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Republicans' Crude, Craven, Cruel Tactics Aren't Working

We are on the home stretch for the 2026 mid-terms and things are definitely not playing out as Republicans envisioned a year ago or even six months ago.  The Felon has record disapproval levels yet continues to tell voters to vote as if he is on the ballot - a gift to Democrats. And then there is the host of unfit Republican candidates, some of who won their primaries with the Felon's endorsement that are faring far less well as they face the general election.  Adding to the Republican desperation is the reality that the only signature legislation past during the Felon's second regime is the misnamed "big beautiful bill" that rewarded the ultra-rich with huge tax breaks while screwing over millions of everyday Americans and throwing a few crumbs to lower income retirees and those working for tips.  In short, boasts of "cutting taxes" are falling on deaf ears, especially as oil and gas prices surge again (Brent crude is currently almost $117 per gallon). Some of the GOP political ads underscore Republican desperation, a prime example being Vivek Ramaswamy add against his opponent Amy Acton that has drawn bipartisan condemnation and is causing venues to cancel events for Ramaswamy, not wanting anything to do with the potential backlash from those infuriated and/or disgusted by the ad.  Other races show desperation such as a Northeast North Carolina congressional race where the GOP candidate has a bitter looking white woman claiming the Democrat incumbent "signed a bill allowing men into women's bathrooms."  The irony is that there are zero cases of transgender individual sexually assaulting but a half dozen or more cases single every week of pastors and youth ministers indicted for sexual assault of minors.  A column in the New York Times looks at the situation:

In my column last week, I wrote about the Democratic Party’s dramatic change of fortune in the race to control the Senate. The expectation at the start of this election cycle was that Republicans would hold the chamber easily and, depending on the course of events, even expand their majority.

After all, just to maintain the status quo, Democrats had to defend incumbents in states that President Trump won handily. And to have any chance at a majority, they would need to defeat at least one incumbent — Susan Collins of Maine, for example — and overcome the Republican Party’s home-field advantage in at least two states. A tall order if there ever was one.

But thanks to a set of Trump’s bad decisions — from his authoritarian occupations of American cities that enraged liberal voters to a war in Iran that has angered swing voters and independents with inflation and high prices — Democrats have turned what was supposed to be a bad Senate map into one where they stand a real chance of winning a decently sized majority in the chamber.

But while the fundamentals determine the overall shape of the electoral landscape, candidates and campaigns play a meaningful part in the final outcome. And it is in the realm of candidates and campaigns that I want to remark on two particular aspects of this campaign season.

The first is the wide gap in candidate quality between the Republicans and Democrats. In race after race, Democrats have managed to recruit and advance candidates who are well positioned to capitalize on changing political circumstances. Even if he were not facing off against Ken Paxton, an experienced but still strikingly weak candidate, James Talarico would still be an impressive recruit. He is a natural communicator — whose seminarian background and personal faith have been a great asset in winning over Texas voters — and he has proved to be both nimble and aggressive, able to hold Paxton’s feet to the fire despite facing an onslaught of cash from outside groups and actors, like Elon Musk.

You could say similar things of Adam Hamilton in Kansas, perhaps the surprise candidate of this cycle, who is running a competitive race against the Republican incumbent, Roger Marshall. . . With his moderate politics, Hamilton has successfully presented himself as a bipartisan figure, with support from prominent Republicans in Kansas. It also helps that Marshall, a doctor, has struggled in the face of revelations that he took harsh and punitive action against his patients, dragging them to court for trivial amounts of money.

Other Democratic candidates, such as Josh Turek in Iowa, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Troy Jackson in Maine, have also successfully capitalized on the Republican Party’s worsening electoral position.

 As for the Republicans, the opposite appears to be true. There are a few candidates in the field who may well outperform the fundamentals, like the Iowa Senate nominee Ashley Hinson. Michele Tafoya in Minnesota also seems to be keeping up with her opponent. But beyond them, Republicans are working with candidates who are just not up to snuff. In Georgia, Mike Collins has been marred by his associations with white nationalists and other extremists, and is headed for a crushing defeat in his race against the incumbent, Senator Jon Ossoff. Darline Graham in South Carolina is barely ahead of her Democratic opponent, and again, this is South Carolina. The aforementioned Ken Paxton is such a lackluster candidate that he may well deliver the Texas Republican Party its first statewide defeat for federal office since 1988.

Perhaps the most striking example of a candidate ill-equipped for a competitive race is Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio. . . . Perhaps the fact that Republicans were not anticipating a competitive year is how Ramaswamy managed to win the nomination. Either way, he is currently poised to lose to the Democratic nominee, Amy Acton.

In apparent desperation, the Ramaswamy campaign commissioned an advertisement featuring Amy Acton’s mother. The two have not seen or spoken to each other since 1978. As a child, Acton testified against her stepfather, who was charged with sexually abusing her. . . . Acton’s mother calls her daughter a liar, someone who “lies about her past.” The evidence says otherwise. To give one example, documents released by Mahoning County officials in Ohio corroborate Acton’s claim that she lived in a tent as a child.

The Ramaswamy camp, which includes fellow Ohioan JD Vance, thinks the ad is effective. But it’s been condemned by people on both sides, including the state’s Republican governor, as crude, craven and cruel. There is a chance, as well, that it blows back on Ramaswamy, undermining his campaign in the critical final stretch of the election. . . . As it is, Ramaswamy’s gambit may well drag down the entire statewide ticket.

We’re still 10 days away from Election Day, so I’m not going to make any grand pronouncements about the outcome. But I will say that if Republicans do lose the Senate, and if they lose it badly, it will be a testament to one of the most striking political dynamics of the Trump era.

No other Republican is able to mimic Trump’s particular style of politics. And while Trump’s endorsement is a powerful force in Republican primaries, the president does not actually have a great track record of picking candidates who go on to win general elections.

Trump is in absolute command of the Republican Party, but outside of his own victories, he has steered it, more often than not, into troubled electoral waters.

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Is the Felon's Repudiation Finally at Hand?

Oil prices have soared this past week - Brent Crude id almost $117.00/barrel - and the stock market dropped almost 600 points yesterday over fears the Iran war is about to heat back up. Both are the result of the Felon's misguided war of choice against Iran that continues to disrupt oil shipments in the Middle East and has encouraged the Houthis to increase attacks against Saudi Arabia.  Meanwhile, the Felon is barnstorming in red states where races were never expected to be competitive and telling audiences to pretend he's on the ballot. Which, if one is a Republican candidate, is the last thing one wants as the Felon's unpopularity his continued to rise and he becomes increasingly toxic. Elon Musk - an evil actor in my view - has thrown over $445 million to GOP candidates in an attempt to buy the mid-term elections with questionable results based on current polling.  Stunningly, the Felon seems oblivious as to his own toxicity yet many fear what he may attempt if the Republicans lose control of both the Senate and House of Representatives.   As a piece in The New Yorker examines, perhaps (if we are lucky) we are the cusp of the Felon belatedly being repudiated and seen for the incompetent, greed driven, and nasty individual that he truly is.  Shock at the gas pumps is a daily reminder to voters of the Felon's failed policies as are ever rising grocery and heating oil costs.  Here are article highlights:

Is this, finally, the repudiation of Donald Trump? In decades of covering American politics, I cannot think of a midterm election which has more directly posed that question about a President—never mind one where all indicators point, ever more starkly, to a straightforward answer: Yes.

As Trump has barnstormed around the country this fall, he has reverted to the playbook he tried in his first midterm campaign. “Pretend, please,” he says wherever he goes, “that I’m on the ballot.” As always, he wants this to be the Trump, Trump, Trump election. The problem for the [Felon] President is that that’s precisely what it is shaping up to be—and, with only days left before his November 3rd reckoning, Americans overwhelmingly do not like him, his policies, or his party.

By just about any metric except the obscene, record-setting amounts of cash that Trump and a small circle of billionaires are spending to save the Republicans’ Senate majority, this fall’s contest looks like the wipeout that so many have predicted (and so often been embarrassingly wrong about) since Trump first entered politics 4,146 days ago: historically low approval ratings, an unpopular war with Iran that has led to high prices and surging inflation, corruption so flagrant that two-thirds of Americans now believe he is profiting off the Presidency. Most notably, Trump’s sagging popularity is not just with Democrats and independents but with many Republicans in red states whose unwavering backing has, time and again, saved him during this insane past decade in American politics.

In the final Times poll of the election cycle, Democrats had an eleven-point advantage in the generic ballot, which is four points higher than in 2018, when the Party picked up forty-one seats and regained the House. As for the issues driving voters, the Democratic pollster John Anzalone summed up the current state of the race. “Democrats lead on everything,” he wrote on X after the Times poll was released. “Like Literally Everything!”

The result has been an entirely unexpected series of tossups in the American heartland, where control of the Senate—once seen as unattainable by Democrats given this year’s map—may be decided in states such as Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas, none of which have elected a Democrat to that chamber in decades. . . . In the race for the House, where Democrats need to pick up only three seats, the Party is seen as a virtual lock to win.

Republicans began panicking weeks ago, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in states they once reckoned on winning comfortably and all but withdrawing from previously competitive Senate seats in places, such as North Carolina and Georgia, where Trump won decisively just two years ago. On Monday, Trump will campaign in Mississippi—staunchly Republican Mississippi—where the Senate seat is now officially “in play.” As for the House, “exceedingly grim” G.O.P. insiders have been telling reporters for weeks that they are braced for a midterm blowout.

“The economic center of the American electorate is collapsing on Republicans,” Greg Strimple, a Republican pollster, declared on Tuesday. His new joint survey with a Democratic colleague for the Cook Political Report found Democratic Senate candidates narrowly leading in Iowa, Ohio, and Texas—all states which voted three times for Trump. According to Strimple, “Voters are so upset with the lack of leadership on reducing their cost of living, they appear willing to propel Democrats to upset victories in reliably Republican states despite the fact that Democrats are less popular than either President Trump or Republicans. The level of voter discontent is truly unprecedented.”

Trump may never have been President at all if not for the [Democrat] Party’s fatal overconfidence about him, in 2016. In the final two weeks before that election, with some national polls giving Hillary Clinton a seemingly insurmountable double-digit lead, her doomed campaign did not even bother to send the Democratic nominee to the decisive battleground state of Wisconsin, instead looking to expand the map to traditionally red states such as Arizona and Utah. Even in 2018, when Democrats did come back from Clinton’s defeat with a strong performance, the split decision—with Republicans keeping the Senate even as Democrats won the House—meant that Trump was unlikely to face real accountability or meaningful constraints from Congress. It was seen as a rebuke, not a Presidency-ending repudiation.

The point here is that winning in American elections is about expectations as much as who claims more seats. . . . . Now, even though polls show that control of the Senate remains up for grabs, with key races all within the margin of error, the baseline has shifted. As a Democratic friend said to me the other day, “I’ll be disappointed if we don’t win the Senate that I did not expect to win a month ago.”

There is also the question of what lesson the parties take from the election. In 2022, Democrats bought their own spin about how successfully they’d held off a red wave, convincing themselves that losing the House by only five seats and holding on to a bare fifty-one-seat majority in the Senate was a great victory.

After Trump’s 2024 win, Republicans believed a political realignment of such importance had taken place that they undertook an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting designed to blunt the Democrats’ advantage going into this year’s midterms. At the start of this year, that redistricting looked like it could help them gain as many as a dozen seats; now, with many 2024 Trump voters turning against the President in places such as South Texas and Florida, the net effect might be as little as one seat.

But, as the election that might spell the beginning of the end of Trump’s long, strange hold on the American electorate finally looms, it’s not the hubris of the victors or the inevitable flood of bad punditry that has me most concerned. It is, as always, the President himself.

Ever since he returned to office, Trump has been hedging against the possibility of a midterm embarrassment by preëmptively attacking the results, questioning the legality of mail-in voting, pretending there is an epidemic of illegal noncitizen voting, and threatening to mobilize the considerable federal resources at his disposal on Election Day and beyond. The Times found that he has publicly cast doubt on the elections on more than seventy per cent of the days since his second Inauguration took place, with recent comments focussing on “rigged polls,” which he said, “have ALWAYS underestimated MAGA.” In the post-2020 world, is there anyone among us who thinks we should not take these threats seriously?

In private, many Democrats (and I’m sure plenty of Republicans, too) self-soothe with talk of a blue wave that will be too big to rig. No less a stolid figure than the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is so alarmed about this complacency that he warned the public this week of the “meaningful risk” that Trump might seek to interfere with or outright “usurp” the election results. I have no doubt that, if the President who was willing to unleash a mob on America’s Capitol rather than concede defeat sees a way to try, he will.

Most of all, I am sure of this: Trump remains who he has always been. He has never publicly accepted blame for anything, and he will not start now. There will be no course correction, no pivot to the center.  . . . . The worse Trump and his Republicans fare on Election Night, the more we should worry about his response. Repudiated Trump may turn out to be the most dangerous Trump of all.

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Evangelicals and the Empathy Gap

Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience.  Most would believe empathy is something true devout Christians dedicated to Christ's social gospel should value and  favor.  Yet having followed evangelicals and the Christian Right - who continue to be the strongest and most loyal supporters - for more than three decades, the reality is that this segment of society rejects empathy towards others and cheers on the Felon's regime that exults in cruelty towards those it dislikes, dehumanizes millions of citizens,  and has green-lighted open racism and hatred towards those labeled as "other."  A new survey by Public Religion Research Institute confirms that evangelicals reject empathy more than any other religious grouping and in some cases describe empathy as "dangerous".  This rejection of empathy is in keeping with evangelicals and "conservative Christians" who view anything that might challenge or cause members to perhaps rethink beliefs as a threat to be stomped out.  In many instances, in my view, this far right "Christians" are the antithesis what what true Christians should be, a reality underscored by their blind allegiance to the Felon and his brutal regime.  A piece at Religion News looks at the survey findings:

A new survey from Washington, D.C.-based Public Religion Research Institute has found a new dividing line among Americans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections: empathy.

According to a PRRI report released Tuesday (Oct. 20), Democrats (84%) and Independents (70%) are more likely than Republicans (53%) to see empathy as a benefit to society. Forty-three percent of Republicans see empathy as a danger if it leads society away from God.

The report, based on a survey of 5,200 adult Americans, also found that about two-thirds of Americans see President Trump as a potential threat to democracy, and some of the faith groups that supported the president in the 2024 elections are losing their faith in him.

While Americans are split over the issue of immigration, with Republicans and white evangelicals supporting the idea of mass deportation of people in the country without legal authorization — a view held by only a quarter of Americans overall — everyone agrees the economy is going in the wrong direction (76%).

And almost no one wants to repeal women’s right to vote — a topic that has become popularized by Doug Wilson, a spiritual adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The issue of empathy made headlines in January 2025, when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde spoke during an interfaith prayer service at the Washington Cathedral on Inauguration Day about the need for mercy and empathy. President Trump and Vice President Vance were in the audience for the service.

It has also been a matter of growing public debate, said Robert Jones, founder and president of PRRI. Jones said researchers have been tracking the public conversation about empathy, which began among evangelicals with a blog post from conservative author Joe Rigney in 2019, and spread to influencers like Allie Beth Stuckey, who wrote the book “Toxic Empathy,” and Canadian professor Gad Saad, author of “Suicidal Empathy.” More mainstream evangelical voices, like Albert “Al” Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, have also expressed concerns about empathy.

That led PRRI to ask in this new survey if Americans see empathy as a benefit to society or a threat. Researchers found what Jones called a partisan “empathy gap” among Americans.

Religious groups were also split. At least two-thirds of most major religious groups said empathy “is a foundational moral value for a healthy society,” as did 83% of religiously unaffiliated Americans. White evangelicals were the least likely to name empathy as a foundational social value (42%), and more than half of white evangelicals (54%) said, “empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.”

By contrast, white Mainliners (73%) and white Catholics (66%), both of which, like white evangelicals, have supported Donald Trump in past elections, still see empathy as important.

“It tells you that this language has now become the majority view inside of white evangelical circles,” said Jones. “They really are on an island by themselves on this question.”

Among other findings, PRRI found that the GOP has lost ground with voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election. In 2024, just over half (51%) of Hispanic Protestants viewed the president favorably. That has dropped to 31% in 2026, according to PRRI. About half of White mainliners (48%) approve of the president, down from 57% last year. Half of white Catholics (49%) approve of the president, also down from 57% in 2025.

When PRRI asked Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 if their opinion of the president had changed for the better or the worse over the past two years, more than two-thirds (68%) said “for the worse.” Among Hispanic Protestants, 70% said their opinion of Trump had worsened since 2024.

Researchers also found that religious Americans are divided over the upcoming mid-term elections.

“Among those who are registered to vote and plan to vote, white evangelical Protestants (68%) and white Catholics (51%) are the only religious groups with majorities who would vote for the Republican candidate,” according to the report.

Hispanic Protestants (44%) and white Mainliners (43%) prefer Republicans to Democrats, but neither party has the support of a majority in those faith traditions, PRRI found.

“By contrast, strong majorities of Black Protestants (76%), the religiously unaffiliated (63%), other non-Christians (56%), Jewish Americans (52%), and Hispanic Catholics (48%) say they would vote for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate,” according to the report.

The survey found that immigration remains a dividing line among Americans. . . . . Overall, more than half of Americans (59%) support a path to citizenship, while a quarter (24%) support deporting immigrants in the country illegally.

According to the report, “Around seven in ten Hispanic Catholics (77%), Black Protestants (73%), Hispanic Protestants (70%), and unaffiliated Americans (68%) support allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens, followed by majorities of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (55%), members of other non-Christian religions (55%), white Catholics (54%), and Jewish Americans (54%).” . . . . evangelicals are split, with about half (48%) supporting deportation, while 44% support a path to citizenship.

Among the survey’s most provocative findings: More than half (57%) of Americans agreed Donald Trump is “a potentially dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.” But a third agreed Trump is “a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”

Researchers also asked a second question that has emerged among conservative evangelical influencers — the idea of repealing the 19^th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the denomination to which Hegseth belongs, has promoted that view, saying every household should have only one vote — and that men should make that vote as leader of the household.

Most Americans (87%) opposed repealing the 19^th Amendment, PRRI found — and that view is consistent across religious groups, Jones told RNS in an interview.

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