We lost two of three at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium but came back in the frozen wasteland of Milwaukee County Stadium to win two out of three, the final game being decided by a six-run explosion in the 13th inning to give Charlie Hough his first win in relief. Hopefully I’ll get home early enough to play the Giants on Tuesday and not have to pull over somewhere between Wendover and Tonopah. After a week and a half of play, we’re 4-5, two games ahead of the last-place A’s. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Jack Ciattarelli (left) and Mikie Sherrill (right)
Far be it from me to predict that Republicans are on the verge of winning this year’s gubernatorial election in New Jersey, but (a) Jack Ciattarelli came pretty close to knocking off incumbent Phil Murphy four years ago, and (b) with Murphy term-limited, Democrats nominated Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who hasn’t exactly been running away with it. Ever since an Emerson College poll last month showed the New Jersey race to be a dead heat, Democrats have been freaking out about it.
When you spend as much time around Democratic Party people as I do, you find that everybody is worried about something. The specter of 2024, and the reign of Trump terror that has followed, has the party on edge. The polls are mostly in Democrats’ favor, but, they worry, what are we not seeing? What are we not hearing? They’re worried they’ve lost their mojo in the face of MAGA.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the governor’s race in New Jersey. Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democrats’ great-on-paper centrist nominee, is ahead in the polls but still being second-guessed.
I felt this skittishness this for myself when I attended a “No Kings” rally last weekend in the blue town of Montclair. It’s a community full of commuters but also the home of Ms. Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who flipped her reddish district in 2018. Her opponent is the suspiciously well-tanned Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who is running for governor for the third time in a row.
Ms. Sherrill is ahead in the polls, but that doesn’t quiet the doubters. The pollster G. Elliott Morris of Fifty Plus One put it best when he texted me, “It would be surprising if Ciattarelli won, but bigger upsets have happened before.”
New Jersey is a Rorschach test for a party in full freakout. . . .
While I do not hold G. Elliott Morris in high regard (and he certainly has no regard for me), his summary of the New Jersey campaign is probably pretty accurate: Yes, a win for Ciattarelli would be considered an upset, but it’s not impossible. Not a single poll has shown Ciattarelli actually leading the race, and this is a state where Kamala Harris won by a six-point margin last year. If we were wagering, and I was willing to bet Sherrill wins by a three-point spread — in other words, half the margin Kamala won by in New Jersey — would you bet against me?
You see that, as a matter of probability, a Republican win in New Jersey would be surprising, as Morris says, but the fact that Democrats are even worried about it is a very good sign for Republicans. Molly Jong-Fast speaks of “the reign of Trump terror,” and if it were widely regarded as such, you’d expect the Democratic candidate in a blue state like New Jersey to have a cake walk — Mikie Sherrill on her way to winning by a double-digit margin — but that’s not happening, is it?
One of the biggest problems facing Mikie Sherrill’s bid for governor may have nothing to do with Mikie Sherrill and everything to do with a certain pundit-class miasma about the supposed unelectability of women. After all, this is a party that has run two supercompetent women for president on its ticket, and they both lost against Mr. Trump.
“Miasma,” ma’am? Hunting around for a fancy substitute for “attitude” or “prejudice,” what on earth would lead you to miasma?
Awkward word choices aside, what color is the sky in your universe, where a candidate’s “biggest problem” is the attitude of pundits?
The pundit class weighed in on this topic:
What is the evidence that Kamala Harris in particular was "supercompetent"?
I think the true problem here is that identity-brain is making it hard for Democrats to think about which female (and nonwhite) politicians are actually good. https://t.co/2Xo2z5WJ2Fpic.twitter.com/cMF0wCTfcs
"One of the biggest problems facing Mikie Sherrill’s bid for governor may have nothing to do with Mikie Sherrill and everything to do with a certain pundit-class miasma about the supposed unelectability of women." How is the miasma about electability supposed to cost votes?
The whole thing isn't really an argument, it's just a set of urges — everyone's sexist and failing our female candidates, yet somehow also being female is not an electoral disadvantage
Do you see what I mean about the New Jersey situation being a very good sign for Republicans? Whether or not Ciattarelli scores an upset victory, the strength of his campaign has backed Democrats into a corner where they’re second-guessing themselves and arguing with each other about tactics and strategy. And the credit for this goes to none other than Donald J. Trump, who defeated both of those “supercompetent women” and thereby demonstrated that identity politics can be a liability.
If somehow Ciattarelli wins this thing, I’ll give a lot of credit to Scott Presler, who’s been doing his ground-game magic in New Jersey. Presler’s work in Pennsylvania last year played a key role in helping Trump win there, and knocking off the allegedly “supercompetent” Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey would demonstrate his effectiveness again.
Google Maps Navigation can eat my entire ass for trying to get me to North Platte by every obscure county road in the northern part of Nebraska before I shut it off, hauled out the atlas, and barely made it to Grand Island in time to take two games out of three from Pete’s Brewers.
Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Pretty soon they’ll be Maveriks, but it won’t be the same.
I was pretty busy the last couple of evenings catching up with friends I hadn’t seen in 10+ years. On the road home to Nevada; tonight’s linkagery comes to you from Sioux Falls. Again. Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.
Think back to mid-November 2024. President Trump had just scored a decisive victory, winning all seven “battleground” states and, unlike 2016, winning the popular vote by a margin of more than 2 million votes.
In the wake of their shattering defeat — which not only put Trump back in the White House, but left Republicans with majorities in both houses of Congress — many Democrats, and their media mouthpieces, seemed willing to admit that maybe it was time to reconsider their general approach to politics. Perhaps taxpayer-funded sex-change treatment for prison inmates and DEI quotas in the Pentagon were not a winning policy agenda, some liberals were willing to confess. For a few weeks there, in November and December, it seemed that Democrats might be on the road to recovery from their long bout with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Ah, fleeting hope! The brief prospect of a more sensible (or at least, more cautious) stance by Democrats did not last long, and they swiftly reverted to the shrieking rhetorical extremism — “Resist Orange Hitler!” — that had been their habit for more than eight years. So here we are, more than three weeks into a shutdown caused by the Democrats filibustering a spending bill in the Senate, and the No. 2 Democrat in the House can’t seem to understand why some people might be upset about it:
“Shutdowns are terrible and, of course, there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage items we have. It is an inflection point in this budget process where we have tried to get the Republicans to meet with us and prioritize the American people.”
Democrat Whip Rep. Katherine Clark: "Shutdowns are terrible. Of course there will be families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility seriously, but it is one of the few leverage times we have."
After that exploded, Katherine Clark went on CNN to try to clean up her mess, but the real problem here is that Democrats have apparently forgot that they lost the election, and elections have consequences.
Clark represents a deep-blue district (D+24) in the deep-blue state of Massachusetts. She is second-in-command of a caucus led by Hakeem Jeffries who represents a deep-blue district (also D+24) in the deep-blue state of New York. Over on the Senate side, Democrats are led by Chuck Schumer of New York (which Kamala Harris carried by a 13-point margin) with his second-in-command being Dick Durbin of Illinois (which Harris won by a margin of 11 points). None of these people are from anywhere that Republicans constitute a meaningful competition, and seem to have no regard for the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump. This is a big part of why the Democratic Party is stuck in its ranting extremist mode, shutting down the government just to thwart Orange Hitler, and clueless about what a majority of voters actually want.
Everyone is now looking toward the off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey as an indicator of what we can expect in next year’s midterms. Both states went for Harris last November — Virginia by a five-point margin and New Jersey by a six-point margin. While it would be hard to imagine a GOP victory in either state, if the Republican gubernatorial candidates in either of those states do at least as well as Trump did, it could bode well for Republicans in their bid to maintain the House majority in 2026. But that’s more than a year into the future, and we don’t know what could happen between now and then.
It is clear that Democrats have not learned their lessons from 2024, and only by repeating the lesson — beating them again and again in successive elections — can we ever hope to teach them anything.
Hope I get my main account unsuspended, or the pickings might be slim next week. This week, a fine young lass with the Grand Canyon as her backdrop. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Well, at least we won the opener. The 1974 Senators began the season on the road against the Red Sox in Fenway Park, and Jim Kaat went the distance for a 7-2 win in the opener, but neither Carl Morton nor Steve Renko could hold the BoSox bats in check in games 2 and 3, which were close losses- but a loss is still a loss. We face the Royals this Tuesday. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
