Category: Congress

UPDATE: GOP’s Dan Bishop Wins Special Election in North Carolina’s 9th District

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UPDATE 11:25 p.m. ET: In addition to Bishop’s win in the Ninth District, the GOP also picked up a victory in a special election in the Third District, where Republican Greg Murphy beat Democrat Allen Thomas by 19 points, 59%-40%. What went wrong for Democrats? As the Daily Caller notes: “McCready came under fire after he accused Bishop of having no faith in public schools, however, the North Carolina Democrat sends his children to an $18,000 a year private school.” Oops.

When early polls showed Bishop trailing, the media began calling the Ninth District a “bellwether” of prospects for the 2020 election, but now we can expect them to forget NC-9 ever happened. Except of course, Trump will just rubbing salt in their wounds:

UPDATE 10:20 p.m. ET: Republican Dan Bishop has apparently won the 9th District special election in North Carolina. With all but two precincts reporting, Bishop has a margin of more than 4,000 votes over Democrat Dan McCready. With 99% of precincts (208 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ………. 94,984 ….. 50.81%
Dan McReady ……. 90,824 ….. 48.59%

UPDATE 10:05 p.m. ET: With 92% of precincts (193 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ……. 89,941 ….. 50.78%%
Dan McReady ………….. 86,120 ….. 48.62%

With only 17 precincts still to be counted, and Bishop leading by nearly 4,000 votes, this is starting to look like a win for the Republican.

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: With 67% of precincts (140 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ……. 72,682 ….. 50.27%
Dan McCready ………….. 71,082 ….. 49.16%

Still too close to call, but encouraging.

UPDATE 9:15 p.m. ET: Bishop takes the lead with 58% of precincts (122 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ………….. 66,956 ….. 50.05%
Dan McCready ……. 66,074 ….. 49.39%

UPDATE 9:10 p.m. ET: With 55% of precincts (115 of 210) reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 65,673 ….. 49.92%
Dan Bishop ………….. 65,138 ….. 49.51%

OK, now we have legitimate good news. McReady’s lead is now barely 500 points. Bishop might pull this out yet. Cross your fingers.

UPDATE 9 p.m. ET: With 40% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 56,921 ….. 50.39%
Dan Bishop ………….. 55,415 ….. 49.05%

You see that Bishop is closing the gap, but without knowing which precincts are still unreported, we don’t know if this trend will continue.

UPDATE 8:20 p.m. ET: With 14% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 47,439 ….. 54.15%
Dan Bishop ………….. 39,727 ….. 45.35%

I’m informed that this reflects a surge of absentee ballots being reported from precincts in urban Mecklenburg County.

UPDATE 8 p.m. ET: With 3% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……… 23,526 ….. 50.44%
Dan Bishop ………….. 22,895 ….. 49.09%

PREVIOUSLY (7:32 p.m. ET)

Polls closed at 7:30 p.m. ET in North Carolina’s 9th District special election, where Republican Dan Bishop is facing Democrat Dan McReady. Trump carried the district by double digits in 2016, and he held a giant rally Monday night in Fayetteville, but Republican leaders were lowering expectations today in what is regarded as a toss-up.



 

Mueller Hearing a Democrat Debacle

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Whoever was responsible for the decision to hold today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing — and I suppose that must be the committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) — is an idiot. If the goal of Democrats in having former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testify was to gin up support for impeaching President Trump, they failed. Badly.

As the New York Post said, the hearing “was a total waste of time”:

Mueller made it clear long in advance that he didn’t want to testify, and wouldn’t talk about anything except what was in his report. He even got the Justice Department to issue a guidance instructing him to keep to his preferred limits.
That left committee Democrats using their time to read bits of the report, then ask the witness, That’s in the report, right?
Mueller would then say Yes or Let me check or Can you repeat the question?
Though he is a hugely accomplished public servant, he was a spectacularly unimpressive witness, often coming off as unfamiliar with his own report or otherwise confused.

Many observers were left with the impression that Mueller must have only been a figurehead in the two-year investigation of Russian “collusion,” and that the report issued under his name was entirely the work of the Democrat attorneys on the Special Counsel’s staff. Attempts by Republican committee members to get Mueller to address evidence related to Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier went nowhere, as Mueller either disclaimed any knowledge of this evidence — despite it being included in his report — or asserted that he could not comment because he didn’t want to interfere with ongoing investigations.

Mueller’s befuddled demeanor seemed to confirm the suspicions of a “senior Democrat” — a former Obama administration official — that, at age 74, the former Special Counsel has become senile.

Democrats need to take a long, hard look at the man whose idea it was to stage this embarrassing spectacle. Who is Jerrold Nadler and is he competent enough to chair the Judiciary Committee?

 

Nadler, 72, has been in Congress since 1992 without accomplishing anything other than occupying a safe seat from a district that has not been represented by a Republican in more than 100 years. He is a short, fat, elderly symbol of the political decline of New York. The stagnating state lost two congressional districts after the 2010 Census, and the subsequent redistricting illustrated the priorities of the Democrats who control New York’s corrupt legislature. They screwed over Rep. Ed Towns, a black Democrat who had previously represented the Brooklyn-based 10th District, in a gerrymander that redrew the district to include the heavily Jewish West Side of Manhattan, which is only connected to a random blob of Brooklyn by the I-478 tunnel under the East River. Towns was forced into retirement to ensure a seat for Nadler, who had previously represented the 8th District. If the so-called “Justice Democrats” need a target for their next left-wing primary challenge, they should aim at Nadler’s old fat ass. Considering how much anti-Semitism now motivates the Left, it shouldn’t be hard for Democrats to recruit a Jew-hating “woman of color” to take out Nadler.



 

Isn’t She Adorable?

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My buddy Benny Johnson, who I’ve known since 2007, posted this photo of himself with Candace Owens at Reagan National Airport. According to Benny, he was running to catch a flight when he bumped into Owens, fresh from her recent congressional testimony, wearing a MAGA hat and carrying “a sizable amount of Chic-fil-A.”

When I shared that on my Facebook page, a friend commented, “She is such a doll,” and indeed, she is. You may recall the story of how it was Owens became a conservative. She was a liberal, but during the #GamerGate controversy, she was “doxxed” by the Left, and had a road-to-Damascus awakening: “I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.”

In this, she reminds me of Michelle Malkin. When she was a student at Oberlin College, Malkin became an object of left-wing scorn when she dared to question the school’s “diversity” agenda, and that experience — being called all the awful things the Left calls people who don’t “know their place” in the official victimhood hierarchy — galvanized her.

Going back at least as far as Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist who exposed Alger Hiss, some of the fiercest conservatives have been former leftists who got disgusted by the hatefulness and dishonesty of the Left. What happened when Owens testified Tuesday was astonishing:

Tensions at a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing on online hate speech boiled over on Tuesday, when conservative commentator Candace Owens accused Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., of distorting her comments on Hitler so flagrantly for the sake of a smear that he must “believe black people are stupid.”
“In congressional hearings, the minority party gets to select its own witnesses,” Lieu began. “Of all the people the Republicans could’ve selected, they picked Candace Owens. I don’t know Miss Owens; I’m not going to characterize her; I’m going to let her own words talk.”
Lieu then produced a cellphone and played a short clip of Owens’ previous remarks at a conference in December, which were widely circulated in February: “I actually don’t have any problem with the word ‘nationalism.’ I think the defintion gets poisoned by elites that want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want. When we say ‘nationalism,’ the first thing people think about — at least in America — is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK then, fine. The problem is, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everyone to be German. …”

Now, let me say here: Owens is exactly correct. No one could have criticized Hitler if his “nationalism” had consisted solely of attempting to restore Germany’s confidence in the wake of its World War I defeat and the subsequent sufferings under the punitive measures of the Versailles treaty. By the early 1930s, many in the West were willing to heed the argument that Germany had suffered enough and, having not read Mein Kampf nor realizing how serious Hitler was about his hatred of the Jews, many failed to perceive the danger in his brand of “nationalism.” This historical context is relevant to what Owens was saying in the audio clip — she obviously is not pro-Hitler — and is also relevant to the dishonesty of the Left’s propaganda about “white nationalism.”

As Victor Davis Hanson said Wednesday on Tucker Carlson, this propaganda is simply about the “demonization of Trump supporters.” While there certainly are people who might be willing to commit criminal violence in pursuit of “white nationalism” (however that term is defined), the Left is using this term as a smear, implying that all 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump are crypto-Nazis. With that background, we return to the House hearing Tuesday:

Lieu then asked committee witness Eileen Hershenov: “When people try to legitimize Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?”
But Owens soon made clear she felt Lieu had intentionally misrepresented her views to drive a false narrative not just against Owens, but also Trump and Republicans in general.
“I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety,” Owens said.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-NY., interrupted, telling Owens, “It is not proper to refer disparagingly to a member of the committee. The witness will not do that again.”
After clarifying that she had not, in fact, called Lieu stupid, Owens continued: “As I said, he is assuming that black people will not go and pursue the full two-hour clip. He purposefully cut off — and you didn’t hear the question that was asked of me. He’s trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany, when in fact the question that was presented to me was pertaining to whether I believed in nationalism, and that nationalism was bad.”
As Owens went on, Lieu tapped his hands together silently.
“And what I responded is that I do not believe we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist,” Owens said. “He was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac that killed his own people. A nationalist would not kill their own people. … That was unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it.”
Owens concluded: “By the way, I would like to also add that I work for Prager University, which is run by an orthodox Jew. Not a single Democrat showed up to the embassy opening in Jerusalem. I sat on a plane for 18 hours to make sure I was there. I am deeply offended by the insinuation of revealing that clip without the question that was asked of me.”
Turning to her 75-year old grandfather seated behind her, Owens remarked, “My grandfather grew up on a sharecropping farm in the segregated South. He grew up in an America where words like ‘racism’ and ‘white nationalism’ held real meaning.”

 

Her poise in defending herself won Owens millions of new admirers — the C-SPAN clip set a new record (4.5 million views on Twitter in 24 hours) for the cable network. There are some people who’ve just got it — they were born to be TV stars — and she’s one of them. What she’s got, America loves, and I expect her to be a powerful force in coming years.



 

Left-Wing Democrats: ‘If Hating Israel Is Wrong, We Don’t Want to Be Right’

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That tweet by Colorado leftist Saira Rao perfectly encapsulates the problems of the new Democrat majority in the House. Nancy Pelosi wanted to pass a resolution — obviously aimed at Ilhan Omar — condemning anti-Semitism. But this has failed, because the Left has welcomed Jew-haters into their ranks, and anti-Semitism is particularly prevalent among radical “women of color” (WOC, in social-justice shorthand) like Linda Sarsour. On elite university campuses now, the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement unites radical students and, not incidentally, serves as a Trojan Horse for anti-white racism. What is meant, after all, by BDS rhetoric condemning Israel as an “apartheid state”? Conservative Jews like David Horowitz and William Jacobson have been warning about this tendency for years. When you see Nancy Pelosi linked to David Duke (!!!) in left-wing rhetoric, you see how serious this threat is in Democrat politics.

 

Ilhan Omar keeps doubling down, and Pelosi is trapped:

Democrats have had the majority in the House of Representatives for just two months, but they’ve already been sidetracked by an ugly divide over anti-Semitism and other bigotry.
For weeks, tensions on Capitol Hill have been rising over remarks from freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota questioning the allegiance of Israel supporters in Congress. Her comments drew condemnation from many of her fellow Democrats and prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California to push for a vote on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Rather than putting the issue behind them, however, the move has prolonged the controversy and put a spotlight on divisions inside the party around a highly sensitive issue.
The resolution came after Omar criticized politicians by using anti-Semitic tropes, prompting condemnation from several Jewish Democratic lawmakers and an apology from Omar last month. But Omar later dug in when she suggested pro-Israel interests pushed members of Congress to pledge allegiance to a “foreign country,” drawing further outrage from her colleagues.
Pelosi had a choice: She could issue piecemeal condemnations and hope the issue disappeared, or nip it in the bud with a strong resolution staking out the House’s stance on anti-Semitism. She chose the latter but didn’t count on the resistance from allies of Omar. After an ugly scrum broke out on Wednesday behind closed doors, the vote was tabled. Leadership is now rewriting the resolution to condemn all hate, not just anti-Semitism.
Members from both the Congressional Black Caucus and the younger, far-left wing of the party were furious about the leadership’s gambit. They questioned singling out Omar for condemnation. What about bigotry from Republicans, including President Donald Trump? And why were Democrats so focused on a woman of color, one of just two Muslims in Congress? Could the added scrutiny even put Omar in danger?
“Like some of my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, I am concerned that the spotlight being put on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk,” California Sen. Kamala Harris told reporters Wednesday. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — who like Harris are running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — also voiced their support for Omar.
Others on the left asked why Democrats were condemning only bigotry against Jews. “We think that hate and racism in our country is growing. American Jewish, LGBTQ, Latino, immigrant, Muslim — it is something that needs to be looked at as a whole instead of just trying to come up with a hierarchy of hurt and pain,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, another freshman Democrat and the other Muslim in Congress, told CNN on Wednesday.

So, Democrats can’t condemn anti-Semitism because, without anti-Semitism, they’d lose “the younger, far-left wing of the party” — the Jew-haters who support Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

In case I haven’t reminded you lately, some of my cousins are Jewish Democrats. They despise Donald Trump, but I wonder: How long will they be able to maintain their anti-Trump stance if Pelosi fails to suppress the Jew-haters in her coalition? You can go back as far as the 1960s and see how this poisonous weed has grown on the Left.

Anti-Israel politics functioned as a proxy for anti-Semitism among “Black Power” radicals, and anti-Semitism was a proxy for anti-white racism. In 1996, I interviewed a former activist for SNCC who bemoaned how “Stokely Carmichael and that crowd ran the white people out of the movement” circa 1966. That tendency flourished again in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and, while it seemed to fade during the Obama years, it continued growing with the BDS movement on college campuses. Now, with Trump in the White House and Democrats controlling the House, Pelosi finds herself yoked to this radicalism and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for her to disentangle herself from the anti-Israel/anti-white sentiment that flourishes among “the younger, far-left wing of the party.”

“All is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .”


 

Cohen to Testify Before Congress

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Here’s the headline stack on top of the Drudge Report:

Cohen to Testify That Trump Engaged in Criminal Conduct While in Office... 
Plans to Provide Evidence... 
Will describe president's 'lies, racism and cheating as private businessman'... 
New details? 
Echoes of Watergate...
Congressman 'threatens' Cohen over 'girlfriends'...
RNC: Have fun in prison!
Curtain rises on 3 days of drama...
VIEWING GUIDE... 
CONGRESS CALLS WITNESS CONVICTED OF LYING TO CONGRESS... 

Also these two banners:

RATFEST ON CAP HILL

COHEN READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP

Well, I don’t what Cohen will say or what impact it will have.

My expectation is a big media noise, with little result.

 

No ‘Wave’ for Democrats; GOP Gains in Senate; Some Races Still ‘Too Close to Call’

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Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but their gains were not enough to called a “wave,” and Republicans managed to expand their Senate majority, while also winning key gubernatorial races. The anti-Trump backlash in the House was smaller than the anti-Obama backlash of 2010, when Republicans gained a whopping 63 House seats in the “Tea Party” election.

As my friend John Hoge points out, #MeToo was a loser — Democrat senators who voted against Justice Brett Kavanaugh were defeated in Indiana, where Mike Braun beat Joe Donnelly, and Missouri, where Josh Hawley beat Claire McCaskill. The only Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh, Joe Manchin, survived in West Virginia.

Three “rock star” candidates for Democrats — Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Stacey Abrams in Georgia — all went down to defeat, although Brian Kemp’s margin in the Georgia gubernatorial elections was close enough that some networks still considered the race “too close to call” as of Wednesday morning. In Florida, Republican Rick Scott’s victory over Sen. Bill Nelson was another slender win rated “too close to call” by the networks. Out west, Republicans lost the Nevada Senate seat of Dean Heller, but were leading in Arizona and Montana, both still rated “too close to call.”

UPDATE: Among Tuesday’s winners was Montana Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte who, uh, body-slammed his Democrat opponent by a margin of about 37,000 votes.

UPDATE II: One of the House races I had called attention to was Texas 23, where Democrats nominated a Filipino-American lesbian against Rep. Will Hurd, the only black member of the Texas Republican delegation. It appears Hurd survived that challenge by a margin of 700 votes. Democrats flipped two Texas House seats, defeating Pete Sessions in the 32nd District and John Culberson in the 7th District.

UPDATE III: Two of the early indicators that Tuesday would not be a “wave” election for Democrats came in Virginia 5 and Florida 18.

In the Virginia race, Democrats nominated far-left journalist Leslie Cockburn (her father-in-law was literally a Stalinist) in a largely rural district where the incumbent Republican had retired, citing personal problems with alcoholism. Cockburn’s daughter is actress Olivia Wilde, and the Democrat got a lot of Hollywood money. Unfortunately for the Hollywood Commies, Republicans nominated businessman Denver Riggelman, and he won by about 20,000 votes.

In Florida, incumbent Republican Rep. Brian Mast faced a challenge from former Obama administration staffer Lauren Baer, a lesbian who is married to a Federal Election Commission lawyer, Emily Meyers. Between them, Baer and Meyers have four Ivy League degrees (Harvard, Yale Law, Brown and Columbia Law). “It’s a breakthrough race for our community,” one Florida gay activist gushed in a September interview, calling Baer “one of the most exciting and qualified candidates running for Congress in Florida this year.” Democrats used to be the “party of the working man,” but now they’re the party of Ivy League lesbians. Florida voters said, “Hell, no.” Mast was re-elected by a 30,000-vote margin.

By the way, I wish to apologize to readers for the lack of blogging on Tuesday. What happened was this: In July, my 17-year-old son got a speeding ticket in southern Virginia, while he and a friend were coming back from a trip to North Carolina. He had originally been scheduled for an October court date, but that conflicted with one of his soccer games, so he rescheduled it for November, without noticing that the date was Election Day, and I had to accompany him to court.

So I thought, OK, we’re going to drive four hours for this early-morning court appearance, and then turn around drive back in time for me to blog the election. However, the plan was changed and I didn’t realize it until we were leaving out Tuesday morning with one of my older sons driving. The trip was extended so that we could drive down to Fort Bragg, hang out with my Army son and his wife, then bring back his wife and new baby for a visit. So it was about 7 p.m. before we got on the road, and past 2 a.m. before we got back home. Because I hadn’t anticipated this, I’d left my laptop at the house, and the only way I could follow the results Tuesday night was on my phone.

As to my teenage son’s ticket, the judge liked him, and agreed to continue the case for six months. If my son goes without any further driving infractions between now and May, the charges will be dropped. Otherwise, I’ll be the one going to prison, because I’ll strangle the boy. Make me miss an Election Day? That’s justifiable homicide!



 

Good News and Bad News

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The bad news is that I failed to win the MegaMillions jackpot last night, so my plan to become a billionaire philanthropist has been delayed, at least. The good news is there is now a website, StopSpeakerPelosi.com, where you can give money directly to help the most crucial 23 endangered House Republicans. This is a much-needed tool to help turn back the “blue wave,” and I endorse it enthusiastically. Take a look at the Real Clear Politics map of the key House races, and you realize that control of Congress will likely come down to a comparative handful of seats on Election Day. If you’re living in one of the districts that is a key battleground, obviously your vote will be crucial, but what if you’re living in a safe district? You can check with your county or state Republican Party to find out how to volunteer, but the main thing is money. Democrats this year are wallowing in cash like nobody’s ever seen.

The situation in Georgia is typical of what we’re seeing this year. Trump beat Hillary 50-46 in Georgia two years ago, but this year Democrats nominated a far-left candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams, who really shouldn’t stand a chance against the Republican, Brian Kemp. However, money is like magic for moonbats: “George Soros has given $1.25 million to Abrams’ political action committee, GeorgiaNEXT, since 2014. He also donated $1 million to the Georgia Democratic Party this year to support her campaign for governor.” And that means trouble up and down the ticket for every Republican candidate in the state, as Democrats are blanketing the airwaves with anti-GOP propaganda.

This is a nerve-jangling time to care about politics:

Monday morning, I made the mistake of switching the TV to CNN. As a journalist, sometimes I like to watch CNN just to see what’s happening in that alternative universe where a scion of the Cuomo dynasty is regarded as an impartial arbiter of news. But Monday morning was a bad time to check on CNN, because they were touting a new poll showing Democrat Andrew Gillum leading by 12 points in the Florida gubernatorial campaign.
“Twelve points!” I yelled, jumping off the sofa and heading upstairs to get a cup of coffee, wondering if the world had tilted off its axis overnight, grumbling to myself about this inexplicable poll number. “How the hell could that left-wing bozo be leading by 12 points? Have the people of Florida lost their minds?”
My panic over the Florida governor’s race was eventually resolved. After getting a cup of coffee and checking out Real Clear Politics, I learned that the CNN poll was badly out of line with other recent polls in the state. An examination of CNN’s sample numbers showed a preposterously high percentage of respondents (39%) identified as independent, and when I showed the CNN numbers to a friend in the polling business, he agreed: “No way the independents are that high.”
Still, even if the CNN poll was garbage, Gillum is surprisingly competitive in Florida, running slightly ahead of Republican Ron DeSantis in most polls, and this is cause for concern not only for Florida residents, but for GOP voters nationwide. The Democrats are pouring millions upon millions of dollars into the midterm campaign and, as the situation in Florida shows, Republicans are in the fight of their lives to stop the dreaded “blue wave.” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.



 

 

Democrats Put Down the Kool-Aid, Realize ‘Blue Wave’ Might Not Happen

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Two months ago, I wrote a story about Gina Ortiz Jones, the Democrat challenger to Texas Rep. Will Hurd, with this headline:

Democrats Nominate Pro-Abortion
Lesbian Feminist for Congress in Texas

In that item, I wrote:

She has been endorsed by all the usual suspects of left-wing extremism, including pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, pro-homosexual groups like Equality PAC, Human Rights Campaign and the LGBT Victory Fund, and the anti-Israel JStreetPAC, as well as the Feminist Majority, People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO. Her agenda includes socialized medicine, taxpayer funding for abortion, gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, and every other issue you might expect from someone who attended elite Boston University.

It seemed to me unlikely that this largely rural Texas district would elect someone like that to Congress, if they knew the truth about her. But this is the case in district after district all across America this year: Democrats are running extremist candidates who are attempting to hide their radical agenda behind a façade of “moderate” rhetoric, hoping to ride an anti-Trump “Blue Wave” into Congress. If Americans are not paying close attention, they might be startled when they wake up Nov. 7 and discover that the House of Representatives has been taken over by a left-wing freak show. Fortunately, it seems the recent Kavanaugh confirmation circus has alerted the public to this danger, and in a widely-cited Politico article about diminishing prospects for a “Blue Wave,” I was happy to spot this passage:

Democrats have pulled money out of several districts that should be competitive, indicating that Republicans have solidified their leads in the closing days of the campaign. In the past two days, Democrats have retreated from an open seat in Minnesota where Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan is retiring and GOP recruit Pete Stauber is ahead in internal GOP polling.
Democrats are also taking money from the race to unseat GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who, Republicans say, has a healthy lead. That came just days after Democrats pulled out of Hispanic-populated districts represented by Rep. David Valadao in central California and Rep. Will Hurd along the Texas border. And they’ve withdrawn $800,000 in planned ads from Rep. Vern Buchanan’s Florida district, where the Democratic challenger, David Shapiro, trails the incumbent.
Democrats should have had “these seats put away by now, and they don’t,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an interview. “I feel like they’ve hit a ceiling and held there — and we’re coming back.”

If the Democrats have actually surrendered their challenge to Will Hurd — in a majority-Hispanic district that is one of the most competitive in the country — there is still hope that Republicans can keep the House speaker’s gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hand:

Two weeks ago, Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman predicted Democrats could pick up 30 to 40 seats; now he puts the range at 25 to 35. Wasserman estimated that Republicans have a 30 percent chance of keeping the majority.

A 30 percent chance? The odds are only 2.3-to-1 against us? That’s not nearly as bad as the odds against Trump winning in 2016, which he did.

Speaking of President Trump, tonight he’ll be at a rally in Mesa, Arizona. Reports indicate a capacity crowd and this might drive a stake through the heart of Kyrsten Sinema, the radical Democrat who’s running for Senate in Arizona. There are also two crucial House races in Arizona: Republican Wendy Rogers, a retired Air Force pilot, is challenging Democrat Rep. Tom O’Halleran in AZ-1, a district Trump won; and Republican Lea Marquez Peterson is fighting to hold onto the AZ-2 seat being vacated by Rep. Martha McSally, who’s running for Senate.