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'17 Specials & '18 Midterms Thread

WakeForestRanger said:
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What a winner. I checked his campaign website and it is filled with boilerplate GOP issues - cut taxes, protect gun owners, privatize education, privatize Social Security and Medicare (for younger generations, of course, GOP olds will still get their government money), gut government regulatory agencies for "job creation" purposes, overturn abortion rights, oppose illegal immigration and "build the wall!" along the Mexican border, traditional family values, etc. My favorite is when his website talks about "overbearing" federal agencies treating good, honest American citizens like scum and riding roughshod over their rights. Yet, according to a politico article, both Garrett and his wife treated their aides like personal servants and were bullying and threatening on a regular basis. They forced his aides and interns to serve as dog watchers and clean their dog's poop off the carpet (and often seemed to forget that the dog was there at the office), called aides at all hours of the night to run personal errands, and his wife would yell at, and threaten, aides if they forgot to pick up the Congressman at his home or let him oversleep. They also forced aides to drive for up to three hours to just pick up family members and bring them back to DC, had them pick up groceries and do other errands. And, now it turns out that he's an alcoholic. The irony is that they are the "overbearing government" his website complained about. He and his wife are the definition of the entitled, arrogant, big government elitist.
 
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getting mad at staffers for "letting you oversleep" when you were probably still drunk from the night before is exactly what I think of when I think of the party of personal responsibility.
 
http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/l...cle_76ff3dbe-62c3-11e8-80d5-13a11695e2d7.html

My congressman is quite suddenly retiring. Really strange situation and timing. There was a rumor that he was going to pull out last week and also that he had some ethics allegations from prior staffers. He came out at the end of the week to refute that he was pulling out, and now he is pulling out and says it's due to his alcoholism. There has to be more to this story. Garrett is a tea bagger, and this is a conservative district - R+6. It stretches from north of Cville down to the NC borderin the center of the state (but doesn't for example include the city of Lynchburg). I seriously doubt he thought he was going to lose. His opponent is Leslie Cockburn, who is liberal and resides in the northern part of the district. I had thought she was the weakest of the 3 Dems in the primary. She was the best funded but won't play well in the southern part of the district, which is the majority of it. (One of her opponents was former military, and the other is from Missouri and has a southern twang.) So I don't see it as a retirement in fear of a blue wave. Only time a Dem has won in recent years was in the 2008 Obama wave due to an unusually large African-American turnout in the district that year, and he lost in 2010.
 
Well..... that explains the weirdness from last week. Like his Facebook live press conference:

 
avalon said:
Well..... that explains the weirdness from last week. Like his Facebook live press conference:

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That makes sense. Some Pub power brokers see a fundraising slacker with some new ethics accusations and convinces him to get out, and they get to hand pick his replacement. As I said, I didn't think he was really in trouble of losing otherwise. But this isn't the best year to run when you have ethics issues. Hell, Menendez is only up a few points in very blue NJ in a year where you wouldn't dream of the blue team losing a statewide race in NJ.
 
WFFaithful said:
Manchin up double digits in WV. Polls lie though.
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Nah, I've considered that a safer seat than it generally gets rated. I'd rate the most dangerous Dems seats in this order: IN, MO, FL, SD, MT and maybe surprisingly NJ because NJ Dems can't seem to find an alternative to Menendez. I'd rate Donnelly as a slight underdog and McCaskill, Nelson and Heitkamp as slight favorites.
 
Virginia General Assembly approves Medicaid expansion to 400,000 low-income residents

But opposition in the House crumbled after Democrats nearly won control of the chamber in November, amid a blue wave widely viewed as a rebuke to President Trump. A chastened House Speaker M. Kirkland Cox (R-Colonial Heights), seeking to rebrand Republicans as results-oriented pragmatists, came out in favor of expansion if work requirements, co-pays and other conservative strings were attached.

In February, 19 of the 51 Republicans in the House joined Democrats to pass a budget bill that expanded Medicaid, apparently concluding that they have more to fear from energized Democrats and independents than from potential primary challengers on the right.
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That will make UVA and MCV hospitals happy. They routinely get dumped on by other hospitals. As state hospitals, they get referrals from private hospitals of "difficult" cases. But the definition of difficult has come to include folks without insurance.
 
 
Seems like the Koch's are broadening their operation to buying Dems along with Pubs.
 
 
 
Yeah, Riggleman was easily their best choice and should win fairly easily. Dunbar could have lost it, even to the liberal carpet bagger Dem candidate. Had also heard the Pubs didn't want to pick someone currently in the General Assembly because they didn't want the possibility of losing that seat - they currently have a 21-19 and 51-49 advantage.
 
Trump’s Backing of Donovan May Muddle Staten Island’s Love for Grimm

“It should be up to the voters to decide,” Mary Ann Delfino, 73, a retired bank teller, said of Mr. Trump’s effort to persuade the electorate. “It’s not for him.”

Ms. Delfino, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, briefly stopped her precision-pruning of her Japanese holly. “People make mistakes and go to jail and come out better for it,” she said.

Freddy Perez, a registered Republican and auto mechanic, recently pressed a “Michael Grimm” sign into his postage-stamp front lawn, right next to a diminutive statue of the Virgin Mary. “I think people will ignore Trump’s tweets on this,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of talk on the island that Grimm is going to win by a landslide.”
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To the extent that undecided voters look to Mr. Trump’s social-media posts for guidance, they might not realize that some of the information was incorrect. In one tweet, the president said that Mr. Donovan had “voted for Tax Cuts and is helping me to Make America Great Again.”

But Mr. Donovan was actually one of a dozen Republican congressmen who voted against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Richard Born, a professor of political science at Vassar College, said that the error might not matter. “Not many people pay attention any longer because Trump is averaging six to seven falsehoods a day,” he said.
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