By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, August 03, 2022
Eric Greitens, please make like Marvin K. Mooney and just go away. As of
this writing, former governor and Missouri Senate candidate Greitens has less
than 19 percent of the vote and is in a distant third place. State attorney
general Eric Schmitt won the multi-candidate GOP senate primary with a
commanding 45 percent. Trump fans will try to spin this as some sort of
symbolic victory for the former president, but Trump looks like a chump for not
clearly backing the better candidate and the better man who was an obvious
frontrunner and hedging his bets by endorsing “ERIC.”
In Michigan, the Trump-endorsed-but-relatively-sane Tudor
Dixon won the GOP nomination for governor in the effort to unseat incumbent
Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. (One of the more curious aspects of this primary
was Dixon’s rivals arguing that Betsy DeVos — Donald Trump’s
secretary of education, who endorsed Dixon — was one of the “RINO
establishment’s leading never-Trumpers.” If you’re a never-Trumper, you
don’t spend four years running the Department of Education for him. Do
words have meaning anymore, or do people now just blurt out whatever sounds
good in their crazy little heads?) A mid July survey found Whitmer just above
50 percent against Dixon, but the GOP field was a bunch of relative unknowns.
Dixon’s grandmother’s died in a Norton Shores, Mich., nursing home during the
pandemic, and she says Whitmer’s policies on nursing homes exacerbated her
grandmother’s isolation and loneliness. Keep an eye on this race.
Two incumbent House Republicans from Washington who voted
to impeach Trump, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse, are currently leading
their primaries as vote-counting continues. They are expected to survive their
primary challenges.
Score one for the DCCC’s support for election-truthers: Representative
Peter Meijer lost to Trump loyalist John Gibbs in Michigan’s third
congressional district. Democrats spent nearly a half-million dollars to
elevate a candidate they will now insist is a dangerous extremist who must be
kept out of office. As of this writing, Gibbs is ahead, 51.6 percent to 48.3
percent; it’s easy to imagine that without that $500,000 in Democratic support, Gibbs loses and
Meijer remains a sane Republican representing that district.
Once again, the DCCC is wildly reckless, and its
decisions undermine all of its rhetoric that candidates such as Gibbs represent
a threat to democracy and the rule of law. It’s easy to understand why some
Republicans would like to see this move blow up in the DCCC’s face with a Gibbs
general-election victory; failure on that scale is the only way it will realize
the consequences of meddling in GOP primaries. But there’s also that
not-so-minor problem that 48,199 or so Republicans in this district preferred
Gibbs to Meijer.
In Arizona, they’re still counting the votes as of this
writing; conspiracy-theorist Kari Lake leads sane conservative Karrin Taylor
Robson by about 12,000 votes, or 1.8 percentage points in the race for the
Republican gubernatorial nomination. Blake Masters won the GOP Senate
nomination in that state and will take on Mark Kelly in November.
The night also brought some indisputable setbacks for
conservatives. The pro-life movement suffered a significant defeat in Kansas,
as voters rejected a referendum that would have allowed lawmakers to enact
sweeping restrictions on abortion. The vote wasn’t even close, a 59 percent to
41 percent split. Ramesh, who grew up in Kansas, lays out what went
wrong:
Kansas (where I grew up) is by no
means a pro-life state, but it would probably never have adopted a sweeping
abortion-protective constitutional amendment by popular vote. Once the state’s
high court effectively amended the state constitution by itself, though,
dislodging its mini-Roe by referendum became — as the result suggests
— impossible.
If we held national referenda, one
on abolishing Roe in favor of some policy regime TBD would
almost certainly have lost in most states. Pro-lifers by and large understood
that the polls in favor of Roe didn’t mean Americans were
deeply committed to an abortion regime as expansive as the one Roe actually
entailed.
No comments:
Post a Comment