2020 Non-Presidential Elections 2

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope Jaime Harrison can beat Lindsey. Our country would be so much better without Lindsey in the senate.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I bet Jeffy's feefees are hurt because Dear Leader has disavowed him: "Trump campaign calls Sessions ‘delusional,’ asks him to stop promoting ties to the president"

Spoiler

President Trump’s campaign has asked his former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to stop “misleadingly” promoting his connections to the president as he seeks to win back his old Senate seat in a race in which Trump has endorsed another Alabama Republican.

A letter sent this week to Sessions — whom Trump publicly humiliated in various ways even before his departure from the Justice Department — cites a Sessions fundraising solicitation in which Trump is mentioned 22 times.

“The letter even makes the delusional assertion that you are President ‘Trump’s #1 Supporter,’” wrote Michael S. Glassner, the chief operating officer of the Trump campaign. “We only assume your campaign is doing this to confuse President Trump’s loyal supporters in Alabama into believing the President supports your candidacy in the upcoming primary runoff election. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The letter also quotes tweets from Trump last month in which he endorsed Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach, in the GOP runoff, scheduled for July 14. In November, the winner will face Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who won a special election in 2017 to replace Sessions, who had joined Trump’s Cabinet.

“We want to be absolutely clear about it: President Trump and the Trump Campaign unambiguously endorse Tommy Tuberville,” Glassner wrote in the letter dated Tuesday. “We demand that you and your campaign immediately stop circulating mailers — or any other similar communication — that wrongly suggest otherwise.”

The letter was first reported by the New York Times.

The Sessions campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Sessions spokesman told the Times that the fundraising solicitation was developed before Trump endorsed Tuberville in early March.

Sessions has drawn Trump’s ire since early 2017, when he recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.

Sessions was an early supporter of Trump’s presidential bid, often appearing with the candidate at rallies. Sessions said that under Justice Department guidelines, that relationship should keep him on the sidelines of the Russia investigation, and he recused himself from the probe.

Several events subsequent to Sessions’s recusal led to the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose investigation Trump repeated referred to as a “witch hunt” and publicly blamed Sessions for allowing it to continue.

In tweets and public comments over the months after Sessions’s recusal, Trump accused him of being “beleaguered” and lacking loyalty. Privately, Trump derided Sessions as “Mr. Magoo,” a cartoon character who is elderly, myopic and bumbling.

Sessions resigned as attorney general in November 2018 at Trump’s request.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Dear Rufus, the world would be a better place if Amy McGrath beats #MoscowMitch. Please make it so.

 

[Maggie Mae]

On 4/10/2020 at 4:26 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Dear Rufus, the world would be a better place if Amy McGrath beats #MoscowMitch. Please make it so.

 

There is hope after all! 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Jennifer Rubin. I so hope she's correct: "Republicans should worry about the Senate"

Spoiler

The numbers do not look promising for Republicans to retain their Senate majority. In key states, Republicans incumbents’ approval has tumbled and Democratic challengers have out-fundraised them.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), whose pusillanimity has become comic (e.g., she finds President Trump’s conduct during the pandemic “very uneven”), now has an approval rating of 37 percent with a disapproval rating of 52 percent. (Compare that to the 60-percent approval for Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills.) Meanwhile, “Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sara Gideon raised $7.1 million during the first quarter of 2020, surpassing Republican Sen. Susan Collins after the incumbent had already set a record for the most fundraising during a Maine campaign.” Gideon has raised a total of $14.8 million; Collins, $13.2 million (although Collins has a million more in cash on hand.)

Arizona is becoming a disaster zone for Republicans. In the most recent poll, Democrat Mark Kelly (husband of gun safety activist Gabrielle Giffords and a former astronaut) leads appointed incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally by nine points. He leads in the RealClearPolitics averages by eight points. Political scientist Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball now rates the race as “leans Democrat.”

North Carolina has also turned dicey for Republicans. Incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is in a statistical dead heat in the RCP averages with Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham. One poll has Tillis’s approval rating at a dreadful 26 percent. Cunningham also had a massive fundraising haul in the first quarter, raising $4.4 million. Sabato rates this race as a toss-up.

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) is the underdog in a race against former Democratic governor John Hickenlooper, with most analysts suggesting the race favors Hickenlooper. Gardner has more cash on hand, but Hickenlooper substantially out-raised him in the first quarter ($4.1 million vs. $2.5 million).

Should Democrats win all four seats but lose Alabama, the Senate would stand at 50-50, with the party that wins the White House able to cast the deciding votes via the vice president. However, the problems do not stop with these four races for Republicans.

Democrats are outpacing Republican incumbents in Kentucky ($12.9 million vs. $7.5 million) and South Carolina ($7.4 million vs. $5.7 million). Even in Kansas, “Barbara Bollier — a Democratic state senator running for the seat that will be vacated by the retiring Republican senator, Pat Roberts — drew more than $2.3 million in the first three months of the year, compared with the roughly $240,000 received by her likely Republican opponent, Kris Kobach.” Democratic polling outfit Public Policy Polling had Bollier leading Kobach by 2 points in its poll this week. (Kobach, you will recall, was sanctioned by a court for misconduct in his voting fraud escapades and lost the governor’s race in 2018.) In Montana, Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock remains the underdog to defeat incumbent Sen. Steve Daines (R), but there too Bullock has out-raised ($3.3 million) the incumbent ($1.2 million).

Democrats almost certainly won’t win all these races. But with so many races in play and Democrats raising money like gangbusters, their chances of netting enough seats to gain the majority increase substantially. By contrast, there is no Democratic-held seat other than Alabama that is remotely in play. Given Democrats’ fundraising success, Republicans will need to spend money in lots of places and eventually need to decide which candidates to cut off so as to minimize their losses.

We should keep in mind that we are more than six months from Election Day and that Trump will handily win some red states (e.g., Montana and Kansas), making it harder for down-ticket Democrats. Nevertheless, at this stage, the smart money would be on Democrats at least getting a 50-50 draw.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Welcome to 2020:

 

[47of74]

Sign, some asshole out in Indiana is doing this now

Quote

A Republican congressional election candidate has been told to cease using the likeness of Mother Teresa in his ad campaigns by a lawyer who served as legal counsel for the late missionary.

Chuck Dietzen, who is running for election to the U.S. House to represent Indiana's 5th Congressional District, used footage of Mother Teresa in one of his election videos.

On April 2, he posted an advert to YouTube which included a picture he had taken with her on his camera. "When I worked in Mother Teresa's orphanage, she told us, 'never abandon your patients.' I've lived by those words ever since," he said.

Florida attorney Jim Towey sent a cease and desist request to Dietzen, saying Mother Teresa's image should not be linked to a political cause, the Indy Star reported. The video has not yet been removed, as of April 27.

I suppose the ones using the images of JPII or Benny XVI are not far behind.

[AmericanRose]

I have finished reading "The Family" and am convinced the US will be stuck in the R-D loop forever.

[GreyhoundFan]

Another great ad from the Lincoln Project:

 

[JMarie]

On 3/26/2020 at 11:43 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

I hope Jaime Harrison can beat Lindsey. Our country would be so much better without Lindsey in the senate.

 

This pisses me off.  I'm an RN and I don't make "15 or 16 dollars an hour. In fact, I make more than 24 dollars an hour (what Graham claims nurses would "make" while receiving unemployment). And my hours haven't been affected at all.

Off to a different but equally upsetting topic....

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/06/gop-candidates-posts-demeaned-muslims-and-mocked-parkland-shooting-survivor-241429

Quote

One post described the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a rapist and a pedophile. Another mocked a survivor of the Parkland high school shooting. A third accused Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) of “hitting the crack pipe too hard.”

The commentary was among now-deleted social media posts and retweets from the accounts of Ted Howze, a Republican challenging Democratic Rep. Josh Harder in a battleground district in California. Others described Islam as “a death cult” and suggested Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign chairman, John Podesta, were responsible for the murder of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer.

In a statement provided by his campaign, Howze did not dispute that the posts were published on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. But he asserted he didn’t write them and said they contained what he considers "negative and ugly ideas."

"Like many folks in my middle-age group, I learned the very hard lesson to never allow anyone access to social media accounts or passwords," Howze said in a statement. "I made the mistake of allowing others access to these accounts unknowingly — and I am angered, horrified and extremely offended that these ugly ideas were shared or posted by those individuals several years ago."

The Howze campaign declined to respond to requests for additional information on who had access to the accounts or wrote the posts, which appeared consistently over the course of several months; when Howze discovered the posts; and why they remained on his public accounts until the day he launched his first congressional campaign in 2018.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope this comes true and the repugs lose everything. "Why the GOP may lose everything"

Spoiler

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the covid-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.

In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’s willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two of the most divisive figures in American politics.

Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.

“I will never forgive myself if I lose it,” Hickenlooper told me, “and I will do everything in my power, I will work as hard as humanly possible, to make sure that I win this, just because I feel in my bones that our democracy has been so weakened by this relentless partisanship, the constant division.”

And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage . . . about jobs, the economy.”

Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”

If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and end McConnell’s days as majority leader.

And they are not the only challengers with a decent shot at Republican seats. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has been running ahead of Republican Sen. Martha McSally, and Republicans face vulnerabilities in Iowa, Georgia, possibly Kansas and perhaps even in South Carolina. McConnell, though favored, faces a spirited opponent in Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. Only one Democratic incumbent, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, is an underdog.

Having disastrously bungled the pandemic, Trump is not only falling well behind former vice president Joe Biden in the polls; he could also be creating a tidal wave that would give Democrats unified control of the federal government’s elected branches.

Hickenlooper and Gideon are running in states Trump lost in 2016, and the president’s increasing vulnerability in Arizona and North Carolina could open the way for Kelly and Cunningham. And Trump’s weakness in once-secure Montana means that Bullock, always more popular than his party, may not have to rely on as much ticket-splitting as he has in the past.

A poll last week by Montana State University showed that Trump, who won Montana by 20 points in 2016, led Biden by just under six percentage points. The same survey found Bullock with a 70 percent approval rating for his handling of the pandemic and a seven-point lead over Daines.

My conversations with four of the top Senate challengers suggested that the coronavirus crisis has reinforced core arguments that helped the Democrats win the House in 2018, particularly around access to health care, while also increasing the saliency of inequality — in both economic and health outcomes — as a mainstream concern.

At the same time, Trump’s brutal belligerence has turned Democratic candidates into missionaries of concord. This allows them to be implicitly critical of the president and reach out to his one-time supporters at the same time.

Thus Cunningham speaks of being “a champion for everybody” and criticizes a Republican Senate where “partisan considerations are overriding institutional considerations.” Gideon notes that she reorganized the seating of the Maine House of Representatives to mix Republicans and Democrats. “When they sit next to each other,” she said, “they see each other as human beings.”

For Hickenlooper, a time of “suffering in every direction” raises the most basic questions about life — and politics.

“You’re never going to be able to control what life throws your way, but you can control whether it makes you better, or stronger, how you respond to it,” Hickenlooper said. “I think this is true of the country. We’re going to have to use this experience to be a stronger, more unified country.”

If the GOP does lose everything, it will be because the Trumpian circus-plus-horror-show is entirely off-key for an electorate that has so much to be serious about.

 

[47of74]

Awww poor Lindsey

Quote

A prominent donor to Sen. Lindsey Graham said this week he broke with the South Carolina Republican to support his Democratic challenger after he started to question Graham's principles.

Richard Wilkerson, the former chairman and president of Michelin North America, said in an opinion piece published Sunday in the Greenville News that he supported Graham until 2017 when he "started having real misgivings about him when he failed to mount any significant defense" of the late Republican Sen. John McCain, who President Donald Trump frequently attacked both before his passing in 2018 and after.

Wilkerson is now endorsing Jamie Harrison, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Though Harrison faces an uphill battle in his fight to oust Graham, a three-term senator, he outraised Graham in the first quarter of 2020. Harrison brought in a total of $7.2 million in the first three months of 2020, while Graham raised nearly $5.6 million.

Wilkerson said he has known Harrison "for years and had been impressed with his intelligence, his genuine warmth and concern for all people, and his moderate stance on the issues that confront us," adding that he believes the Democrat will help foster bipartisanship among the parties.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope the people of TX don't send this jerk to congress. "Obama’s former aides angry, hurt over Ronny Jackson’s embrace of Trump’s conspiracy theories"

Spoiler

Former Obama officials expressed anger and a sense of betrayal after onetime White House doctor Ronny L. Jackson echoed President Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about their former boss, President Barack Obama.

The retired Navy admiral, who served as the physician to the president under George W. Bush, Obama and Trump, released a lengthy statement Thursday doubling down on a tweet he’d sent the day before calling Obama, and people who worked for him, “a Deep State traitor” who “deserves to be brought to justice for their heinous actions.”

Jackson’s comments followed a tirade of tweets from Trump proclaiming “Obamagate,” over unsubstantiated claims that the Obama administration was working to take down Trump. Jackson accused his former boss of weaponizing “the highest levels of our government to spy on Trump.”

“I will never apologize for standing up to protect America’s national security interests and constitutional freedoms, even if that means triggering liberals and the ‘mainstream media,' ” Jackson said in his statement.

Former Obama officials who worked with Jackson in the White House reacted with surprise and hurt that their former colleague was embracing Trump’s conspiracy theory, which he has called “the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA” and “worse than Watergate” — though he’s been short on specifics, telling reporters who asked Monday, “You know what the crime is.”

“During my time in the White House Ronny L. Jackson was my colleague, my friend and my doctor. I thanked him in my book for his good care,” tweeted Alyssa Mastromonaco, Obama’s onetime deputy chief of staff. “His comments yesterday and today leave me confused, angry, and heartbroken. I don’t recognize this version of Ronny at all.”

Others struggled to square Jackson’s rhetoric with the person who they say was once friends with Obama and his team.

“Ronny L. Jackson palled around with us Deep State Traitors for 8 years and did nothing but smile and say kind things about Barack Obama, who made him an Admiral,” Jon Favreau, Obama’s onetime speechwriter, wrote on Twitter.

One of Favreau’s podcast co-hosts on “Pod Save America,” former Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor, also referenced Jackson’s friendship and accused him of adopting Trump’s conspiracy theories for political purposes.

“Ronny L. Jackson was friends with Obama and his entire staff,” Vietor tweeted. “I never heard him make a partisan statement. So it’s really been sad to watch him debase himself by lying for Trump … to win a Congressional primary. Truly shameful.”

Jackson left his White House post after 12 years in 2018, and shortly afterward, Trump nominated him to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. But Jackson withdrew amid growing allegations of professional misconduct.

Trump took a liking to Jackson after the doctor answered questions from reporters following the president’s first physical exam at the White House. Jackson gave a fawning report of Trump’s mental and physical health, telling reporters “that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.”

Jackson is running for Congress as a Republican in Texas. He ran in a crowded primary where no candidate received a majority of the vote, so he and the other top vote-getter are competing in a runoff election May 26 to determine who runs in November. Trump has endorsed Jackson in the race.

 

[louisa05]

Senator Ben Sasse gave a nasty commencement speech for his hometown high school’s virtual ceremony. He’s the first speaker on the link after the principal introduces the ceremony.  It’s so jam packed with sheer assholery that it’s hard to summarize.  Share around the web if you can. He deserves to be shamed.  

Spoiler

 

Link: 

 

 

[Audrey2]

Ben, you weren't chosen for Saturday Night Live. Being a Senator doesn't make you funny. Please quit your day job as well.

[GreyhoundFan]

He's such a pretentious snot. It's sad he couldn't be bothered to actually shave. I only made it through a few minutes before I had to turn it off.

[louisa05]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

He's such a pretentious snot. It's sad he couldn't be bothered to actually shave. I only made it through a few minutes before I had to turn it off.

I watched the whole thing. It just keeps getting worse. He tells the kids that missing the end of their senior year and having only a virtual graduation isn’t even in the top 100 of problems. Basically tries to make them guilty for feeling bad. As my husband said, for most of them that’s the number one thing right now and they have every right to feel bad that they were cheated out of those milestones.  
And he insults so many people it’s mind boggling. 

[47of74]

Another GOP fuckstick in action...

Quote

Republican congressional candidate Ted Howze said earlier this month he had nothing to do with social media posts from his personal accounts that demeaned Muslims, accused prominent Democrats of murder and mocked a survivor of the Parkland school shooting.

The “negative and ugly ideas,” he asserted, were penned by others whom he’d given access to his accounts, but he declined to name them.

In the weeks since his denial, new questions have emerged about that explanation.

At least a dozen additional posts from Howze’s account over a two-year period espouse conspiracy theories, suggest Hillary Clinton and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) are responsible for murder, or denigrate Dreamers, Islam and the Black Lives Matter movement. As of Tuesday afternoon, they were accessible on his personal Facebook account.

 

[JMarie]

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/05/20/qanon-follower-wins-senate-primary-in-oregon/24370649/

Quote

A follower of QAnon, a conspiracy theory that has been spreading from the far fringes of right-wing social media into more mainstream Republican circles, won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Oregon Tuesday, crediting fellow followers for her victory.

“Where we go one, we go all,” said candidate Jo Rae Perkins in a tweet published prior to the results coming in, quoting a popular slogan from the conspiracy theory. “I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. Together, we can save our republic.”

“Where we go one, we go all,” said candidate Jo Rae Perkins in a tweet published prior to the results coming in, quoting a popular slogan from the conspiracy theory. “I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. Together, we can save our republic.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The Lindsey Must Go super PAC released a great video:

 

[JMarie]

On 5/16/2020 at 9:47 PM, louisa05 said:

Senator Ben Sasse gave a nasty commencement speech for his hometown high school’s virtual ceremony. He’s the first speaker on the link after the principal introduces the ceremony.  It’s so jam packed with sheer assholery that it’s hard to summarize.  Share around the web if you can. He deserves to be shamed.  

  Hide contents

 

Link: 

 

 

 

 

 

Guess who's up for re-election in November? (hint: his name rhymes with schfen)

[GreyhoundFan]

The Lincoln Project just dropped an ad against #MoscowMitch. It's wonderful:

 

[fraurosena]

Oh! Is anyone following how these elections are going?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

26 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh! Is anyone following how these elections are going?

 

Yes, he's not polling well. Couldn't happen to a nicer nazi guy.