A week to go.
Should Ds take the House and do well with Govs, or hold Senate losses to a minimum (or better), it will be a narrative changer about what what Trump does, how smart playing to his base really is, whether being an asshole is smart politics, etc.
I can’t wait.
WaPo:
Shooting victim’s family shuns President Trump in Pittsburgh as top officials decline to join him
Congressional leaders from both parties — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) — have all declined invitations to join Trump on his visit, according to three officials familiar with matter. (McConnell’s office said the Kentucky senator “has events in the state and was unable to attend.”)
So has at least one of the victims' families.
Brian Beutler/Crooked:
OUR GOP PROBLEM FROM HELL
It was once widely believed that Republicans would tolerate only a certain level of depravity from Trump, that they would contain his seemingly limitless appetite for dehumanizing immigrants, minorities, and others outside his base of support. It remains fashionable to wonder aloud what the party’s breaking point might be.
There is no breaking point—not for people committed to the conservative project in America. Trump has driven a relatively small number of disgusted conservatives out of that project. But those who remain have accepted that the only way to advance their goals—enormous, regressive tax cuts, an unprecedented retrenchment of the welfare state, Christian religious supremacy—is through an increasing ratchet of racial division. Unless incentives change, they will press ahead with that strategy, even amid death and defeat.
NBC:
Surprise: Democratic candidates aren't talking much about Trump. Here's why.
The fewest campaign attack ads focusing on an incumbent president at this stage of the midterms in more than 15 years.
First, Democratic operatives assume that attitudes toward Trump — while critical to the midterms — are already "baked in" thanks to his omnipresence in the political conversation. With the president constantly setting news cycles on fire, there's more value in promoting topics that might otherwise fall out of the conversation.
"Nobody will cover or talk about health care unless we pay for it," Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster at Global Strategy Group, told NBC News. "And directly because of Democrats advertising on health care, we are now seeing Republicans — and the president — respond and engage on the issue, which is a debate Democrats welcome because voters trust us more on the issue."
So what do Democrats stand for? Protecting you, the little guy/gal, against corporate greed.
Guardian:
'Assault on our country': Trump sows racial division as midterms approach
As president presents vision of lawless nation, fellow Republicans follow his lead by fueling anxiety over race
Jeff Flake, the retiring Arizona senator and a Republican critic of Trump, said he was unnerved by the president’s use of divisive and racially inflammatory rhetoric. He called the insinuation that terrorists are traveling with the caravan a “canard” and a “fear tactic”.
“These, for the most part overwhelmingly, are people who are either fleeing violence or looking for a better life,” the senator said during a CNN forum in New York.
But his view stands in sharp contrast to attempts to stoke racial anxiety among white voters by dozens of Republican candidates running for Congress and the political action committees supporting them.
In a closely watched race in New York’s Catskills region, advertisements supporting the Republican incumbent John Faso have focused on his opponent’s brief rap career more than a decade ago, rather than his record at Harvard and as a Rhodes scholar. One ad brands the Democrat Antonio Delgado, who is black, a “big city rapper”. Delgado, a local attorney born in Syracuse, advocates for universal healthcare.
And btw media seems to be turning a bit:
Know what is weird? This is weird.
Internal polling?
Florida early vote:
ICYMI, this is also weird:
Natasha Bertrand/Atlantic:
Mueller Wants the FBI to Look at a Scheme to Discredit Him
The special counsel says a woman was offered money to fabricate sexual harassment claims.
An alleged scheme to pay off women to fabricate sexual assault allegations against Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been referred to the FBI for further investigation, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office told The Atlantic. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,” the spokesman, Peter Carr, told me in an email on Tuesday.
Trumpworld is getting desperate. It’s why the bizarre focus on caravans and birthright talk. Theyve lost the media narreative (remember Trump fuming because the MAGA bomber and the Karavan Killer were distracting from his message?). Even the rallies aren’t working the way they want.
They are losing, they know they are losing, and they really don’t know what to do about it.
And then comes Tuesday.
John Della Volpe/WaPo:
The young don’t vote? This time they will. And school shootings are the difference.
Few things unite pundits of different political stripes more than their healthy skepticism about the role young Americans will play in the midterm elections. After all, the record of the young has been among the most consistent trends in American politics. According to the United States Elections Project, in five of the previous eight midterm election cycles, between 18 and 20 percent of Americans under 30 voted; in the other three years (2014, 1994, 1986), 16 percent to 21 percent showed up. Voting at less than half the rate of older adults, young Americans representing the baby boomer, Gen X and millennial generations did their part to earn the irrelevance assigned to them by most of our leaders in Washington.
That is about to change.
Anyone predicting outcomes that mirror the last cycle — or the last eight cycles — will most likely wake up on Nov. 7 surprised to see a radical shift in voting patterns, with a modern American electorate more reflective of a younger, more diverse nation. And a big part of what’s animating that change is violence like school shootings — and the willingness of young Americans to believe that government can do something about it.
Let’s end with this marvelous video from Alan Brady*:
* it’s the character he played on the original Dick Van Dyke show.