in the state. In Illinois, the Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate lost by 10. The Trump candidate lost the Maryland governor’s race by 25.

Trump, for his part, is entirely unwilling to consider that he was – and is – anything but an unalloyed good for his party, declaring a “Big Victory” on his Truth Social website Friday.

Even if Trump leads them to electoral destruction, there is still a section of the Republican Party that will follow him.

It is not a good thing for Toomey to speak out against Trump given that he is already out the door. But his voice is part of a growing chorus of Republicans suggesting that Tuesday’s election was the final straw for Trump. Will base voters listen?