The Kelly-V Victor Debate: Democrat vs. Libertarian Candidate Correspondence in the 2016 Midterm Election
It was the first and only debate of the campaign, which will help decide if the Democrats retain control of the Senate. Mr. Kelly repeatedly emphasized his independent image, referring frequently to his disagreements with members of his own party, including President Biden.
The two men, who have spent months attacking each other on issues including abortion, border security, inflation and election integrity, were also joined by Marc Victor, the Libertarian candidate, who has not reached double digits in polls.
The debate did little to cover new ground on the most contentious issues, but the moderator asked pointed, direct questions in a bid to force the candidates to clarify their sometimes murky positions. Mr. Masters tried to straddle the line between his previous hard-line stances and his more recently adopted softer tone — but continued to largely play to his base, even if it required some winks and a nod or two.
A white knuckle midterm election is racing into its last four weeks with the Senate on a knife-edge and with a strong prospect of a Donald Trump-aligned Republican majority in the House.
Democrats are being weighed on by history. It is almost always the case that presidents are taken aback after two years after they win an election because of high inflation and gas prices.
For much of the last few months, the midterms have been eclipsed in the news by the war in Ukraine, Trump’s showdown with the Justice Department over the search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and devastating hurricanes. The campaign has gotten more competitive as more voters tune in.
Many Republican candidates are saying Trump was a cheat and out of office. Future elections may be controlled in certain races for governor or secretary of state. And the ex-President himself is using the campaign as a testing ground for a likely 2024 bid to reclaim the White House.
The fight against Biden, Oz, Oz and Oz: a case study in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on abortion and the opioid crisis
If the issues that caused Biden to be popular in the summer will cause voters to stay home, then the Senate might be able to hang on to its majority. But candidates – their strengths, flaws and respective coffers – will also play a role.
Republicans are favored to win the House of Representatives in four weeks but their hopes of a huge majority have diminished because Democrats want to retain suburban areas where the Supreme Court decision on abortion may not be popular.
• Besides having history on their side, Republicans have an opening since a majority of voters believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, with fears of a recession growing and the country still trudging through the aftermath of a once-in-100-year pandemic. They are pounding Democrats as soft on crime and fans of open borders as migrants stream across, while leaping on Biden’s low approval ratings at a time of global turmoil to frame the election as referendum on a failing presidency.
The fight is still closer than Democrats think, despite the tightening of some major races. The Supreme Court’s ruling on the abortion issue changed the tone of the campaign. Trump, who has scared many voters outside his support base, went back into the news with his refusal to give up the documents he kept at his Florida resort. He also foisted a battery of unskilled election-denying GOP nominees on his party – risking its hopes in key races.
For instance, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman on Sunday beseeched around 1,200 supporters in Bucks County, northeast of Philadelphia, where Democrats must run up their margins, to send him to Washington to restore abortion rights, raise the minimum wage and expand access to the health care he says saved his life.
“Send me to D.C., and I will be the 51st vote,” said the stroke survivor, whose blue collar campaign brands his Trump-endorsed opponent, TV surgeon Mehmet Oz, as an elitist peddler of quack cures and a carpetbagger from New Jersey.
Glenn Youngkin, a rising star of the Republican Party who won in Virginia in 2021, slammed Democrats for causing economic misery.
According to Youngkin, people are seeing inflation go through the roof, and groceries and utility bills are going up as well.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/10/politics/midterm-outlook-huge-consequences-analysis/index.html
The 2016 midterms are shaping up to the next election: Donald Trump, Herschel Walker, and J.D. Fetterman
The election’s consequences are huge. The GOP will kill the legislative agenda of Biden if they win the house, and use the investigation of the business dealings of the president and his son to destroy the administration. A GOP majority in congress would be a tool of revenge for Trump, as well as a means of impeaching him in the lead up to the presidential election in ten years.
The race in Georgia was thrown into turmoil by a Daily Beast report that Republican senate nominee Herschel Walker paid for an abortion despite campaigning against the procedure. Walker’s struggles are an example of the troubles of other inexperienced or unvetted candidates that Trump helped win nominations, partly due to their signing up to his false claims of election fraud.
Fetterman missed the summer because of his stroke, but Oz was unable to take advantage of it. The Republican nominee may have gained some traction in bashing Fetterman on crime, after struggling to consolidate conservative support. In some polls, the current attorney general of the state is trailed by the incumbent GOP candidate for governor. Although in a tightly divided state like Pennsylvania, which Biden won by only by a point in 2020, it’s not impossible for an extremist like Mastriano to win.
Another Trump pick, Ohio Senate nominee J.D. Tim Ryan tried to re-energize working class voters who have switched to Trump by running a lackluster campaign in a state that is red. Democrats have a long shot in Ohio.
Trump’s influence is on full display in Arizona, which, like Georgia, is a state where Trump tried to overturn Biden’s election win. Trump acolyte Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor, has become a rising star of the MAGA world in her campaign for governor and is refusing to say whether Biden is the legitimate president. Recent CNN polling shows no clear leader in the race between her and Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs.
The spectacle of the former president lambasting his party leader in the Senate is an example of the unprecedented nature of the midterms and also the way in which Trump threatens to again dash the Republicans hopes of winning the chamber.
Masters, a venture capitalist, flipped a question over whether he believed Biden was the legitimate president to coin a soundbite on a GOP election theme. “Joe Biden is absolutely the President. I mean, my gosh, have you seen the gas prices lately?” he said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/10/politics/midterm-outlook-huge-consequences-analysis/index.html
Hunter Biden, Blake Masters and the Arizona Economy: Why Do We Need to Worry? What Do We Want to Tell Them About the 2020 Election?
In new CNN polls last week in Arizona and Nevada, more than twice as many voters cited the economy and inflation as their top issue as cited the second place issue in each state – abortion (44% economy vs. 14% abortion in Nevada, 41% economy to 17% abortion in Arizona). Majorities in each of the states said the economy is getting worse.
Republican Senate leaders have said for a long time that the best chance in November lies in a constant focus on the Biden economy and not making the campaign all about him.
Similarly, in Arizona, Blake Masters won the Republican nomination for Senate with the help of Mr. Trump’s endorsement, which arrived months after Mr. Masters recorded a social media video in which he looked directly into the camera to tell viewers, “I think Trump won in 2020.” At the time, Mr. Trump made clear he was snubbing another Republican candidate who the former president believed had not done enough to support the lie that the election was rigged.
Mr. Masters said at the debate that Mr. Biden was elected legitimately. He believes that Mr. Biden may have won because the social media companies suppressed negative news about Hunter Biden.
Masters was able to get in the race because of the financial support from Peter Thiel, a conservative tech billionaire. He appealed to Republicans because he promised to prioritize immigration, while also repeating Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In one campaign video released last year, he said he believed Trump won.
When Arizona gets a better shot at the Senate, Sen. Lisa Masters tells CNN that she has a path to victory for a narrow Democratic re-election
With Kelly’s win in Arizona, Democrats will hold 49 seats and Republicans will hold 49. Democrats need just one more seat to hold the majority in the Senate, after they defeated Mehmet Oz in the Senate race in Pennsylvania. The Senate is currently divided but the Vice President casts the tie breaking vote.
The Democratic candidate for Nevada is trying to fend off a challenge from the Republican, Adam Laxalt, who was the state’s former attorney general. Democrats are also defending a seat in Georgia, where Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker are headed to a December 6 runoff, CNN projects.
Even if the Republicans win control of the US House, it will still be a very narrow lead as GOP leaders had hoped.
The advantages of a retired astronauts, a Navy veteran and husband of a former lawmaker make Kelly well positioned to survive the Democrats’ efforts in purple states like Arizona.
Masters’ team hoped that the large amount of mail-in ballots dropped off at polling locations on Election Day would favor Republicans as the votes were counted in Arizona. Those ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, took longer to count than those cast in person on Tuesday because officials had to verify signatures on the ballot envelopes.
In a call with reporters on Friday afternoon, Masters campaign advisers argued that Masters had a path to victory. One campaign official said that they knew the race was going to be close. It’s too close to call in this race and the smart observers know it. It is most likely going to be down to 10,000 votes. And we feel good, we have a path.”
Masters made a change to his tone about the 2020 election results as well as the conservative stances he had sought out during the primary on abortion in an effort to appeal to broader swath of the Arizona electorate. (Though Republicans comprise a plurality in Arizona, independents make up about a third of the electorate and often sway close elections).
Masters was portrayed by Kelly as an Extremist who would jeopardize abortion rights, Social Security and Medicare. Kelly has focused on Masters’ anti- abortion stances ever since a new ban on abortion was passed in a state with legal efforts to ban abortion in almost all cases.