midterms

With US primary elections coming in November 2018, the neocon-deep state faction of the Trump administration is cleverly scapegoating Russia, while changing the narrative on what was previously called “election meddling” to now be identified as “election involvement”.
Not that any of this matters, because we have, to-date, seen no evidence of “meddling”, “collusion”, “interference”, or “involvement”.
Nevertheless, should Republicans have a poor showing in the midterms Russia will be blamed, and should Democrats have a poor showing in the midterms Russia will be blamed.

According to a new poll from Morning Consult, just around a third of Americans feel Trump is trustworthy, about the same number who say he has the judgement need to be president. 77% of respondents, on the other hand, feel he's arrogant and 60% say he's reckless, unwilling to admit mistakes.

Carol Shea-PorterThe DCCC wants you to think Democrats can't win in midterm elections and it isn't their fault.

In the final week of the midterm election cycle, House Republicans are on the offensive and an abysmally-led DCCC is retreating almost everywhere.

Yesterday Steve Israel was crowing on Twitter how 4 powerful senior Republican committee chairmen are retiring (Doc Hastings, Mike Rogers, Buck McKeon and, now, Dave Camp). What his tweets conspicuously left out, of course, is that Israel didn't recruit any candidates against them and actually undermined candidates who ran against Rogers and McKeon last cycle.

Financiers of the far right's anti-democracy jihad: 2 KochsElizabeth Drew, in a fascinating piece for the NY Review of Books, The Stranglehold on Our Politics, talks about the determinative properties of voter turnout in midterm elections. Normally turnout sinks from between 51.7 to 61.6% for presidential elections into the high 30s for midterms.