Kerry Eleveld

The fundamentals of the 2022 midterms increasingly reveal a cycle that is departing from the historic norms most pundits have relied on as touch points for their analysis.

In particular, the generic ballot trend lines appear to be decoupling from President Joe Biden’s job approvals by the day. FiveThirtyEight’s generic ballot aggregate, for instance, had tightened Thursday to a mere 1-point advantage for Republicans, 44.3%-43.

The GOP colleagues of embattled Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming just don’t get it.

Among the various failings of the Mueller investigation into 2016 was the fact that the probe never managed to establish Donald Trump’s clear intent despite the damning web of connections between his campaign and the Kremlin.

The select committee investigating Jan. 6 has made avoiding that trap the central focus of its work.

Donald Trump is still the most dominant Republican in the country, but his very mixed primary record has left his air of invincibility in tatters.

As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, Trump has a 30% problem. While several of his endorsees won their races convincingly, most of them either won or lost with a less-than-middling 30-some percent of the GOP vote. They include:

Rep.

Georgia Republicans avoided the worst-case scenario Tuesday in their marquee primaries for governor and Senate, avoiding runoffs in both critical contests.

Sitting GOP Gov. Brian Kemp trounced Trump-endorsed former Sen. David Perdue, winning nearly three-quarters of primary voters.

Meanwhile, Trump-endorsed former Georgia football star Herschel Walker ran away with the Senate primary, winning some 68% of the vote. His nearest challenger, Gary Black, finished at just over 13%.

Remember last year when House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy suddenly turned against the bipartisan Jan. 6 commission he had deputized one of his own members to negotiate?

Right. Now McCarthy is among five sitting Republican House members who have been subpoenaed by the select committee investigating Jan.

Politico Playbook is a little late to the game on something we’ve been discussing for months here at Daily Kos: Donald Trump’s political handiwork in the midterms could help sink GOP chances of regaining control of Congress.

As Playbook notes, the Republican Party outperformed in House races in 2020 due to Trump’s heavy draw among the MAGA faithful in rural areas.

It doesn’t get any more dimwitted than this. Last week, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas claimed that Democrats’ focus on protecting the right to vote was in response to a “manufactured crisis.”

To support that claim, he pointed to a Pew Research Center poll conducted just after the November 2020 presidential election that found more than nine in 10 voters said it was easy to vote in the election.

It took just under a week for Virginia to go from a Republican gubernatorial victory supposedly fueled by conservative backlash to school curricula to wild-eyed calls for book burning.

On Monday, the Spotsylvania County School Board ordered school staff to begin removing books that contain “sexually explicit” text from school libraries, and report back on progress in a special session next week.

If there’s one thing Republicans absolutely positively don’t want over the next year, it’s a cycle in which the party’s de facto leader Donald Trump is on the ballot in every single race across the country.

Senate Republicans are using every trick in the book to steer attention away from Trump and back to President Joe Biden.

Donald Trump is succeeding in mainstreaming his fringe politics at the state level just like he did at the federal level.

Originally, the Arizona sham audit was an outlier—replicated in no other state and only gaining prominence among Trumpy bit players at the state level.

“What went wrong with the Pandemic in Florida?” queried a New York Times headline over the weekend. 

Hmm. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis may have come to mind for any reader who has even remotely paid attention to the recent delta surge plaguing the state. But not according to the Times’ triple-bylined piece.

When President Joe Biden addressed the nation Thursday in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack in Kabul, he sought to soothe, center, and steel Americans for what had been, what is, and what is yet to be.

“Tough day,” Biden said from the East Room of the White House before even beginning his prepared remarks.

In May 2020, just a couple months into the nation’s explosion of coronavirus cases, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis traveled to the White House to brag about beating COVID-19 in his state. 

“We’ve succeeded,” DeSantis said, accusing the media of spinning a “typical partisan narrative” about what the trajectory of the virus would be in his state.

As Taliban forces entered Kabul—Afghanistan’s capital and largest city—and Afghans rushed to Hamid Karzai International Airport in a last-ditch effort to flee the regime, the Republican National Committee (RNC) decided it no longer wanted to claim credit for the “historic peace agreement” the Trump administration brokered with the Taliban.

As of Friday, Dallas County hospitals had zero ICU beds available for children, according to the county’s chief executive, Judge Clay Jenkins.

“That means if your child’s in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have COVID and need an ICU bed, we don’t have one,” Jenkins explained. “Your child will wait for another child to die.

In the news today: An internal CDC document about the delta variant of the coronavirus grimly declares “the war has changed”; there may be a glimmer of hope yet for a voting-rights workaround to the filibuster, with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia playing a central role in revising the bill; Attorney General Merrick Garland is threatening to sue Texas Gov.

A steady stream of polls from multiple outlets have shown that a shocking number of Republican voters believe the election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump, and/or that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president.

But new Daily Kos/Civiqs polling finds an even more eye-popping number: 80% of GOP voters “agree with former President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

After weeks of sometimes depressing, sometimes infuriating headlines about intransigent vaccine hesitancy in mostly red areas of the country, health officials appear to be making some headway with the unvaccinated even as case counts surge and some hospitals begin to reach a breaking point.

Donald Trump not only won Illinois’s 14th congressional district twice, but its Democratic representative, Lauren Underwood, narrowly won reelection last year in a nail-biter after flipping the district blue in 2018.

The district’s competitive nature and right-of-center lean is what made President Joe Biden’s visit there Wednesday so notable.

Pennsylvania Republicans want to change the state’s voting laws, but they have one major hurdle: Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.

So instead of mounting a legislative campaign that could sway some of their Democratic colleagues and potentially avoid Wolf’s veto pen, they’re resorting to what has traditionally been a little-used tactic to amend the state constitution.

“We have a deal,” President Joe Biden announced Thursday, celebrating the framework of a bipartisan infrastructure deal worth $1.2 trillion, only about $580 billion of which would be new spending.

“They have my word, I’ll stick with what they’ve proposed,” Biden said, flanked by a core group of Senate Democrats and Republicans. “And they’ve given me their word as well. Where I come from, that’s good enough for me.

Last year, Senate Republicans were already feeling so desperate about their upcoming midterm prospects that they rushed to wish Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa a speedy and full recovery from COVID-19 so that he could run for reelection in 2022. The power of incumbency is a huge advantage for any politician, and Republicans were clinging to the idea of sending Grassley—who will be 89 when the ’22 general election rolls around—back to the upper chamber for another six-year term.

More than six months after Donald Trump became the certified loser of 2020, his lies about that loss continue to haunt state election workers across the country. A new Reuters report reveals that everyone from statewide elected officials down to local election workers and their family members continue to live under the threat of violence, and even death.

In the two states with the closest outcomes in the 2020 election and where secretaries of state held the line against efforts to overturn the results, Republican lawmakers have made brazen power grabs that would tie the hands of those same elected officials in future elections.

Georgia GOP lawmakers have already codified their effort into law while Republicans in Arizona are attempting to finalize a similar move, as The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out.

As House Republicans line up to purge their ranks of any potential truth tellers about Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, new reporting from the Washington Post suggests they are living a level of denial that exceeds mere strategic choice about how to retake the majority next year.

Not only are House GOP leaders ousting their No. 3, Rep.

One hundred days into Joe Biden’s presidency, everyone living in a reality-based world is getting the sense that the 46th president of the United States might be on the way to making history. 

The potential for Biden to enact historic change has been fueled by a confluence of factors, including a catastrophic pandemic that has arguably become the nation’s deadliest public health crisis in a century and has devastated the economy in the process.

A Gallup tracking poll found that consumer confidence in the nation’s economy was a net positive in April—+2 points to be exact—for the first time since Donald Trump declared a national emergency in early March 2020.

After the brief national lockdown, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index dropped to -32 in early April 2020 and has been climbing out of a hole ever since. The latest survey was conducted April 1 to April 21.

John Boehner served as GOP House speaker from 2011 through late 2015, when he left Washington, D.C. altogether. Importantly to him, that was before Donald Trump had finished engineering his takeover of the Republican Party.

“That was fine by me because I’m not sure I belonged to the Republican Party he created,” Boehner writes in his soon-to-be released book, “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” according to The Washington Post.

When progressive activist Melissa Byrne wanted to push President-elect Joe Biden on cancelling student debt, she bought full-page ads in the print edition of Delaware’s The News Journal, which was delivered daily to Biden’s home during the transition.   

“Good Morning President-elect Biden,” the ad began in giant bold type.