Twenty seven days until the election.
Catherine Rampell/WaPo:
The one conspiracy theory that Republicans won’t believe
But perhaps most of all, they were mad at the Republican Party.
After all, the GOP had stolen a Supreme Court seat from Obama, taken away the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so they could push through a pick without 60 votes, and arranged for a sham FBI investigation when their pick was credibly accused of sexual assault. Some of them even mocked a woman who said she had been sexually assaulted.
Despite all this, Republican leadership somehow couldn’t fathom why legions of Americans might be genuinely, grievously upset. Instead, several Republicans suggested, all those Kavanaugh protesters — just like those phony Women’s Marchers last year — must be mercenaries. That is, they were only pretending to be mad, because they were being paid to be mad.
Not merely paid: paid by an evil, rich, foreign-born Jew.
The protesters who confronted a senator in an elevator were “Paid for by Soros and others,” President Trump tweeted, in a reference to Hungarian-born American Jewish billionaire and liberal philanthropist George Soros.
Politico:
POLITICO race ratings: The GOP House is crumbling
There are now 209 seats either firmly or leaning in the Democratic column — only 9 shy of the 218 needed to win control.
But despite some individual success stories, the overall House landscape remains grim for Republicans. Democratic candidates are better positioned over the final weeks of the campaign, thanks to record-breaking fundraising earlier this year. Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said last week that 60 House Democratic candidates will report raising more than $1 million between July and September — a staggering number — with 30 raising more than $2 million.
Republicans, meanwhile, are relying on deep-pocketed outside groups to bridge the gap.
Soros? Nah, probably not.
USA Today:
Taylor Swift inspired 65,000 people to register to vote, says Vote.org
"Thank God for Taylor Swift," Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for the voting nonprofit, told Buzzfeed News, stating that more than 65,000 people registered to vote in the 24-hour period following Swift's post.
According to Guthrie, Vote.org had its second-busiest day of the year after Swift's post with 155,940 unique visitors to its website, making it the site's biggest day since National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 25, when the site saw 304,942 unique visitors, up from a daily average of 14,078 visitors.
EJ Graff/Politico:
Is Trump Driving Women Away From the GOP for Good?
Female voters have slowly drifted away from the Republican Party for decades. Under Donald Trump, that trend has accelerated.
Republican women still overwhelmingly support the president—84 percent of them, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week. But that statistic overlooks a broader trend: Fewer and fewer American women identify as Republicans, and that slow migration is speeding up under Trump. My conversations with pollsters, political scientists and a number of women across the country who have recently rejected their lifelong Republicans identities suggested the same—and illuminate why this moment in American politics might prove a breaking point for women in the GOP. According to pollsters on both sides of the aisle, that doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party either in this fall’s midterms—which are likely to bring a record gap between how men and women vote—or for the party’s long-term future.
Nate Cohn/NY Times:
Battle for the House Has a Wide Range of Possible Outcomes
The size of the Democratic advantage is unclear, polling shows, and the Kavanaugh controversy introduces an element of volatility.
The possibility that the Kavanaugh nomination is helping Republicans in Republican-leaning areas is important because the fight for control of both the House and the Senate will be determined largely in Republican-leaning areas. This simple fact has always been the G.O.P.’s biggest advantage. If the electorate is polarized along the lines of recent presidential elections, as it was during the Obama presidency, Republicans could hold down their losses considerably.
Democrats have been considered clear favorites in the fight for House control because polls and special election results have made it seem that the electorate wouldn’t be so polarized, allowing them to compete in many Republican-leaning districts. But if Democrats can’t break through and actually carry the many Republican-leaning districts they’ve put into play, Republicans could stay highly competitive in the fight for House control and even survive a wave election.
Making it even more volatile for the pollsters, there are also new voters that don’t get polled, and non-regular voters drawn in (see Taylor Swift above, see Stacey Abrams below).
Politically Georgia:
First wave of ballots returned for Georgia 2018 election
Black voters made up 42 percent of all early voters as of Saturday, McDonald said. Black voters account for 30 percent of registered voters in Georgia, but they’ve mailed almost as many ballots as white voters, who have returned 47 percent of absentee ballots.
About 58 percent of voters so far are women, who make up 51 percent of the population.
African-American and female voters will be critical in the race for governor between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp.
“Whites are voting at about the same level as 2014, whereas African-Americans have surged quite a bit, as have other persons of color,” McDonald wrote on Twitter.
No votes will be counted until Election Day on Nov. 6, and the first wave of absentee-by-mail ballots account for about 1 percent of all early votes cast in the 2014 midterms.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
The giant blue swing
In general, college-educated white voters have had it with Trump and his party. In 2016, Trump won these voters nationally 49 percent to 45 percent. His party now trails 55 percent to 42 percent in battleground House races.
Contrary to the latest collective wisdom that the confirmation fight over Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has energized Republicans, “among those who cite judicial nominations as extremely important, 50 percent are backing the Democrat in their district and 47 percent are backing the Republican.”
Max Boot/WaPo:
The dark side of American conservatism has taken over
The ascendance of extreme views, abetted in recent years by Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the tea party movement, increasingly made the House Republican caucus ungovernable. The far-right Freedom Caucus drove House Speaker John A. Boehner into retirement in 2015. His successor, Paul D. Ryan, lasted only three years. Ryan’s retirement signals the final repudiation of an optimistic, inclusive brand of Reaganesque conservatism focused on enhancing economic opportunity at home and promoting democracy and free trade abroad. The Republican Party will now be defined by Trump’s dark, divisive vision, with his depiction of Democrats as America-hating, criminal-coddling traitors, his vilification of the press as the “enemy of the people,” and his ugly invective against Mexicans and Muslims. The extremism that many Republicans of goodwill had been trying to push to the fringe of their party is now its governing ideology.
That’s why I can no longer be a Republican, and in fact wish ill fortune on my former party. I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats beginning in November. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as it is currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right party out of the ashes. But that will require undoing the work of decades, not just of the past two years.
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
We need to stay angry about Kavanaugh
Democracy is all that opponents of the coup have left. In next month’s elections, the party responsible for this travesty must be punished. The idea that “both parties are equally to blame” is an unadulterated falsehood.
Amelia Penniman/USA today:
Brett Kavanaugh will trigger historic Democratic turnout led by women in November election
Ford’s testimony triggered something deep within women across the country: our colleagues, our apolitical female friends, women of all backgrounds and political stripes who know all too well the feelings of shame and self-doubt that come with speaking truth to power. This is something that men — Republicans, Democrats, and political pundits — will never understand. And it is something that, as a result, has been vastly underestimated.
The impact of this lack of sympathy for what is a far from unusual female experience cannot be overstated. And it will be on full display in the form of backlash to the GOP in a few short weeks.
Republicans may think they just netted a win. But in doing so they have sacrificed their integrity and their humility. And they did so in front of a vast audience of Americans. In a midterm election cycle that was already careening towards catastrophe for Republicans over health care and tax cuts, Kavanaugh’s confirmation will bolster a historic Democratic turnout led by women.