Back To School With Betsy And Donald by Nancy Ohanian Wisconsin is a thinking state and in 2016 both national parties nominated the worst possible contenders for people accustomed to using their brains. By the end of the campaign thoughtful voters on both sides of the partisan divide were ready to puke. Many sat it out and others were motivated by a lesser of two evils strategy.
Trump Snowball Effect by Nancy OhanianNew polling from CNN shows Trump losing among likely voters in both Wisconsin and North Carolina. Trump is down 3 points in North Carolina and 10 points in Wisconsin. Although Trump won both states in 2016, Wisconsin had a statewide election since then which was disastrous for the GOP.
My guess is yes-- this November we're going to see a lot of the seats that were lost while Debbie Wasserman Schultz incompetently ran the DNC picked back up by Democrats again. And, as Joan Walsh explained this week for The Nation that process is already underway. During the Wasserman Schultz years Democrats lost 942 legislative seats.
Wisconsin's 82nd Assembly District is in southwestern Milwaukee County, right where Milwaukee County, Waukesha County and Racine County meet. It's one of the reddest parts of Milwaukee County. Hillary lost it with 43% but two years later both Tammy Baldwin and Jill Karofsky were just a fraction n of a point away from 50%. The current Assemblyman, Ken Skowronski is a knee-jerk Republican careerist.
A new YouGov poll for CBS News shows that nearly half of registered voters (48%) believe Trump's policies are making the economy worse. Worse for Republicans is that most voters (57%) say Trump is doing a very bad (43%) or somewhat bad (14%) job on handling the pandemic.
Nationally, Republicans have, by and large but with a few exceptions, fought against Democratic governors trying to protect their states' residents from the worst of the pandemic. But no Republican-dominated state legislature has been more pro-COVID than Wisconsin's. They have worked hard-- and effectively-- to prevent Gov. Tony Evers, a very moderate Democrat, from instituting rules to keep the state safe. The Republicans have given Wisconsin 36,448 cases of the disease-- 6,260 cases per Wisconsinite. On Saturday there were 926 new cases reported (and 7 new deaths).
Today New Jersey's congressional delegation is made up of 7 Democrats and 5 Republicans. Not one of the Democrats is being seriously challenged for reelection-- in fact two, Bill Pacsrell and have no opponents at all. Two of the Republicans, Frank LoBiondo and Don Payne, have no opponent at all. Other Democrats have only pro forma opposition.
Even though congressional party leaders are blocking it from becoming part of the official Democratic agenda and even though both the DCCC and the DSCC screened candidates to find ones who didn't back it, 84.5% of Americans (and 70.1% of all Americans) support Medicare-For-All. Friday in Illinois, President Obama explicitly expressed-- for the first time, at least in public-- his support for Medicare-for-All.Democrats and independents are about to turn out in droves to defeat Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress. The media is calling this a "blue wave." But that's utter bullshit.
