When the moon. is in the 7th house. And Jupiter, aligns with Mars. Then peace will guide the planets. And love will steer the stars Hair Aquarius
This wasn’t supposed to happen, but sometimes the stars just line up that way. Remember, it was less than four short years ago when, after inaugurating Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took a look at the Senate map for 2018, rubbed his hands together, and gleefully predicted a filibuster proof GOP majority in 2019.
And then the wheels came off of the wagon. Trump turned out to be an electoral nightmare as a president, GOP House members started jettisoning from the party ahead of a midterm election that was already looking like a blue wave, and none of the top talent McConnell was counting on running in 2018 wanted to risk their careers. The Democrats minimized the damage.
And now we’re in 2020, and McConnell is staring at the possibility that even if he survives his own reelection, he could be returning in January as the Senate Minority Leader, which won’t be anywhere near as much fun once Schumer torpedoes the filibuster, and McConnell has no more ability to dick around than Kevin McCarthy does in the House. But how did we get to this pending debacle in the first place?
This really is becoming a possible perfect storm, in this case three different prevailing conditions that all had to come together to align. For one, it comes down to leadership. Trump has turned out to be toxic to his own party. An easy way to illustrate that is the 2018 midterms. Trump has absolutely no political coattails. Look at all of the Senate and House races Trump personally interjected himself into, and still couldn’t get his candidates over the finish line. It doesn’t matter if your shortstop is hitting .359, if he makes as many unforced errors as Trump, the team is going to lose.
The second one is candidate quality. One would think that this wouldn’t be much of a problem for the GOP, since almost all of their Senate races feature incumbents up for reelection, but it isn’t working out that way. Because so many GOP Senators have tied themselves to Trump with barbed wire, they are now facing difficult reelection campaigns as the country continues to sour on Trump. And as I pointed out, even having him come to town to campaign for you is no assurance of success in the long run.
The third confluence is the old favorite, money. Whether you’re the DNC or the RNC, you go into a cycle knowing one thing, money is finite. There is a limit to how much you can raise, and the better your slate, the more you can raise. The first thing that a party does is to look at the map, and separate the races, what can be considered as safe races, that should require no party support,and those at risk races that may require heavy party buy in to defend.
Going into 2019, holding the Senate for the GOP didn’t appear to be too much trouble. The GOP was only looking at having to help to prop up three campaigns, Susan Collins in Maine, Gardner in Colorado, and McSally in Arizona. This was partially offset by the potential to flip Doug Jones’s Senate seat in Alabama. The rest of the field looked reasonably secure. Light to moderate expenditures to those three campaigns should have allowed a comfortable cushion for helping out at risk House races.
But then Covid-19 hit, and everything went to hell in a handbasket. Trump pathetically botched his response, and the GOP Senate meekly followed him down the rabbit hole. And after state Governor’s started taking the bull by the horns, and shutting the states down, Trump started an all out assault on GOP Governors to reopen for business as soon as possible. And surprise, surprise, the virus spiked in every damn one of the states that did. And the GOP Senators continued to stand behind Trump.
And all of a sudden, to paraphrase 3 Dog Night, 3 is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. Tillis is in a fight to the death in North Carolina, Ernst is trailing in Iowa, there are two seats suddenly up for grabs in Georgia, and even Leningrad Lindsey is in a dead heat in South Carolina. We’re only 73 days from the election, and pretty soon the RNC is going to start having to start to triage their races to try to determine where the money will do the most good.
Which brings us to the money itself. Where the hell is it? Biden is out raising Trump, which should have been unthinkable, and they’re using the grassroots fundraising built into the primaries to do it. Democratic challengers are repeating 2018, and out raising entrenched incumbents. But you know what you’re not seeing this year? Quick! How many 6 zero checks has Steve Wynn written out to Trump, the RNC, or Trump aligned Super PAC’s? How about Robert Mercer, anybody heard from him yet this cycle? And what about Shelly Adelson? Where’s he been? Adelson was an omnipresent figure for Trump and the RNC in 2016. When those checks were written in 2016, they were played to great fanfare, to highlight the financial might of the GOP.
They’ve. Dried. Up. More and more reporters are reporting that they are hearing from panicked sources in the RNC as well as the Trump campaign, because the fat cats aren’t taking their calls anymore. I don’t have a direct line to Shelly, so I don’t know whether Trump finally got so toxic that even the cash cows can’t take the stench anymore, or if they just took a look at the lay of the land, see a repeat of 2018 on the near horizon and just aren’t willing to throw good money after bad.
As you can see, there were actually three separate storms that had to build in perfect rhythm to turn what should have been a normal GOP Senate cycle into a Nightmare On Elm Street. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing. Donald Trump. His pathetic leadership and toxic personality turned large parts of the country against him. But the Senate incumbent’s bovine acceptance to all things Trump has come back to bite them on the ass. Which has led the fat wallets to just keep right on sitting on them. Only in Trumpmenistan.
Don’t forget there’s another factor in Senate races: the map. Some years more Democrats are defending seats (such as 2018 when they weren’t expected to do as well as they did), sometimes it’s the Republicans, like this year, when they couldn’t remotely afford to drop the ball on the factors you cited. They needed to bring their A game. Instead they got Trump as team captain.
The money drying up was the final blow I’ve been waiting for for years now. I knew it was only a matter of time before the GOP couldn’t deliver the goods their money men paid for. But OMG, open grifting and stealing RNC funds straight from the coffers? That’d be a bridge too far for most honest citizens, never mind these billionaires. When this is over, they’re going to try to pin all the blame on Trump. But the example of Rasputin is worth keeping in mind. When HE was taken out of the picture, the first Russian Revolution broke out less than three months later.
I know many historians do “credit” him with the ultimate downfall of the tsar and his family, well, that and all the other underlying distress and cultural currents of the time. And interestingly, R. was a mystic never mind all-around crazy guy, with his feet planted in an almost medieval belief system–which looks more than a bit familiar today.
Maybe Q-Anon is a modern day throwback to ignorant, superstitious, gullible group think. Don’t know. But over the recent years it has certainly felt as if we were headed backward, centuries backward.
Don’t buy all the White Russian propaganda that’s grown around Gregori Yefimovich. True, Rasputin was a bit of a freeloader and his Khylesti belief in salvation through lots of sin was out there (albeit more honest than evangelical Christians are). But he also lived in a fairly modest apartment in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) had the good sense to see what a disaster the First World War would be for Russia and even helped a few guys dodge the draft. The White Russians never forgave him for a) worming his way into the Romanovs’ circle and b) failing to stop the hemorrhaging of their country’s entry into WWI with being taken off the count by them.
What we’re really watching is less going backwards and more pulling off a mask. This is the end of 20th Century America. The lies and pride finally caught up to us and now the bills have come due. And Trump will be made the scapegoat for such.
I don’t imagine some slasher movie ending as a metaphor. Nope. My “jock” background notwithstanding I was also a musician, and by my teens vocals only. Down at SIU-C I was even a bit player in the Marjorie Lawrence Opera Theater so my imagination goes to the overwhelming (visual and sound) of grand opera. Specifically the (in this case) apt opera Don Giovanni since the Pussy Grabber In Chief considers himself the world’s greatest lover, who btw screws and dumps thousands of women but in the end gets what’s coming to him.
At the end, a terrified Don is dragged into the fires of hell. In this case I think ole Satan might send some extra minions out to grab up McConnell and whole bunch of other Republicans and before the gateway to hell closes up drag all those others down after Trump!
So perfect. Repent. No. I’ll never repent. Repeat. That’s Trump but until the craziness of the last many months, I wouldn’t have thought Republicans would troop obediently behind him to their own doom.
But now? I do. Thinking they’ve had their brains, commonsense, and decency sucked out of their mortal beings. These last almost four years will make for a ton of Cultural, American Studies, History, Psychology research, papers and dissertations. And far more interesting than the usual “angels dancing on the head of a pin” work most of us got stuck with because the times were dull and boring.
It’s like this, Carroll: if they didn’t have the strength to stop him before he got the nomination, why would they be able to stop him now? I beat this drum regularly but people seem to forgetting this: there is…no…leadership, not among the GOP. A huckster like Trump could only succeed with that being the truth.
SIU-C. I’m not too far from there, and it was definitely one of the colleges I looked at way back in the day!