The Senate was won by Democrats last year

The Vows of John Walker, Democrat Sen. Pat Murray, and the Case for an Abortion Law that Should be Decided at the State Level

Thanks to the terrible Dobbs decision, abortion rights are a winning issue for Democrats. Ultrawealthy people are pretty good at shielding their assets so the billionaires tax isn’t likely to work. And, as our own polling guru Nate Cohn pointed out last summer, gun control is one of those issues that always seems to poll well but rarely decides elections.

Walker, whose candidacy has endured a stream of gaffes on policy, has more recently been contended with allegations from two women who say he had pressured them to have abortions. Walker has denied the allegations and CNN has not independently confirmed them. The candidate has previously stated in favor of a full federal ban on abortion without exceptions. He said that he supports Georgia’s law, which restricts abortions after six weeks but does allow exceptions in cases of rape or incest if the mother’s health is at risk.

Democrat politicians have done terrible damage to America, ruining our economy, causing chaos at our border and increasing crime in our cities. They changed our lives. The spot says that abortion in Nevada hasn’t changed.

Laxalt, who prior to the Supreme Court ruling called the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision a “joke,” wrote in an August op-ed that abortion should be decided at the state level. He said it was a lie that he’d support a federal ban on abortion as a senator, and that he supported a potential state referendum banning abortion after 13 weeks of pregnancy.

His opponent, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, is running an ad saying she will “always fight for a women’s right to make our own health care decisions,” while “Adam Laxalt won’t.”

Republican Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley in Washington state has aired multiple ads expressing her opposition to a federal ban. “Patty Murray has spent millions to paint me as an extremist,” Smiley says of the longtime Democratic senator in one of her spots. I oppose a federal abortion ban, but I am pro-life.

Shortly after Roe was overturned, Murray began airing a straight-to-camera ad, in which she says, “It is a horrifying reality: Extreme politicians across our country, now in charge of the most private health care decisions.”

This is exemplified by the way Joe O’Dea, the Republican nominee for Senate in Colorado, has addressed the issue in his race against Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in a blue-leaning state.

In a recent ad, the first-time candidate and businessman touted his outsider credentials – “I’m an outsider, not a politician” – and his support for abortion in the early stages of pregnancy – “For the first five months, that should be a woman’s decision between her and her doctor.”

(O’Dea has also said he would have voted for Obama nominee Elena Kagan, a liberal justice who dissented in the Dobbs ruling, as he wants to end the “blood sport” over the Supreme Court confirmation process.)

What is the problem with Ted Budd? Why is the Republican-President Biden concerned about the economy and its ill-equipped future?

If there is an issue in your district that is showing up in your polling, then talk about it. If it is not an issue that shows up in your polling, talk about issues like the economy that are more advantageous to you,” the operative said.

Ted Budd said in a local interview in September that the Supreme Court made it clear that this was a Raleigh decision not a Washington decision.

The congressman co-sponsored a bill in Congress that would allow officials in Washington to decide how to regulate abortion, rather than the capitol of North Carolina.

With the Senate potentially on a knife-edge in the last few weeks of the election, a Donald Trump-aligned GOP majority in the House could be on the horizon.

The Supreme Court ruling and GOP chaos gave Democrats plenty to paint Republicans as a threat, but high fuel costs hurt everytime voters pass gas station signs. The families that can least afford it are the ones that are hurt by higher egg and meat prices. Some of this is beyond Biden’s control and can be traced to post-pandemic issues and the war in Ukraine. Even if Biden has presided over some bright spots, like a low unemployment rate, the President’s party is likely in trouble if the election turns on the economy. Presidential elections are often decided by economic sentiment. And Biden, despite some more favorable polling in recent weeks, still stands at 39% approval in the CNN Poll of Polls.

The election is happening at a time when Washington and the former president are both still reeling from the insurrection he incited to try to stay in power.

There is a false belief that Trump was cheated out of office. Some, in statewide races for governor or secretary of state posts, could end up controlling future elections. And the ex-President himself is using the campaign as a testing ground for a likely 2024 bid to reclaim the White House.

The push and pull between these competing priorities have been vividly displayed over the past week during the first flurry of general election Senate debates in states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona. During the televised Arizona encounter last week, Republican challenger Blayne Masters came out with a strong opening and kept Mark Kelly on the defensive, linking him to Biden while the conversation initially focused on border security. But as the discussion shifted toward abortion and election integrity, Kelly clearly regained the momentum, as Masters struggled to explain his support during the GOP primary for a near total ban on abortion and his embrace of Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in 2020.

The GOP is still favored to flip the chamber because elections for more nationalized races are more likely to turn on the prevailing environmental winds.

On the economy, the border and crime, the GOP is bombarding Democrats with the charge that excessively liberal policies under Biden have sent the country spiraling in the wrong direction. It is the latest iteration of a time-for-a- change message that the opposition parties have used to great success throughout American history during times of public discontent. Brabender predicts that by Election Day, very few individual Democrats will escape the undertow of the negative overall public perceptions about their party’s performance, particularly over inflation. He says that there are certain generic considerations baked into the cake when it comes to the economy.

The fight is still very close despite the fact that several of the major races for Congress are now in the GOP’s favor. The tone of the campaign changed in June after the Supreme Court electrified the Democratic base by overturning the right to an abortion. Trump, meanwhile, who scares many voters outside his fervent supporters, roared back into the news with his refusal to hand over classified documents he hoarded at his Florida resort. The Republicans risk their hopes in key races when he foisted a bunch of unskilled election-denying GOP nominees.

Thanks to Pennsylvania, the answer in the Senate this year is the Democrats, and even if Fetterman can’t perform all his day-to-day duties as well as he’d hoped, as long as he can show up for votes, he’s fulfilling their most important mandate.

“Send me to D.C., and I will be the 51st vote,” said the stroke survivor, whose blue collar campaign brands his Trump-endorsed opponent, TV surgeon Mehmet Oz, as an elitist peddler of quack cures and a carpetbagger from New Jersey.

But elsewhere on Sunday, a rising star of the Republican Party – Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who won in Virginia in 2021 a year after Biden carried it by 10 percentage points – slammed Democrats for inflicting economic misery.

Youngkin pointed out on CNN’s “State of the Union” that cost of living has gone up and grocery prices have gone up too.

The Case For Blake Biden: A Republican Candidate Who Can Win a Supermajority and Why Does He Wanna Win?

The consequences of the election are large. If the GOP does win the House, they will plan to kill Biden’s legislative agenda and to unleash a fearsome set of investigations into the administration, including over the business dealings of the President’s son, Hunter Biden. A GOP majority would be a tool of revenge for Trump and could impeach key Cabinet officials and even the current President himself in a brutal run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

“For you, Herschel Walker wants to ban abortion,” says a narrator, before playing comments the Republican made supporting no exceptions to a national abortion ban. The narrator then asks if the allegations were for himself.

Gail: Thanks to Fetterman, Pennsylvania voters chose him over Mehmet Oz last year, despite his health issues. The main issue in Congressional elections these days is which party will control what.

Portman referred to the Ohio Senate Republican nominee, who defeated Tim Ryan, as an example of how Trump was able to win the primary by eight points. Portman said the Republican Party ran some candidates that “more independent-minded voters just couldn’t support.”

In states like Georgia, Ohio and New Hampshire, the Trump-endorsed Senate candidates are performing better in the polls than the more mainstream gubernatorial candidates, suggesting that if Trump hadn’t played a role in Senate candidate selection the party would be in better shape.

The unprecedented nature of these midterms is also playing out in the extraordinary spectacle of the former President and most likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee openly lambasting his party’s leader in the Senate, underscoring the forces unleashed by Trump that threaten to again dash his party’s hopes of winning the chamber.

But GOP Sen. nominee Blake Masters could cost Republicans a key pick-up opportunity in his race against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who’s running for a full six-year term after winning a 2020 special election. The former astronaut, who holds a narrow lead among likely voters in CNN’s polling, blasted Masters in a debate last week for peddling “conspiracies and lies that have no place in our democracy.”

Masters was asked if he believed Biden was the legitimate president to coin a soundbite on a GOP election theme. The President is named Joe Biden. Have you heard about the gas prices recently? he said.

In the months that followed, commentators and pollsters breathlessly speculated about whether voters would prioritize abortion or the economy in casting their vote. Republicans were happy and Democrats were sad to see the abortion decision backlash go down earlier in the fall.

The findings appear to confirm what Republican Senate leaders made clear long ago – the their best chance in November lies in a relentless focus on the Biden economy and the ex-President not making the campaign all about him.

Democrats are attracting a large portion of voters who disapprove of Biden, according to polls measuring sentiment of House races. The Democrats are leading slightly among voters who somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance, which is a reversal from 2010 when the president’s party lost a large percentage of voters who disapproved of him.

What’s more, Biden’s position is consistently weak across the battleground states that will decide control of the Senate. According to CNN polls, only 42% of likely voters approve of his performance. Other recent surveys have put his approval at a comparable 39% in Georgia and Wisconsin and only slightly better (around 44-45%) in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

The results show that two-thirds of voters who focused on inflation gave Republicans their votes, as did a third of those who prioritized immigration. A majority of those who focused on abortion or health care were Democrats.

The Concrete is Not Set yet: Political Campaigning for a Better Future by Replacing the Biden Economic Management with Energy and Natural Resources

In the long run, the most important of these may be the argument that the incentives for domestic production embedded in the trio of central Biden legislative accomplishments – the bills to rebuild infrastructure, promote semiconductor manufacturing and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy – will produce a boom in US employment, particularly in manufacturing jobs that don’t require a college degree.

In the future there are only a few Democrats that are focusing on those possibilities this year.

More commonly, Democrats are stressing legislation the party has passed that offers families some relief on specific costs, especially the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. According to Garin, highlighting specific initiatives can allow individual candidates to overcome the negative judgement of the Biden economic management. His main concern is that too many Democrats are focused on abortion instead of the economy.

The founder of Somos Votantes, a group that mobilizesLatinos for Democratic candidates, says Republicans have not convinced voters they have specific answers to the economy, which is a saving grace for her party. “The concrete is not set yet,” she said recently after a day of door-to-door canvassing in Phoenix. There is still a way to connect with people. Unlike Way to Win, her group emphasizes the idea of giving people opportunities to help them meet their obligation to family and that Republicans are focused on taking away rights.

Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an advocacy group in Washington, DC. He was an adviser to the Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. His views are his own, expressed in the piece. CNN has more opinion on it.

The Disturbance of Abortion: Why a Majority of Democrat Candidates Are Fighting Back Against Its Implications

We know that abortion is a huge motivating force for voters who identify as Democrats. But for independents, the dynamic is more complex. A recent KFF Health Tracking Poll found one-third of Democratic women want to hear candidates talk about abortion, but only 16% of independent women share this sentiment.

Polling done by FiveThirtyEight indicates that abortion is no longer on the minds of some voters due to high inflation, high crime rates, and fears of an economic downturn. In the immediate wake of the Dobbs ruling in June, 29% of women aged 18 to 44 listed abortion as one of their top three political priorities. That number was down to 12% in the polls conducted in September.

Republicans running for office have shied away from the issue. The websites of the Republican Senate candidates in Arizona and Nevada have been scrubbed of stridently pro-life language, with Adam Laxalt running ads stressing his lack of interest in changing the status quo.

Imagine a voter who is personally opposed to abortion but knows someone who got one because of economic pressures. They could feel more comfortable voting in favor of a candidate that supports greater abortion restrictions if they pledged to champion the expanded funding for safety net programs.

Several elected Republicans have moved in that direction. Sen. Marco Rivas, locked in a closer-than- expected reelection campaign, unveiled a package of safety-net proposals that would boost resources available to pregnant women and provide on-the-ground programs that give mothers the support they need.

Red states such as Tennessee, Florida and South Carolina have opted into the federal program that provides post birth Medicaid coverage, up from the old standard of 60 days, which is a must for every state that restricts abortion. New spending aimed at helping low-income mothers was passed by Texas and Indiana while they passed restrictions on abortion to demonstrate their commitment to being pro-life.

News from Philly Rep. Charlie Dent: Why Dr. Oz and John Fetterman will debate in the US Senate if he is a Democrat

Editor’s Note: Charlie Dent is a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who was chair of the House Ethics Committee from 2015 until 2017 and chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies from 2015 until 2018. He is a CNN political commentator. His views are not reflected in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.

Pennsylvania has two statewide, open seat races, with US Sen. Pat Toomey retiring and Gov. Tom Wolf finishing the second of his two terms. It’s rare in the commonwealth.

Shapiro has dominated the airwaves. What’s more, during an interview last week on the Real America’s Voice network, Mastriano falsely claimed the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia “is grabbing homeless kids and kids in foster care, apparently, and experimenting on them with gender transitioning, something that is irreversible.”

The US Senate race between Republican Dr. Oz and Democrat John Fetterman is too close to call. Oz and Fetterman will debate on Tuesday for the first and only time, and the stakes couldn’t be higher for Fetterman, who suffered a near fatal stroke days before the primary election in May.

Questions have been raised about Fetterman’s capacity to perform the duties of a US senator due to auditory processing issues as a result of his stroke. All eyes will be on Fetterman, who will use closed captioning during the debate. Neurological experts say people with hearing or deafness use closed captioning.

The Midterm Oz: The Case for a Prosperous Republican Party in Pennsylvania and its Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Outburst

Polling is tight. Oz emerged from a brutal GOP primary that drove his unfavorable ratings high among Republicans as well as Democrats and independents. Republican voters have since come home to Oz.

He and his allies have been pounding Fetterman on inflation, taxes, fracking and the Green New Deal, a plan to wean the United States from fossil fuels and cut greenhouse gas emissions. Fetterman, an early supporter of US Sen. Bernie Sanders, has been attacked as a radical socialist.

Fetterman has been praised by far- left Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner as an effective way of moving commutations and pardons in the modern direction.

Fetterman has waged aggressive attacks against Oz, trolled him over social media and paid advertising on issues such as health care and Social Security in order to portray the wealthy GOP candidate as out of touch with ordinary Pennsylvanians.

All things considered, there is a reason for Republican optimism. Republican momentum is building nationally as likely voters express concerns about inflation and the economy, and Oz is well-positioned to win. Republicans are surging throughout the country on economic issues, notwithstanding candidate quality problems, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision on abortion, and former President Donald Trump’s unhelpful midterm interventions.

Pennsylvania also features three toss-up House races — in the Lehigh Valley, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre and suburban Pittsburgh-based seats. The race between incumbent Democratic Rep. Susan Wild and Lisa Scheller, who is a family-owned manufacturing business, should be watched. It is a swing district that I held for nearly 14 years, and it is among the most competitive. John King produced an excellent report on Northampton County, which could determine the fate of the statewide races and control of Congress.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed some concern Thursday over Democratic prospects in Georgia in the final weeks before the midterm elections, but he remained hopeful about Pennsylvania after the their nominee’s recent debate performance.

But with inflation concerns rising and Biden’s unpopularity, he’s kept the president at arm’s length. Instead, former President Barack Obama has been Democrats’ choice to amp up Georgia voters – and deliver a harsh case against Walker.

The debate did not hurt the state of Pennsylvania, according to Schumer.

The overheard comments came during a conversation among Schumer, President Joe Biden and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on the tarmac of Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, New York. Biden gave a speech in the state on Thursday as part of a message in which he painted Republicans as a threat to Americans pocketbooks.

What has changed: Raphael Warnock, the Supercongressman, and the Republican Party: Bringing back up the elephant in the room

When the Georgia election takes place on December 6, Democrats will have a better chance of holding the Senate.

The Democratic leader said his party was “picking up steam” in Nevada, where Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is among the party’s most vulnerable incumbents.

One key characteristic of the race has changed, as Democrat Raphael Warnock has moved from challenger to incumbent in order to beat Republican nominee Herschel Walker. The former football great, recruited and endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has been running an odd campaign with controversy, but still is in a close race with another player before Election Day.

“You can’t afford to give a clown a vote on Roe v. Wade,” Fetterman told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Thursday, adding that Oz’s comment showed “what he actually believes about abortion.”

The Democrats immediately began advertising on Oz’s comments, but most of the attention was focused on Fetterman’s stroke.

“We wanted to be and thought it was important to be there. A Democrat told a senator that they showed up. I always got back up when I was knocked down. That is the essence of our campaign, and that is that we are running for anyone that has ever been knocked down, and had to get back up. That is what we are running on.

In the last election cycle, Georgia elected two Democrats to the US Senate, and this time, the state is home to a contest that could potentially determine if President Joe Biden gets a second term.

A Warnock victory would likely foreclose Republicans’ path to a majority in the Senate, which is currently split 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris casting a decisive vote. Republicans coalesced behind Walker as a result of economic angst and low approval ratings of Biden, who is familiar to Democrats nationwide.

Underscoring his party’s mix of ambivalence and political practicality, former Vice President Mike Pence, after not mentioning Walker during his remarks at a rally in Cumming, Georgia, on Tuesday for GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, told reporters he is “supporting the whole (Republican) ticket here in Georgia.”

What Has Raphael Warnock Done to America? The Ukraine War, Election Day, and Other Violations of the Fourth Amendment

While initially trying to steer clear of directly addressing the controversy, Warnock eventually decided to do so. He launched an ad called “Hypocrite” last month.

Warnock’s play to undecided voters and moderates has focused on his efforts to expand access to health care – he often cites his work to lower the cost of insulin – along with his bipartisan record in the Senate.

“I’ll work with anyone if it means helping Georgia,” he says in another ad, hammering home a message the senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church has repeated at rallies and in his lone debate with the Republican.

“There is very little evidence that he has taken any interest, bothered to learn anything about or displayed any kind of inclination towards public service or volunteer work or helping people in anyway,” Obama said of Walker at a rally for Warnock last week in College Park.

Walker’s campaign has trafficked heavily in culture war rhetoric, along with criticism of inflation and crime rates under Biden, whom he’s sought to tie to Warnock to as tightly as possible.

“For those of you who are concerned about voting for me, a non-politician,” Walker said during their debate, “I want you to think about the damage politicians like Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock have done to this country.”

If you sign up for the newsletter you will get this weekly column. The strongest opinions of the week came from CNN and other outlets.

TheUkraine war is a classic VUCA moment. So is the election on Tuesday. The vote for all the seats in the House and more than a third in the Senate is volatile, uncertain, complex and potentially, ambiguous.

Democrats think their warnings about the future of democracy are amply justified. “We all understand inflation is temporary but losing our democracy could be permanent,” wrote Dean Obeidallah. He cited the “Washington Post’s recent reporting that a majority of the GOP nominees on the ballot his year for the House, Senate and statewide office have denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election. We have never seen anything like this in our lifetimes – if ever in the history of the United States.”

Voters are interested in the economy. “It’s nothing new,” wrote historian Meg Jacobs. She pointed out that the first televised political advertisement, for the winning Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, focused on inflation. “In the ad, he talks to an ‘average’ housewife, who complains that ‘high prices are just driving me crazy,’ and Eisenhower promises to fight on her behalf. That was at a time when inflation was less than 2%!”

“Battles over inflation — what’s the cause, who is to blame, what is there to do — get to basic fights over who should have what. Should corporations make more money and should workers make more money? Should consumers shoulder the responsibility of higher wages?

Rising energy prices are “being felt particularly by lower-income households and workers,” wrote Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

An “unnecessarily painful recession” is on the horizon, warned a researcher. The reason: the “unusually rapid pace of monetary policy tightening” by the Federal Reserve Bank, which this week hiked interest rates by three quarters of a point for the fourth time in a row. The housing market is rapidly slowing due to higher rates and companies are facing pressure to cut staff. “The Fed’s hawkish policy stance is occurring in the context of a very troubled world economy that has also been plagued by high inflation.” The Fed’s leaders have signaled that they may start moderating the pace of interest rate hikes.

My Elections: After 50 Years, What Have We Learned about the Campaign of Barack Obama? A Comment on Obeidallah, The Washington Post, the Washington Post and CNN

“Obama served up the perfect closing question for voters: ‘Who will fight for your freedom?’” Obeidallah observed, “The answer clearly is the Democratic Party, and the former President delivered that message, pointing to threats to reproductive rights and same-sex marriage by some Republicans.”

The Washington Post’s Republican writer wrote that having Obama make the final argument might not be a good idea. “Hindsight can be rosy, but Obama’s record of helping down-ballot Democrats is … less than stellar. In fact, Obama presided over the loss of more House, Senate, state legislative and governors’ seats than any president in U.S. history… It is not surprising that many Democrats don’t want Biden to join them on the campaign trail. Obama isn’t the perfect hero they are hoping for. To the contrary, based on this disastrous record, he may be electoral kryptonite.”

A note to our readers: On Tuesday, pivotal races will decide who controls the House, Senate and dozens of governorships across the country. CNN’s My Election tool allows you to build a custom dashboard and follow contests that matter to you. CNN has a free account to start with.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html

The Case of Michael Fanone: When Do ‘Never Trump’ Candidates Stand Up for the 2019 2021 Midterm Elections? A Post by Joshua A. Douglas

Michael Fanone, a former Metropolitan Police officer injured in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, wrote that when he converses with other officers who defended the capitol, they often discuss why Americans are indifferent about the insurrection. Americans seem to have no interest in anything. An overt attempt to end our democracy? This is bad…

“I’d like to believe that the violent attack on Paul Pelosi will be a turning point, but somehow I doubt it. … We are no longer talking about isolated incidents or seeing universal condemnation of violence by our leaders. The husband of the woman who is third in line to the US presidency was beaten in his home for political reasons, and the right wing media and some Republicans enjoyed the violence, Fanone said.

Some initiative are up for a vote in three-quarters of the states. The ballot for democracy in 2022. was written by Joshua A. Douglas. “Not only do we have candidates who have questioned the 2020 election or refuse to say they will accept defeat this year, but numerous states and localities also will vote on measures to change how elections are run or who may vote in them.”

Friday brought word that former President Donald Trump could announce that he is launching another bid for the White House in the next few weeks. Zelizer says that Democrats shouldn’t underestimate the threat that Trump poses.

“The Republicans remain a strongly united party. Very little can shake that unity. The ‘Never Trump’ contingent did not emerge as a dominant force. Indeed, officials such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney were purged from the party.”

The Republicans will be confident if they get back in control of the House and Senate next week. The GOP will likely be able to unite behind Trump thanks to the strong showing of election-denying candidates.

Trump himself will feel emboldened, Zelizer wrote. Trump is still a political figure despite the ongoing criminal investigations. … It will be harder to prosecute Trump once he is a candidate. Trump, a master of playing the victim, is sure to claim (as he has in the past) that any investigation is simply a politically motivated ‘witch hunt’ intended to take him out of the running.”

The rise and fall of Twitter: Elon Musk, his tumultuous presidency, and the fate of Twitter (after his 2013 Twitter victory)

The slurring of Jews that West made has been made all the more appalling by this. A cultural icon has decided to hang a live wire around his neck, wave the wire around, and run it up the flagpole of his fame due to a scary electrical charge in the air.

Elon Musk’s first few days of controlling Twitter have been tumultuous, with the Tesla CEO spreading misinformation, laying off a large share of the workforce and sharing the idea of charging users for blue-check verification status.

Marietje Szake wrote a story about how tech executives hold over our lives the power that the US tech industry has over us.

The number of racist and neo-Nazi posts exploded on the site after the sale was confirmed. The accounts with the labels indicating as much be removed were linked to Russian and Chinese state media. Speculation was rife that Musk might reverse the ban on extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Musk “has placed no limits on his own speech,” wrote former advertising executive Rob Norman in the New York Times, “and, under his ownership, seems likely to enable the inflammatory, provocative and sometimes verifiably untrue speech of others.”

“I know from having represented the world’s biggest buyer of advertising space that advertisers worry about these things a lot. In this case, advertisers’ worries could lead them to flee en masse, costing Twitter almost all its current revenue. If there was no revenue, it was possible that the future of the platform could be at risk.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html

Midterms Are Vuca Elections: Martha Hickson and the 2021 New Jersey High School Librarian. CNN Opinion: The Case for America’s Future Starts Now

Martha Hickson, a high school librarian in New Jersey for more than a decade, called it the worst year of her working life. In 2021, protesters showed up at a school board meeting and “railed against ‘Gender Queer,’ a memoir in graphic novel form by Maia Kobabe, and ‘Lawn Boy,’ a coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Evison. They displayed selected sentences from the book, and isolated images from the other person’s work.

They attacked Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Protesters accused it of being a plot to lure kids to degradation.

“But the real sucker punch came when one protester branded me a pedophile, pornographer and groomer of children. After a successful career, with retirement on the horizon, to be cast as a villain was heartbreaking.”

My employer’s response was even worse. The board sat silent that night and didn’t utter a word for the next five months.

CNN Opinion wrote a personal essay about America’s future in a series called, “America’s Future Starts Now.” Nine education experts also weighed in with thoughts on how to move America’s schools forward.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html

The Divorce of Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen: Celebrity Power Couples in Brazil, and in Israel, after the 2011 Brazilian Presidential Comeback

Elections in Latin America and the Middle East brought back familiar faces. In Brazil, the former President posted a remarkable political comeback, defeating the incumbent Jair Bolsonro, wrote Arick Wierson.

“Not since the end of the military dictatorship in the 1980s have Brazilians been faced with two more starkly contrasting candidates, each with diametrically opposing political outlooks for the country,” Wierson wrote. A sizable percentage of the voting population wasn’t sold on either of the visions for the country.

In Israel, last week’s election put former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the cusp of returning to power, likely in position to form a right-wing governing coalition.

The most stable political party in Israel is Likud. Israel is shaped more by the right wing than it has ever been in its history because Netanyahu is its master.

NFL quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bündchen are divorcing, a development that is hardly unusual in the world of celebrity power couples. Yet there’s enormous public interest in the split, Jill Filipovic noted. The fascinating part of the Brady-Bndchen divorce is that these are two people who are not like us, but still have a lot of celebrity cachet.

Bndchen commented that she wanted Brady to spend more time with their family, after years of sacrificing so that he could thrive professionally.

This is “a familiar and frustrating” dynamic: “The woman who steps back to care for children and make sure her husband succeeds – and the husband who doesn’t quite seem to appreciate that sacrifice and continues to push professionally far past when he needs to, at the expense of his family.”

A Conversation with Kevin McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Implications for Democrats and Black Holes

In an exclusive interview with CNN, the potential next Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, laid out his plan for power and vowed to tackle rising crime and inflation. He promised broad investigations against the Biden administration on the Afghanistan withdrawal, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and how the administration has dealt with parents and school board meetings. And he didn’t rule out an eventual push to impeach Biden.

The president of the United States took to the campaign trail over the weekend as a sign of the critical stakes and the growing angst among Democrats.

Trump will hold a rally for J.D. Vance in Ohio on Monday to end his campaign, something he used to do well among grassroots Republicans. In a speech that ended in the pouring rain, President Trump predicted that voters wouldelect an amazing slate of true “MAGA warriors” to Congress.

Biden, who spent Saturday getting out the vote in the critical Pennsylvania Senate race with Obama, warned that the nation’s core values are in peril from Republicans who denied the truth about the US Capitol insurrection and following the brutal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.

It is on the ballot. It is a defining time for the nation. And we all must speak with one voice regardless of our party. There’s no place in America for political violence,” Biden said.

The president will end his efforts at a Democratic event in Maryland. The fact that he will be in a liberal bastion and not trying to boost an endangered lawmaker in a key race on the final night reflects his compromised standing in an election that has reverted to a referendum on his tattered credibility and low approval ratings.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/politics/election-eve-campaigning/index.html

Biden Revised: The American Dream of the Future Is Yours to Live… but Your Life Isn’t: The Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna McDaniel Revisited

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her party would win both the House and the Senate and accused Biden of being oblivious to the economic anxiety among Americans with his repeated warnings about democracy.

In a speech in Pittsburgh on Saturday, Obama warned that the GOP would cut Social Security if they won a majority in Congress, and claimed that Republican concern over the economy was a ruse.

“Look, they’re all about the wealthier getting wealthy. The wealthier people are staying wealthy. The middle class is stiffed. Biden said the poor get poorer under their policy.

The headquarters of the pro-Trump nominee in the Arizona gubernatorial contest opened a letter with a suspicious white powder on Sunday. Lake’s opponent, current Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, condemned the incident as “incredibly concerning.”

There were two major fights in Florida of the GOP nominating contest, one of which was held on Sunday night. The ex-president came up with a new nickname for the man who may prove to be his toughest primary opponent: Ron DeSanctimonious.

But the Florida governor chose not to engage, turning his ire instead on Biden and calling his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, “a donkey” while taking credit for defying Washington officials and experts during the pandemic.

As he rallied for Rubio, who is seeking reelection, Trump didn’t repeat his mockery of DeSantis on Sunday but again teased the likelihood of a presidential run. Tom Cotton will not run in the Republican primary, a sign that the next presidential race is heating up.

In Brooklyn, Bill Clinton was stumping for New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul. The Empire state should be safe for the Democrats but Hochul had a very close race against Zeldin and that shows the weakness of the national environment.

I know that an election rally is all about a candidate but your life is on the line. For young people in the audience, your life is on the line,” Clinton said.

Biden has a hard time speaking personally to Americans craving a return to normal after the swine flue or getting across the pain of rising prices in a 40-year high inflation explosion that his White House once described as “transitory.”

Outliers in the House and Senate: Why a Majority of Democratic Voters voted for President Donald Trump, Rep. J.R. Majewski, and Rep. Kaptur

The pattern also helps explain some outliers in particular states. In Ohio, Rep. Kaptur defeated J.R. Majewski, who lied about his military service at the Capitol. She won by 13 points in a district that Mr. Trump won in 2020. The other Republicans in House races in Ohio did better than Mr. Trump did.

There are exceptions, of course — like Democratic strength in Colorado or Republican durability in Texas. The most impressive showings fit well with each party.

There’s the Republican landslide in Florida, where the stop-the-steal movement never sought to overturn an election result and where Gov. Ron DeSantis refused to go further than a 15-week abortion ban. There are the Democratic successes in Kansas and Michigan, where abortion referendums were on the ballot at different points this year, and where Democrats swept the most competitive House districts.

It is not yet known which party will control the Senate or the House of Representatives next year. But it’s clear that the “red wave” wished for by Republicans did not materialize in 2022.

Former President Donald Trump: Trump was on voters’ minds nearly as much as the incumbent. Roughly 28% of voters said they intended their vote to express opposition to him, only a few points lower than the roughly one-third who said they were expressing opposition to Biden.

The strength of individual candidates may have helped the Democrats win over voters who were against the president. In New Hampshire, the incumbent Democrat won almost all of the voters who disapproved of Biden, and nearly all the voters who approved of him.

CNN Insider Look: The First Time Republicans Haven’t Decided to Vote for Mike Fetterman, the Oscillator

CNN’s exit polls include in-person interviews with voters on Election Day, and in-person interviews with voters before and after the election. They were conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool. Read more here.

It was unusual to find Trump voters crossing party lines to vote for Mr. Fetterman in the county. One of them, Michael Yeomans, 66, a retired heavy equipment operator who supported Mr. Trump in 2016, said he never considered voting for Dr. Oz “based on the things I have seen Dr. Oz do before he was interested in running, like on TV.’’

Mr. Fetterman did not release his medical records, did not do well in the debate, and embraced Biden, but I am still confused as to how he was able to do so well. “He’s an odd-looking guy, in shorts and a hoodie. I thought this was going to be easy.

It is possible that Mr. Fetterman’s stroke may have led to voters who were leaning Democratic to vote for him.

Republican senators returned to the Capitol for the first time since Election Day and were puzzled by how the party failed to seize the opportunity.

At the same time, Senate GOP leaders are pressing forward with a mid-week vote to affirm their control of the conference, even though some conservatives are pushing for changes at the top.

Rick Scott said that he has not decided if he will challenge McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. McConnell and Scott were at odds over how the Senate should be won.

“There’s no one single factor,” said Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn, ticking off the growing pains of “first-time candidates,” a “confusing political environment” and “a combination of issues.”

“We’re going to have a very robust and candid conversation over the course of the next couple of days,” Thune said. There is no question that we did not meet expectations in this election.

Looking forward is always a better campaign strategy according to Capito. Looking back to 2020 it seems like it didn’t work out. I think we should look at the future. That’s what our candidates should, and wanted, to do, and some of them just fell short.”

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman declined to blame Trump for the GOP’s underwhelming performance, stressing the need for “better candidate recruitment” and “sticking with the issues.”

“The results were disappointing, but in the end, we basically got Republican control of the House,” Cornyn said. “I think that may be the cause of the Democrats’ excitement because they said it could have been so much worse.”

Cornyn doesn’t know why the Biden administration considers that a victory. “It’s kind of like the old saying, there’s nothing so exhilarating, as being shot at and missed.”

What will the GOP tell us about the 2024 reiélection? — Rep. Mike Rounds discusses the future of the South Dakota GOP

It is not clear yet if the Republicans will take the House, but they are almost certain to hold a small majority.

“The former president is going to do whatever he wants to do, and I don’t think he’s going to listen to what my thoughts are on it,” South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds said. Someone who will unite the party is what I want. That’s the way we win elections.”

Asked if he wants Trump to be the 2024 GOP nominee, Idaho GOP Rep. Mike Simpson told CNN, “Let’s see who runs. Personally, I don’t think it’s good for the party.”

Romney voted to remove Trump from office, and he referred to the president as an “albatross around Republican necks.”

Romney believes that the man has been on the mountain too long. “We’ve lost three races with him. I would like to see a person from the bench come up and take the place of the leader of the party.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/politics/republican-reaction-losing-senate/index.html

What did she tell us about Covid-19, when she was pregnant, and why she fought against an anti-abortion extremist in Michigan

Simpson said that one of the reasons why Republicans did poorly was because of their connection to the former president. “I think we had some candidates that were too tied to Trump,” said Simpson.

The party needs to set its sights on winning the Georgia Senate elections, even if Democrats already hold the majority.

“There’s a huge difference, as you all know, between a 50-50 Senate and 51, so we really need that seat and that’s where all our efforts ought to be devoted,” he said.

“With our democracy at stake, with our fundamental liberties on the line, and with a clear choice between moving America forward or holding it back, the American people spoke loud and clear: Democrats will retain the majority in the Senate,” Schumer said.

Editor’s Note: Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms. She is the author of Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work. She has her own views expressed here. Read more opinion on CNN.

A few months ago – as economic concerns reached a fever pitch and pundits began to forecast a looming “red wave” – Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer put a stake in the ground.

We tend to say Covid-19 was a she-cession and that we need to get women back in the workplace. You know how to do that? You empower women. You shouldn’t take away the ability to make the most important economic decision in our lives away from us.

Whitmer’s victory reveals a fundamental truth, and one that Democrats would be wise to run on in elections to come: The price of parenthood is the ultimate economic issue – and only one party is doing something about it.

Clearly, the message hit home for voters: Whitmer won in a landslide against an anti-abortion extremist, racking up double-digit margins in a state that famously swung red back in 2016. 45% of voters in Michigan rate abortion as their top issue compared to 20% nationwide and 9% in the state where inflation is a factor.

The cost of childcare, education and child care: How Democrats can make a better nation by putting paid leave to work for a less expensive child

But there are additional costs killing parents’ budgets every day. The price of child care, for one, is rising faster than inflation. In fact, it’s now the norm for pre-school to cost more than an in-state public university degree, contributing to a staggering 40% of parents going into debt well before their children have moved into a dorm.

American hospital prices are more expensive than in other countries, with Exploding health care costs responsible for two-thirds of all bankruptcies. And while we’re comparing ourselves to the rest of the world, 120 other countries now have paid parental leave programs at the national level – but guess who still doesn’t?

Black women are more likely than other women to have financial issues in the first place. Months after the Dobbs decision overturning, it’s more expensive than ever to raise a child – over $18,000 per year, per child for a working-class family, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. While gas prices might hurt you, they are still less expensive than care for a child the Supreme Court forced you to have.

This election was a second chance for many Democrats, particularly at the local level, to put paid leave back on the table, to lower the cost of child care, and to finally get better access to quality education and health care. These policies would ease parents’ financial stresses far more than Republican corporate tax breaks ever could – and history shows that if candidates articulate the value of these policies, their numbers may in fact improve.

These candidates offer a blueprint for a better nation – and, looking ahead to 2024, Democrats would be wise to take them and their strategy seriously. They have shown us a future where leaders talk about pocketbook issues, and prove they can get the policies passed onto the people.

Most importantly, it’s a world in which parents across the political spectrum can be sure that the party they elected is, finally, giving us a chance, too.

Biden presented a liberal agenda that sounded good to non-liberals and he seemed so mellow. People looked down on Biden as a presidential candidate because he reminded them of another person. Turns out that these days a nice great-uncle who wants to put a cap on drug prices is just what we’re looking for.

Bret: Our friend Frank Bruni had the best line on this same point in his newsletter last week. “For Donald Trump,” he wrote, “we needed noise-canceling headphones. For Biden, hearing aids.” The age question will become more acute with Biden, so it is particularly sharp. Some of his fumbles, like calling Chuck Schumer the Senate minority leader, are going to stick in people’s minds.

He had long-term physical problems that made it difficult for him to deal with his work, as was shown by a story by our newsroom colleague Annie Karni. Lesson No. 1: Joining the United States Senate is not the best possible agenda for a man who’s recovering from a serious stroke.