Did you know she drives a motorcycle? Did you care?
The Fix says they've got
"everything you need to know" about the fight for the Senate, just in case you haven't been paying attention to the election. In the event that you haven't, let me suggest that The Fix shouldn't really be your first stop for information about the Republican candidates in these hotly contested seats.
For example, here's their "everything you need to know" about Joni Ernst.
If she won, she would be the first woman elected to federal office in Iowa, as well as the only woman combat veteran in Congress. She would also be the rare senator to ride a motorcycle. Ernst has sought to make her campaign about those superlatives and her personality, and less about her policy positions. It's worked.
Gee. Why, Fix team, would she be reluctant to make this election about her policy positions? Any ideas there? What are those policies, by the way? I mean, if she's likely to be a senator, maybe we ought to know that. Like maybe that she thinks
privatizing Social Security is a heckuva idea. Or maybe how she thinks
states should arrest federal agents trying to implement Obamacare, and can nullify laws they don't like. Which isn't half as crazy as
her idea that the government might "move people off agricultural land and consolidate them into city centers." And that she
has to be personally armed in case the government agents come for her. That's barely scratching the surface of what you need to know about Ernst to know that she's a bit of a nut job, which might be something the Fix would want to clue us in on? (By the way, Reps. Tammy Duckworth and Tulsi Gabbard—both Democrats—are women and combat veterans, so there's that, too.)
Then you've got Thom Tillis, the Republican in North Carolina, who they let Charlotte Magazine describe for them, as "more practical than ideological, devoted to making government operate as much as possible like the corporations he’s worked for and whose needs he serves—and focused on the endgame." No, he's not at all ideological. He just happens to think social insurance programs are "de facto reparations," because, you know, only the black people get them. Which is why the state legislature—with him in charge—worked so hard to implement voter suppression to keep those people from voting. The Fix might also have talked about what's been going on in North Carolina under Tillis's leadership: the decimated education funding, the restrictions on women's health care, the cuts to unemployment benefits and the Earned Income Tax Credit, rejection of Medicaid expansion—all kind of important things when thinking about how Tillis would legislate at the national level. But that's too complicated. That's not "everything you need to know," right?
How'd they do with tea party rebel Tom Cotton in Arksansas? He's the one who chose to hang out with the Kochs rather than attend a key political event in his district, one that Arkansas politicians know you don't skip out of. He's also one of a handful of Republicans to vote against the Farm Bill, and then came up with a total bullshit excuse for his vote. An excuse, by the way, that The Fix's colleagues over in fact-checking land completely blasted. As they did his insane claim that 'ISIS and Mexican drug cartels" were going to invade Arkansas. Seems like The Fix team could have just walked across the hall for that research. But what they tell us is that "Cotton was far from the perfect candidate the right thought he would be."
Sign up right now to make GOTV calls to Democratic voters in the toss-up states that will decide control of the Senate.
I'm sorry, I can't make phone calls, but I will chip in $3 to Daily Kos to help fuel Get Out The Vote efforts.
So "everything you need to know" about the fight for the Senate does not include the fact that some of the Republicans in a position to take these seats are crazy extremists to the right of Ted Cruz. That's ever so helpful, Fix crew. Thanks, Fix, for absolutely nothing.