Early Voting Opens, GOP Candidates Not the ‘Best’

Four states—Minnesota, South Dakota, Virginia, and Wyoming—started early voting this week for the 2022 election culminating in six weeks, and conservative columnist Matt Lewis has a piece on how bad the “crop of Trumpy primary winners” are. He went beyond saying they are not “quality,” as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said about them by writing, “Republicans are not sending us their best.” Lewis then called them “garbage candidates.”

Lewis starts in Michigan with John Gibbs, running for Congress. Gibbs called Democrats the party of “gender-bending,” defended an anti-Semitic Twitter feed, and pushed the theory that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta participated in a satanic ritual. He also argued against women’s suffrage because the social system of patriarchy “is the best model for the continued success of a society”; women lack “the characteristics necessary to govern and … are commanded not to rule.” Beating first-term GOP incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer, Gibbs won with the endorsement of Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) because Meijer voted for DDT’s second impeachment and accepted the election of Joe Biden for president. Meijer replaced Justin Amash, a Republican who voted for DDT’s first impeachment before he became a Libertarian.

Nearby, GOP congressional candidate J.R. Majewski was outed as a liar—shock!—when he claimed to be deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11. He was actually loading planes in Qatar, almost 1,200 miles away. Majewski is known for exaggerations, conspiracy theories, and hopes of violence against the government. DDT praised Majewski because he made a “Let’s Go Brandon” rap video and cut the name “TRUMP” on his farmland. And he was in the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Majewski claims his military service was “classified,” but the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) withdrew $1 million worth of ads for him. 

Lewis has just touched the surface of “not sending us their best.” In the upper chamber, McConnell’s super PAC pulled $10 million out of the campaign for Blake Masters, GOP candidate for U.S. Senate. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) withdrew $2 million.   They have a lot of reasons other than Masters’ poor polling. Masters: 

• Wants to fire all the generals and admirals, because they are “woke” and “left-wing” losers who never won a war, and replace them with “the most conservative colonels.”
• Claimed he was “100 percent pro-life” until the overturning of Roe v. Wade engendered massive protesting.  
• Thinks states should be allowed to regulate access to contraception.  
• Pushes the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative.
• Blames gun violence in America on Black people.
• Tried to cover up past viewpoints such as privatizing Social Security, support for DDT’s “stolen election, and blame for economic woes on diversity among Federal Reserve leaders by scrubbing his website. 
• Hired two fake electors for his staff.  
• Believes in the “replacement theory,” the racist belief that Democrats want to replace Whites with non-White immigrants.
• Sent emails to his Stanford vegetarian co-op damning democracy such as decrying the “miserably peculiar American diety [sic] called Democracy” and “feudal monarchies” and pushing social classes, describing those lower on the social ladder “human trash.” Masters also advocated articles for an alternative to voting. 
• Said that Ted Kaczynski’s writings provided “a lot of insight there that is correct” (though he denounced Kaczynski’s terrorist actions).
• Called for McConnell to be replaced as GOP leader with Sens. Josh Hawley (MO) or Tom Cotton (AR) for the position.

McConnell said that Masters’ major donor, gay billionaire and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, has the money to bankroll his friend. A GOP strategist estimated Masters would need $60 to counteract his opponent, Sen. Mark Kelly, because outside groups pay three times as much for airtime as candidates in the state. Democrats have spent the GOP by 2-1, and Kelly has $24 million in the bank from the $54 million he raised. Two pollsters from DDT and Biden found Kelly leading Masters 50 percent to 42 percent. Masters’ favorability rating at 37 percent (54 percent unfavorable) was unusually negative for a first-time candidate.

Other GOP candidates getting in trouble:

In a New York congressional race, the FBI caught the husband and son of GOP candidate Tina Forte in a drug and gun bust at their family warehouse. Her family members were also arrested for the same thing in 2019. Forte is slamming her opponent, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, for being soft on crime. Forte has shared images of her with the Proud Boys leader, shared QAnon conspiracy theory slogans, and participated in DDT’s January 6 rally. Her campaign pushes her small business credentials with the location where the FBI arrested her husband and son.

Maine’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Paul LePage, took advantage of tax breaks from Florida legally available only to full-time residents. He and his wife owned the property and filed for the tax breaks while LePage lived in Maine’s governor’s mansion from 2009 to 2015 and again while he campaigns for his old job. They bought two homes in Florida and sold one with the homestead exemption of $8,500 for permanent residents while living in Maine.

Nevada’s GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, Adam Lexalt, dropped assertions of stolen elections and DDT’s endorsement from his website and may be close to taking out Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and changing the Nevada senator to Republican. He also has nothing to say about Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposed abortion bill although he called Roe v. Wade last June and praised its overturning as “a historic victory.” Laxalt orchestrated several failed lawsuits to block Biden’s presidency after the election and employs an insurrectionist as his senior campaign operative. Now he’s ready to fight the results of the senatorial election—if he loses. He may get support because both his father and grandfather were U.S. senators.

GOP candidates in early voting:

Ted Budd, GOP candidate in North Carolina, made DDT far less prominent on his website, but he still appeared with DDT last week for the Wilmington rally, however, which may not have done him any good. DDT smeared Cheri Beasley, opponent and elected judge, in the midst of a racial rant. And the incumbent U.S. representative was an original co-signer of the GOP national abortion ban. Adding a disclaimer, Budd recently insinuated he would accept the election’s results after months of refusing an answer. Other accusations against Budd are his votes against farmers and a bankruptcy for his family’s agriculture business costing farmers millions of dollars in losses. According the media, he took oil industry donations the day before voting against the gas price-gouging ban and took money from big pharma before voting against lowering drug prices.

Yesli Vega, the GOP candidate in a Virginia swing district against Rep. Abigail Spanberger, is struggling against her statement expressed by Todd Akins that rape rarely leads to pregnancy “maybe because there’s so much going on in the body.” The rapist is doing it “quickly,” or “it’s not something that’s happening organically,” Vega said. She added that as a police officer she worked only one case in which the rape victim became pregnant. Candidate for U.S. senator from Missouri, Akins lost his election. Aligned with a group asking candidates to commit to banning abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, Vega also said that abortion has been legal “after the point of birth.”

Harriet Hageman, who defeated Rep. Liz Cheney in the primary after DDT’s and McCarthy’s retaliation for her moderate view recently, has been accused by 41 legal professionals of violating the oath of attorney and professional statements about the 2020 election.  

Gov. Kristi Noem, running for re-election in South Dakota, is a high profile candidate facing ethics charges from a state board. They found sufficient information that she may have “engaged in misconduct” by intervening in her daughter’s application for a real estate appraiser license, and “appropriate action” could be taken. Noem, who had hoped to run for president in the future, called the complaints political and sought to get the records sealed. She can publicly defend herself, and results can be reprimand or community service. The law’s solution for making recommendations to the governor would be useless because Noem is the governor.

Noem also faces another charge of illegally costing taxpayers money for the private use of a state airplane. That complaint is before the state’s division of criminal investigation overseen by a county prosecutor. She has used private jets to fly to fundraisers, campaign events, and conservative gatherings, some of them out of state. The 2006 came from the governor at the time, Mike Rounds, who is now the current U.S. senator from the state. He used the plane for such events as his son’s basketball games while on official business.

This week, Illinois and Michigan start their early voting.

And the next hearing from the House January 6 investigative committee is Wednesday, September 28, 2022 at 1:00 pm EST.

 

Primaries – August 16, 2022

Yesterday’s primaries in two states featuring three women—Liz Cheney, Lisa Murkowski, and Sarah Pain—hit the media, one with a decision within hours and the other not decided for several days.

Alaska:

State election officials hope to have some results on August 23 and 26 with final numbers at the end of the month. The reason is the new ranked-voting system passed through ballot initiative last year and used for the first time this year.

For primaries, the top four candidates move on to the general election. In the election to replace the late Rep. Don Young, Alaska’s only U.S. representative, winning Democrat Mary Peltola and two GOP opponents Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, move to the November general election along with the undeclared fourth person in the contest. If one of the four candidates don’t get at least 50 percent, votes are redistributed until one person gets the majority. Palin hates the system, perhaps because the intention was to elect politicians with a wider rather than a narrower appeal. Maine was the first state to employ this ranked voting.

Peltola and Palin were winners in the special election to replace Young until 2023, and a ranked system is employed because neither of them received 50 percent of the vote. For voters who picked Begich, their second-choice votes are assigned to that pick. In an attempt to rig the system, Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) told Palin voters “to pick only one” candidate, but that system would lessen the possibility of a Republican winning the seat by losing any power to rank a second choice. If enough voters pick only one candidate or select Peltola for their second choice, she could go to Washington for four months this fall.

Palin’s former in-laws won’t be voting for her, and they threw a big pre-Election Night party for opponent Nick Begich. As far back as her vice-president candidacy, they questioned Palin’s ability. Faye Palin said about Sarah Palin, “I’m not sure what she brings to the ticket other than she’s a woman and a conservative.” Sarah and Todd Palin were divorced in 2020 at Todd’s choice.

Lisa Murkowski, DDT’s target for losing the election, came in first of 19 candidates for U.S. Senate but didn’t rise to 50 percent of the vote. She is the only senator to vote to convict DDT in his second impeachment trial. Murkowski will compete against DDT-endorsed Kelly Tshibaka, who moved to Alaska to run for the position, and two others, not yet identified. The four candidates will follow the same one as Palin and her three candidates in the November election. Tshibaka is only four points behind Murkowski, but she may lose some of that lead because Election Day votes counted first would be more favorable to her. Murkowski’s top Democratic opponent also received only six percent of the vote indicating that she may be the choice for Democrats.

Carpetbagger Tshibaka, who returned to the state for the election and was investigated when she applied for a residential fishing permit after eight months residency. This permit requires one year living in the state. She also kept her Maryland voting registration when she applied to vote in Alaska. Murkowski has such a strong presence that she won her 2010 campaign as an independent after losing the GOP primary. At the end of December 2010, she was certified the winner over Joe Miller with 101,091 votes to his 90,839 even after he filed a lawsuit against her write-ins and won some of his conditions before the state Supreme Court.  

Mike Dunleavy will go to the general election for the gubernatorial seat and follow the same ranked-vote process with three others. DDT gave Dunleavy “Complete and Total Endorsement”—”subject to his non-endorsement of Senator Lisa Murkowski…  In other words, if Mike endorses her, which is his prerogative, my endorsement of him is null and void, and of no further force or effect.” Dunleavy didn’t “non-endorse” Murkowski, but he did say DDT “has nothing to worry about which seemed to satisfy DDT.

Wyoming:

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) lost her election to DDT-endorsed Harriet Hageman, as predicted, by over 37 points after she supported the constitution instead of DDT. He declared the primary the most important in the nation, and his attacks against her were so severe that she couldn’t campaign in open venues. Threats of violence by DDT’s supporters forced her to have invite-only house parties and not provide advance notice about her travel in the state.

DDT was so desperate to elect her opponent that he and Republicans used an obscure shell company to fund Cheney’s primary challenger, violating the “straw donor” ban in the Federal Election Campaign Act forbidding contributions using another’s name. One donation was for $50,000.

In an early July debate with her opponents, Cheney, the vice-chair of the House January 6 investigative committee, challenged Hageman to prove her statement that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that DDT won the election. To win the election, Hageman reversed her position from 2016 when she called DDT a “racist and xenophobe” and said this about Liz Cheney:

“I know Liz Cheney is a proven, courageous, constitutional conservative, someone who has the education, the background, and the experience to fight effectively for Wyoming on a national stage.”

In accepting the Profile of Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Cheney said, “Everyone has a duty to set aside partisan battles and stand together to preserve our great republic.” She posted the transcript and video of her remarks on her congressional site. Kennedy’s grandson presented Cheney with the award while his mother, Ambassador Caroline Kennedy watched.

Chuck Gray, a DDT-endorsed election conspiracy theorist stating that President Joe Biden was not elected in 2020, won the GOP race for secretary of state in charge of elections. Democrats had no candidates so he has been de facto elected.

The Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans opposing DDT, may agree with him about the importance of Cheney’s loss: the organization declared her loss is the death of the GOP:

“Tonight, the nation marks the end of the Republican Party. What remains shares the name and branding of the traditional GOP, but is in fact an authoritarian nationalist cult dedicated only to Donald Trump… Liz Cheney stood up to the lawless, reckless attack on our nation led by Donald Trump, and millions of Americans saw leadership that transcended ideological boundaries… She remains an essential leader of the pro-democracy forces in the United States today and we encourage her to continue to engage in the fight to save our Republic and protect our democracy.”

The Lincoln Project describes itself as a pro-democracy organization dedicated to the preservation, protection, and defense of democracy.

Updates:

DDT is endorsing candidates without consulting them. It appears he is selecting those most likely to be elected because of polling or no opponents in the primaries.

During her campaign, newly-elected DA Coty Wamp in Tennessee’s Hamilton County said she might prosecute librarians and teachers who have LGBTQ books in libraries because the content “is called contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Now she says she never made that claim. The far-right group Moms for Liberty is disappointed.

The Senate GOP Campaign Arm pulled $13.5 million in targeted advertising from Arizona (Blake Masters), Nevada (Adam Laxalt), Pennsylvania (Mehmet Oz), and Wisconsin (Ron Johnson) since August 1. All of them are losing in the polls. Chris Hartline, NRSC communications director, said the money had been transferred into independent expenditures to coordinate with campaigns but didn’t give the amount. States have limited coordinated amounts; in Arizona no more than $622,000.  Masters received $15 million from billionaire Peter Thiel but has only $1.6 million remaining, compared to the $24.8 million that his Democratic opponent, Mark Kelly, has. 

Blake Masters, Arizona’s GOP U.S. Senate candidate, tried to separate himself from the white supremacists, but Andrew Torba, founder of the far-right social media platform Gab, said “it’s a flat-out lie” that Masters doesn’t know who Torba is. The response was to Masters’ rejection of Torba’s endorsement in the Arizona Mirror where the candidate stated, “I’ve never heard of the guy … because he’s a nobody and nobody cares about him except the media.” DDT had endorsed Masters. Torba wrote back that Masters is “already become a typical politician before he is even elected!”

Rep. Lee Zeldin, New York’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, may face a criminal investigation for a “dubious petitioning effort” to add third parties to the August 23 primary ballot who would siphon votes away from Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul. Signed Independence Party petitions were dropped at the GOP party headquarters—and bound in volumes—before submission to the state Board of Elections on the May 31 deadline.” According to the Times Union, almost 20 percent of the 52,000 signatures required to put “upstart third parties” on the ballot were “xeroxed copies of other, original signatures within those same records interspersed in a manner leading some election experts to conclude their inclusion may have been intentional, possibly to inflate the number of signatures to surpass the daunting new threshold of 45,000 valid signatures for upstart state parties to gain ballot access.” Over 12,800 signatures were invalid, including over 11,000 photocopied ones. The total was 6,000 short of an Independence Party ballot line to sway certain close elections for GOP candidates.” Another example of Republican “election integrity.”