Team Biden, Democrats Throwing Everything They’ve Got At The Midterms

There’s a scene from the 1979 Al Pacino classic And Justice For All, in which Pacino’s law partner, played by Jeffrey Tambor, has lost his mind and causes a massive disturbance in a Baltimore courthouse by throwing plates from the cafeteria at people in a corridor in the building. It’s up to Pacino and a judge, played by Jack Warden, to finally subdue him.

I bring up the scene because it almost perfectly encapsulates the midterm elections just less than a month away.

The Democrats are Jay Porter, Tambor’s character. They’ve lost their minds and everything around them has begun to fall apart as a result, and for the sake of society they need to be tackled and subdued before they can do any more damage.

But the prospect of being subdued is so terrifying for them that they will literally resort to any means – throwing plates from the cafeteria, in the movie analogy – to stave off what’s necessary.

And they’re throwing lots of plates.

At Fox Business, Larry Kudlow had Joe Concha and Monica Crowley on to talk about exactly this…

She’s correct. Everything the Biden regime is doing right now is aimed at reversing the existential problem the president’s party is confronting.

That problem is the midterms, and the end of their delusions about them. Because now that we’re a month away, and the polls they’ve clung to which have shown Democrats holding on against the red wave the fundamentals of all these races clearly showed was going to happen have begun to turn, desperation has sunk in.

RealClear Politics’ congressional map is now showing 220 House races either leaning, likely or safe Republican, which means Democrats have already lost the House. RCP has 35 House seats rated as Toss-Ups, meaning they see a potential 255-180 GOP majority, which would be a 42-seat gain, before there are any major upsets in races they rate as “Lean Democrat.” There are a few of those races in which Republicans have begun to show momentum and might pull a surprise flip.

RCP has split the difference and is projecting an over-under of 24.5 seats the GOP would gain. That means their over-under of the GOP majority currently sits at 237.5.

The current trend suggests the over.

It might just be noise, but in the past week Rasmussen Reports’ generic congressional ballot poll moved three points in the GOP’s direction, from 45-44, to now 47-43. And this despite what’s beginning to be a common recognition within the polling industry that there is a large underground contingent of Republican voters who won’t answer polls but fully intend to vote – so pervasive is the distrust among conservatives in the Biden administration and the Left’s co-opting of Corporate America and Big Tech in particular that they’re afraid they’ll be put on a list if they answer a poll.

And even with that, virtually every poll shows a lot more voter enthusiasm on the Republican side than on the Democrat side. Virtually every poll also shows independent voters are caucusing with Republicans in huge numbers this year, particularly on questions about the economy, inflation, crime, the border and Biden’s job performance.

Remember something important about the generic congressional ballot – those polls aren’t taken in swing districts and states; they’re done somewhat at random geographically. And a great deal of Democrat vote is tied up in safe majority-minority urban districts where 80 percent or more of the voters will always vote Democrat. So a four-point GOP lead in a generic congressional ballot question will translate to a significantly larger gain on Election Night.

And in Senate races, a similar trend is in evidence – though there seems to be less fluidity than in the House.

RCP’s map shows 47 seats at least leaning Republican – 44 safe or not up for election this fall, plus the open Missouri seat that Eric Schmitt, the Show-Me State’s Attorney General, is running away with, and the leaning-Republican races which are favored to produce a re-elected Marco Rubio in Florida and newly-elected J.D. Vance in Ohio.

They’ve got 46 seats at least leaning Democrat. Of those, 42 are safe or not up, and then there are two more “likely Democrat” seats – Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut, who’s leading first-time GOP candidate Leora Levy by double digits, and the open seat in Vermont currently held by Pat Leahy, in which U.S. Rep. Peter Welch currently leads first-time GOP candidate Gerald Malloy by seven points (50-43) in the most recent Trafalgar Group survey.

Then there are two other seats RCP rates as “lean Democrat” – Washington, where 30-year veteran senator Patty Murray is generally seen as a double-figure leader over first-time Republican candidate Tiffany Smiley, but a Trafalgar survey two weeks ago had the race at just 49-47 for Murray, and Colorado, where unremarkable and unpopular Democrat incumbent Michael Bennet has led by five and six points in the past two Trafalgar polls (though other polling has the race closer to a 10-point margin) over GOP first-timer Joe O’Dea.

RCP has seven races rated as Toss-Ups. Of those seven, it seems safe to project that Republican incumbent Ron Johnson will hold his seat in Wisconsin against far-left Democrat Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (the RCP average has Johnson up by 2.7 points, but he’ll do better than that), and U.S. Rep. Ted Budd is likely to beat far-left Democrat Cheri Beasley in the open North Carolina seat (Budd is only ahead by 1.5 points in the RCP average, but it’s expected he’ll outperform those numbers). RCP projects both seats as GOP holds.

So that’s 49-46 with five seats in the lurch. Of those five…

• The Democrats have fired their best bullet in the Raphael Warnock/Herschel Walker race in Georgia, and while Walker was damaged it appears he wasn’t knocked out of contention. That race is still very much a tossup; only one outlier poll in the past two weeks has it as more than a three-point race for Warnock, the incumbent Democrat. Given Walker’s problems he should be far further ahead, particularly given Stacy Abrams’ utter disaster at the top of that state’s ticket. To rely on ticket-splitters to hold on is not a dependable strategy.
• Blake Masters scored a huge victory by pretty much all accounts in last week’s Arizona Senate debate over incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly, and now Masters’ underfunded campaign is beginning to catch some financial wind in its sails thanks to Donald Trump and Peter Thiel mobilizing money for him. The RCP average has the race at Kelly +4.1, but that might not be enough to hold off Masters’ surge driven as it is by strong messaging on the border and crime.
• RCP rates the Nevada race between Adam Laxalt and Democrat incumbent Catherine Cortez-Masto as a GOP pickup, owing to Laxalt’s 2.7 point advantage in the RCP polling average. He’s likely to win by more than that after the high-profile Las Vegas mass-stabbing by an illegal Guatemalan with a criminal record named Yoni Barrios, which has quite inconveniently highlighted Cortez-Masto’s open-border stupidity just in time for the election. Our guess is RCP will soon move the Nevada race to “leans GOP.”
• The momentum in the troublesome Fetterman-Oz race in Pennsylvania finally seems to be with Dr. Mehmet Oz, the first-time GOP candidate whose campaign has been fraught with mistakes and suspect messaging. Of late, though, Oz seems to be gaining traction against Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a radical leftist and stroke patient who can’t even form complete sentences or sentient thoughts – and Oz has finally settled on the runaway crime in that state as his pressure point. Which should work, because Fetterman has long been the criminal’s best friend, from wishing to decriminalize hard drugs to demanding that as many as a third of the people incarcerated in Pennsylvania be set free. RCP has the race as Fetterman +3.7, but no new polls have been released this month, and when they are we expect to see Oz take a lead.
• Finally, a race in New Hampshire between Democrat incumbent Maggie Hassan and retired general Don Bolduc is a good deal closer than anyone expected. Trafalgar has the race at only 48-45 for Hassan, and that was a poll concluded on Sept. 30. There has been no polling released that was performed this month.

Is it possible the GOP can sweep those five races? Yes. Is it likely? We would say Laxalt, Oz and Masters are more likely than not to win, with Bolduc and Walker a little less likely. But should events continue to radiate a spirit of chaos and failure on the part of the Biden administration, the wave could well wash over the full spectrum of Senate toss-up races.

This is something that, as Crowley noted, Team Biden clearly fears.

Announcing a $500 billion student loan forgiveness giveaway was a panic move. So was pardoning all federal inmates convicted of marijuana possession, which amounts to freeing drug dealers. So was last week’s selloff of 10 million more barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve after OPEC announced a coming production cut.

And so was Biden’s irresponsible talk of nuclear Armageddon at a highly-publicized fundraiser speaking appearance, clearly designed to put the country on a war footing in which voters would naturally gravitate toward stability and the party in power.

They’re throwing plates just like Tambor’s crazed character in And Justice For All. It’s up to the American people to rush and disarm them. This is what the midterms are for.