Can the Democrats make the formerly Republican slogan “jobs, not mobs” their midterm mantra?
They just might get away with it. In politics, jiujitsu is fair play – and these days Republicans are less the party of “law and order” and more the party that denies the outcomes of democratic elections and attacks the US Capitol.
On Thursday night, President Joe Biden launched a frontal assault on Donald Trump and the right’s embrace of creeping authoritarianism. Twelve hours later, the government reported 315,000 new jobs added in August and stunning prime-age labor force participation.
Along the way, Trump said he would “very, very seriously” consider January 6 pardons if re-elected, and bragged of giving financial assistance to some of the insurrectionists. As each day passes, the Republican nexus to law, order and democracy grows more tenuous. Meanwhile, the summer’s special elections and the latest polls portray the Democrats with the wind in their sails.
Alaska announced the election of Democrat Mary Peltola to Congress and the defeat of Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee. A week earlier, a Democrat pulled off an upset for a vacant House seat in rural upstate New York.
The supreme court’s evisceration of abortion and privacy rights, a sharp drop in gasoline prices, and Trump’s latest legal drama have resurrected Biden’s ratings and the Democrats’ chances. The latest Quinnipiac poll gives them a four-point edge on the generic ballot, placing Nancy Pelosi within striking distance of retaining control of the speaker’s gavel.
A separate Wall Street Journal poll showed Democrats now leading among independents.
Earlier this year, “Republicans were cruising, and Democrats were having a hard time,” Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster told the Journal. “It’s almost like the abortion issue came along and was kind of like a defibrillator to Democrats.”
As if to prove his point, Republicans are now scrapping references online to Trump and abortion. Blake Masters, the Republican Senate challenger in Arizona, removed language from his website in which he described himself as “100% pro-life”.
For the record, Masters garnered Trump’s endorsement during the Republican primary and a bucketful of bucks from Peter Thiel. Thiel once publicly lamented extending voting rights to women and minorities.
“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” he wrote in 2009.
In a similarly benighted spirit, Herschel Walker, another Trump favorite, branded inflation a women’s issue. “They’ve got to buy groceries,” Walker, a Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, said. On top of his Heisman trophy and football rushing records, Walker holds a record of alleged domestic violence.
Also count on Trump’s mishandling of top secret and classified documents to grab headlines in the run-up to election day. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican would-be Senate majority leader and would-be House speaker, respectively, cannot be happy.
According to the inventory filed with the court, the FBI search netted dozens of empty folders with “Classified” banners, together with seven documents marked “Top Secret”. Whether Trump retained copies of the President’s Daily Briefing, one of the crown jewels of the intelligence community, is an active and open question too.
To be sure, Trump caught a break on Labor Day. A federal judge granted his motion to appoint a special master to weigh claims of executive and attorney-client privilege. The court also enjoined prosecutors from proceeding with their review of documents.
At the same time, the court made clear that it would not interfere with the assessment being conducted by the director of national intelligence. An appeal by the government is likely – as is ensuing delay.
And then there is Newt Gingrich. He’s back. The disgraced former House speaker may have played an outsized but behind-the-scenes role in Trump’s efforts to cling to power, according to the January 6 committee.
“Some of the information we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisers to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election,” Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman, wrote Gingrich.
Once upon a time, Gingrich, a former Georgia congressman, was in the line of presidential succession, right behind vice-president Al Gore. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the Gingrich 2012 campaign remains more than $4.6m in debt. As Business Insider put it, “No presidential campaign from any election cycle owes creditors more money.”
“Don’t be measuring the drapes,” Representative Tom Emmer, head of the national Republican campaign committee, recently advised colleagues. “This isn’t the typical midterm that we’re talking about.”
Lloyd Green served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
