October 23, 2024

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

Don’t Be Fooled by Swing State Democrats Suddenly Attaching Themselves to Trump in a Last-Ditch Effort to Win

By Manzanita Miller

Something uncanny has been happening in contentious battleground states over the past few weeks. As polls have tightened between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, multiple Democrat senators vying for reelection have come out in sudden praise of various aspects of Trump’s economic and immigration policies. 

Mainstream pollsters are in agreement on one thing – polls are tightening as the “excitement” over Kamala Harris replacing Biden at the top of the ticket has faded. In the latest YouGov poll Harris is leading Trump by a single point across seven battleground  states: 50 percent to 49 percent.

Other polls show Trump leading in four of the battleground states, with a new Telegraph poll showing Trump ahead in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina, while he is neck and neck with Harris in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both states Biden won narrowly last time.

Let’s not forget that there is massive evidence that polls will continue to underestimate Trump’s support, especially in battleground states. In fact, if polls are off as much as they were in 2020 Trump could easily win all the battleground states and the national vote.

The very conceivable reality of a second Trump presidency is scaring swing state Democrats to the core. Over the past few weeks four prominent swing state Democrats – three U.S. Senators and a U.S. House member running for Senate – have tried to tie themselves favorably to Trump’s policies. The irony is all four Democrats voted to impeach Former President Trump twice. Why are a string of viciously anti-Trump Democrats suddenly attaching themselves to the Trump agenda three weeks out from election day? 

Americans for Limited Government President Richard Manning has a firm thesis. Manning asserted in a statement that this sudden attempt to cozy up to Trump is a strong warning sign that Harris is doing very badly in swing states, perhaps even worse in internal polling.

“My operating theory is that your opponents tell you if you are winning or losing”, Manning said. “When the Democrat Senate candidates in four swing states all are caught praising Trump or his policies in an attempt to trick people into voting for them as someone who can work with Trump – while voting to impeach him twice – you can surmise that Trump is not a dirty word with a majority of voters and that his policies are popular.”   

Polling does show – repeatedly – that Trump’s policies on the economy, trade, immigration, crime, foreign policy and much more are wildly popular, so many Democrats are simply reading the writing on the wall. Despite attempting to undermine Trump at every turn, including voting twice to impeach him based on phony claims, these spineless swing state Democrats are suddenly attaching themselves to Trump’s popular policies.

The only conclusion is that while they themselves have spent their careers feeding into the same destructive America Last agenda that has hollowed out the middle class, they can no longer get elected being “anti-Trump”.

Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania just dropped an election video that featured Trump and tried to tie himself to Trump’s efforts to levy tariffs on Chinese goods, even though Casey supported Trump’s impeachment – twice. In a highly contested battleground state like Pennsylvania, Casey is apparently attempting to align himself with Trump’s pro-working-class message that has resonated with voters, despite attempting to undermine his presidency.  

In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin dropped a similar video, boasting about getting Trump to sign a made in America bill – allegedly hinting she could work with Trump again should he return to the White House. Like Casey, Baldwin voted to impeach Former President Trump twice.

Then we have an add from Democrats in Ohio boasting that Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown “worked with Republicans” and wrote a bill that then-President Trump signed to crack down on illicit drugs at the border. So suddenly it is politically feasible for Democrats to admit there is a border crisis after four years of the Biden-Harris administration’s failed open borders agenda? Let’s not forget that Brown also voted to impeach the Former President twice.

Then there is Rep. Elissa Slotkin who is running for Senate in Michigan, Slotkin just released an add criticizing electric vehicle mandates, a sudden flip from her previous position. Slotkin said in the video, “no one should tell us what to buy, and no one is gonna mandate anything”. This recent turn of events comes after Slotkin voted against legislation to block the Biden-Harris administration’s new mandates on the sale of electric vehicles. Like her fellow Democrats in the senate, Slotkin voted to impeach Trump twice in the House.

Self-serving Democrats are simply reading the writing on the wall and attempting to attach themselves to what the people want, despite attempting to impeach him less than four years ago. Trump’s policy positions are widely popular across a range of issues, and it is no longer politically feasible to oppose his commonsense approach to immigration and the economy.

According to a recent YouGov survey, Trump leads Harris by double digits on the top three most important issues to voters – inflation, the economy, and immigration. Trump also leads Harris on six other important issues, from the Israel-Hamas war to the war in Ukraine, foreign policy in general, crime, guns and disaster response. Trump leads Harris by 12 points on inflation, nine points on the economy, and 14 points on immigration, according to the survey. He has also carved out broad leads among swing voter groups – including a 19-point lead on immigration among independents.

In the final weeks of the election, it isn’t particularly shocking to see duplicitous Democrats changing their ideology with the political tide, but what it does indicate is they would struggle to get elected in November without attempting to ride the coattails of Trump’s America First populism. It also indicates who they anticipate winning the White House.

Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/10/dont-be-fooled-by-swing-state-democrats-suddenly-attaching-themselves-to-trump-in-a-last-ditch-effort-to-win/

Cartoon: Now Hiring

By A.F. Branco

Click here for a higher level resolution version.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/10/cartoon-now-hiring/

Tom Crist: Here Are All The Radical Plans Democrats Will Ram Through Congress If They Nuke The Filibuster

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is promising that if Harris is elected president and the numbers in the House and Senate are favorable, they will eliminate the Senate filibuster for a singular altruistic purpose — to enshrine Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. They ignore polling that suggests there are other issues at the top of Americans’ daily concerns.

The putative Harris administration would try again to eliminate the filibuster just one more time to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., blocked that effort in 2021 but will not be in office in 2025. And then, depending on their whim, they might also make Puerto Rico a state. Then the District of Columbia. Then they would for sure call it quits and go back to the 60-vote rule. Well, maybe they would first take a look at passing single payer healthcare and, of course, use 51 votes to pass a noncontroversial wealth tax, stack the Supreme Court under the guise of judicial reform, gut the Second Amendment, pass broad amnesty or grant citizenship for more than 15 million people who they illegally welcomed to the country. But that’s probably it. Absolute normalcy after that.

No serious person who understands the Senate filibuster or the term “gridlock” could think for one second that a Democrat president, House, and Senate would exercise sufficient restraint to pull up short of funding their most radical pet projects and passing legislation they know could never garner 60 votes. If your ideas are too radical to garner 60 votes, just lower the bar and get what you want. Who would be the voice of reason against that — Sen. Bernie Sanders? Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer? Sen. Elizabeth Warren?

Regardless of how many times Democrat candidates tell us that they are protecting democracy, they are not doing anything of the sort. Democracy is mob rule, one more vote than the other team. The filibuster is not contained in the Constitution but instead is the logical outgrowth of the long-developed Senate rule-making process. For a bill to be filibuster-proof, it required the support of 67 senators until a rule change reduced that number to 60 in 1975. Legislative processes are not designed so one party or the other, with 51 votes, can trade radical swings in our country’s laws and policies. They are designed for the opposite result, to force legislation down the middle and away from both ideological extremes.

Our Constitution and Senate and House rules are written to compel legislators, who work for the people, to stand eye-to-eye, communicate, and compromise for the greater good. The 60 votes serve as an effective buffer against radicalism. Harris and her party have utter disdain for that rule book.

Abortion and Elections

After recognizing that the country is split on various abortion issues, Harris states that her team will simply eliminate the filibuster to win on that issue. She says so in a flippant way as though this is not controversial and would not be more broadly impactful. The reality is that most Americans favor restrictions on abortion. While it is not true that the standard U.S. Democrat voter supports unrestricted abortion up to the moment of birth, it is clear that Harris’ position on these issues is not in the mainstream and is extraordinarily far to the left. She and her team conclude that they can take such a hotly disputed issue and cram their preferences down the country’s throat — and feel no repercussions when leadership in the Senate swings the other direction.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Act will never garner 60 votes in part because it is loaded with policies that would make it easier to cheat in elections. It could garner 51 and, in doing so, would eliminate voter ID requirements nationwide and make ballot harvesting legal in 50 states. This would create the opportunity for the Democrats to legally stuff ballot boxes, go door to door to collect ballots, and for plenty of illegal votes to be counted. It would create, not eliminate, uncertainty and, worse, would turn over state authority to run elections to unelected federal bureaucrats.

Illegal Immigration

Most of the Democrat retreads in the proposed Harris administration suggest that the solution for the immigration crisis they exploded is to simply grant amnesty, or a short path to citizenship, to 20 million illegal immigrants — including the roughly 500,000 with criminal records in their home countries. Puerto Rico, half of which rejects the idea of becoming a state, would become our 51^st state. D.C. would be 52nd. This would give the Democrats four more Senate seats that, when combined with eliminating the filibuster, would render Republican Senate representation effectively meaningless. Single payer healthcare, wealth taxes, and other pet projects would bring up the rear.

Playing for Keeps

Many commentators have wrongly compared this circumstance to the Dems’ decision to eliminate the filibuster for the purpose of breaking the logjam to confirm then-President Barack Obama’s appointed federal judges. When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did that, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promised him that his rule change would come back to haunt him. The Dems confirmed dozens of Obama’s appointed judges with 51 votes. A few short years later, in the face of hypocritical screams that he was destroying democracy, McConnell used the same procedure to seat judicial appointees of then-President Donald Trump, including three Supreme Court justices the leftists loathe. What Harris is proposing today is decidedly worse.

The Dems are not promising to eliminate the filibuster to break a few ties, with the understanding that there will likely be future turnabout and their worst Republican policy nightmares will come true. This time they are playing for keeps.

If they can broadly eliminate the filibuster, buy four more senators, make millions of illegal aliens citizens with a 51-senator vote, rig our voting system processes, and rejigger the Supreme Court to create a roster of 13 mostly leftist justices, then they can entirely stop speaking to the Republican side of the aisle because they will have a permanent filibuster-proof Senate majority. And the Republicans will never have enough voters to reinstate legislative bumpers for both sides. It is not that Democrats have evaluated the likely conservative counter-offensive and determined that the risk is a good one. They perceive no risk. With all these sweeping changes, they can do whatever they want until the end of time with no practical oversight or influence of the people. The only two things holding them back are a Harris victory in November and a conscience they sorely lack. We will be a functional leftist autocracy.

Our country has run thus far on the concept that we the people elect our lawmakers to represent us like grownups in a serious setting for the purpose of passing laws that benefit as many Americans as possible. The elimination of the filibuster, especially for the reasons stated by Harris, would strip almost a perfect half the country of any meaningful federal representation — even a Republican president and House would be neutered. No serious person can think that, armed with a rigged durable majority and a 51-vote rule, the Harris Dems would not run wild.

Conservatives will survive the next four years regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. The question is who wants to live in a place in which only a single point of view is mandated from the top of government down by people who have proven themselves to be too ineffective to lead under the rules that have existed for generations? Who will support a Republican Party that sees all of this partisan rule breaking coming and does nothing to stop it? This presidential election is a referendum on both parties, neither of which seems able to look to the future to understand its gravity. 

To view online: https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/22/here-are-all-the-radical-plans-democrats-will-ram-through-congress-if-they-nuke-the-filibuster/