Although the elections may be tantalizingly close (in truth, they probably won't be that close), the likeliest outcome for the Republicans is. . .

The races have generally (but not consistently) been tightening in both states, especially according to polling organizations which are classified as Republican-leaning by liberal media sources. Some hardcore leftists (e.g. Washington Post) are cheerleading for a Democrat blowout in Virginia, but the ones who attempt to be less transparently liberal have the contests being tighter. Close though the races may be, as things stand now both Jack Ciattarelli (NJ) and Winsome Earle-Sears (VA) appear to be heading for losses. It's up to the good voters of New Jersey and Virginia to get out and vote and prove the pollsters wrong.

We'll start with a look at New Jersey.

Photo credit: inquirer.com

Background:

In 2025 Ciattarelli is making his third attempt for Governor of New Jersey. The three-term state legislator ran in 2017 and finished second in the Republican primary to Kim Guadagno, the two-term (2010-2017) Lt. Gov. under Governor Tubba Goo.

In 2021 Ciatterelli came closer than expected to an upset victory after starting 15 to 20 points down in early general election polls. Even polls taken in late October (by Democrat-college groups such as Emerson, Rutgers, Farleigh Dickinson & Monmouth) anticipated incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy being victorious by 6 to 10 points. Only the Trafalgar Group (R) came close to getting it right, predicting a 4-point loss for the challenger; Ciattarelli lost by 84,000 votes (3.2%).

Murphy was first elected in 2017 by vastly outspending Republican nominee Guadagno, as well as by capitalizing on the massive unpopularity of outgoing Republican Governor Chris Christie, to whom Guadagno was constantly linked. That election result maintained New Jersey's habit of alternating parties every 8 years in gubernatorial elections, a pattern which has held since 1993 when ultra-liberal Republican Christine Todd Whitman denied Democrat Jim "Flimflam" Florio a second term by eking out a surprising 1-point victory. Florio later claimed that he was "one of the first victims of modern right-wing talk radio", LOL. Democrats are likely to break that alternating pattern in 2025 as things stand now.

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The 2021 election was mainly a referendum on Murphy's first term, with Ciatterelli being regarded as sufficiently bland and moderate to avoid alienating potential crossover Democrat voters which any Jersey Republican requires in order to have a chance of winning a statewide election. Murphy is a huge supporter of the illegal importation of new Democrat voters from foreign countries, and he designated New Jersey as a sanctuary state. He also took several steps to hinder the deportation of illegals (such as not permitting law enforcement to ask about immigration status), but by 2021 many New Jersey voters had grown weary of the invasion and their disaffection hurt Murphy's re-election chances. Nor were the voters pleased with the numerous tax increases which were passed by the overwhelmingly Democrat NJ legislature.

Unlike 2017, Republicans were able to compete on almost equal financial footing in 2021 in the expensive gubernatorial election. The same applies in 2025, though as we head into the final days of the race the Democrat has substantially more cash on hand, and therefore will likely be more visible in the media than Ciatterelli (nevermind the media bias advantage the Democrat already holds for free).

Ciattarelli won 6 of New Jersey's 12 congressional districts in 2021 -- including the one represented by 2025 Democrat nominee Mikie Sherrill. Sherrill is currently in her fourth term in the House, and is a member in good standing of the far-left wing of her party. She was first elected in the anti-Trump year of 2018 in what at the time was a tossup district (NJ-11) centered on upscale, suburban Morris County.

Until 2018 Morris County had been forever represented in Congress by liberal Republicans such as Rodney Frelinghuysen. Like several other squishy Republicans in the House, the staunchly anti-Trump Frelinghuysen picked 2018 to retire. The 72-year-old, 12-term representative was not comfortable being "forced" to toe the party line and support a president whom he despised. Frelinghuysen abandoned his House seat, hoping (or knowing) that he would be replaced by a Democrat who would help the new Democrat majority thwart Trump's legislative agenda and begin Trump's congressional persecution.

Morris County seems to have recently begun a journey away from the left and back towards the center, voting for Trump in 2024 after giving Joe Biden a 4.2% victory in 2020. Morris is reliably Republican in other statewide elections too (Murphy lost here twice and it wasn't particularly close), even selecting hapless Curtis Bashaw over Andy Kim in the 2024 Senate race. But in 2022 Democrat gerrymanderers added a larger portion of ghetto Essex County to the district, taking the district from being a complete tossup to favoring Democrats by 5 points. Republicans face an uphill battle to win it 2026 from either Sherrill or whoever her special-election replacement is if Sherrill becomes Governor as expected.

2024 presidential election results in New Jersey

Geography:

We have divided New Jersey into the six geographical regions listed below, shown with the counties which correspond to those regions:

• South Jersey: Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Salem
• Central Jersey: Mercer, Middlesex, Somerset
• West Jersey: Hunterdon, Morris, Sussex, Warren
• Central Coast: Monmouth, Ocean
• Urbanized North: Bergen, Passaic
• Ghetto Jersey: Essex, Hudson, Union

Photo credit: redlineheadlines.com

Scott Presler and his organization have worked diligently over the past couple of years to increase Republican voter registration counts in certain states. Presler focused on Pennsylvania during 2024 and has been given inordinate credit for the GOP victories which occurred there -- Trump's win along with that of Senator Dave McCormick, and the important pickup of two House seats (CD-7 and CD-8) in Eastern PA.

While it is true that the Democrat registration advantage in PA was reduced to 3.1% from 5.6% during 2024 (a net GOP gain of 165,000 registrations in 12 months), the trend in PA has been significantly in the R direction for over 15 years now. Between November of 2008 and November of 2023 the GOP added 210,616 voters in the Keystone State while Democrats diminished by 579,285, a net change of 789,901 in the positive direction for Republicans.

Pennsylvania has apparently "cleaned up" its voter rolls in 2025, with both parties seeing a reduction in registrations:

2024:

• 3,710,290 R (40.5%)
• 3,991,381 D (43.6%)
• 1,460,307 I (15.9%)

• 3,642,630 R (40.9%)
• 3,811,262 D (42.8%)
• 1,448,470 I (16.3%)

2024 PA voter registration, by county

After 2024, Presler and his vote registrars moved east to New Jersey in an attempt to turn that state "red". As in PA, trends in New Jersey are already favoring Republicans, although these trends have not manifested themselves in any victories. Trump's loss by 5.9% here in 2024 was actually the best showing for a Republican candidate since George Bush lost by only 2.4% in the 3-way election of 1992. Prior to 1992, the GOP won 6 presidential elections in a row in New Jersey before the state's demographics began to head rapidly south.

Recent results have been no better down the ballot, with Chris Christie the only Republican to win statewide since Christie Whitman in 1997; the GOP has not elected a U.S. senator from the Garden State since ultra-liberal Clifford Case in 1972, and the U.S. House districts have been gerrymandered to an extent which limits Republicans to just 3 districts out of 12 (and at least one of those GOP districts, CD-7, is very marginal). Those factors notwithstanding, Trump did a little better statewide than expected in 2024, Jack Ciattarelli almost pulled off a major upset in the most recent gubernatorial election, and there appears to be reason for some optimism on the Republican side going forward.

The trend is also apparent in the New Jersey voter registration figures, to a minor degree.

November 2023:

• R: 1,541,158 (23.7%)
• D: 2,504,294 (38.6%)

• R: 1,628,633 (24.2%)
• D: 2,534,932 (37.7%)

• R: 1,670,297 (25.3%)
• D: 2,525,346 (38.2%)

2024 presidential election result in Virginia

Background:

Although Trump lost the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2024, his margin of defeat (5.7%) was a distinct improvement over 2020 when he lost by over 10 percent; the 2024 outcome was in line with other recent presidential elections in Virginia. There was false optimism in the 2024 U.S. Senate race, where many wishful thinkers believed that Hung Cao would defy the polls and score a major upset over incumbent radical leftist Timmy Kaine, or at least make it a close call. Cao did neither of those things, losing by 9 points which was just a slight tick better than the polls predicted.

Trump's sizable step in the right direction, along with the surprise victory by Republican Glenn Youngkin for Governor in 2021, helps to create the illusion that Virginia is a "purple" state where Republicans have almost as good a chance at winning as Democrats do. In reality, Virginia is slipping behind the rest of the country and becoming "bluer" by the day. Relative to the nationwide percentage of the Republican presidential vote, Trump's 4-point underachievement in VA in 2024 was the worst showing here for a GOP candidate since the 1940's when Virginia was solidly Democrat across the entire ticket. Although Virginia does not register voters by party, recent estimates of party affiliation indicate that Democrats have nearly a 2:1 advantage over Republicans. That's not very purple.

Speaking of Governor Youngkin, his win in 2021 was primarily the result of the stars and planets aligning in his favor, and it is now abundantly clear that Youngkin's electoral success (and that of his party, which gained 7 seats and took control of the state House that year) was a temporary phenomenon.

Youngkin benefited from several factors, which have some parallel to Donald Trump's surprise victory in 2016, and those factors may have also helped Republicans in races down the ballot in Virginia in 2021:

Photo credit: washingtonmonthly.com

• Youngkin, like Trump in '16, was a political outsider and not a career politician, and both were fortunate to be able to run against the single most repugnant and unlikeable Democrat available at the time (Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton). Former Governor and Clinton crony McAuliffe was a godsend for Youngkin. McAuliffe's abrasive personality and his far-left political positions proved to be quite helpful to the moderate Republican candidate. Furthermore, the Republican was able to compete financially against the Democrat's massive fundraising advantages by contributing significantly to his own campaign. Youngkin distanced himself from Trump (just as McAuliffe was not able to distance himself from Joe Biden) enough to keep moderate and independent voters from rushing to the left.
  
  The 2021 Republican nominee was aided to a substantial extent by voter revulsion against local school boards (notably in Loudoun County) which were defying parents -- and common sense -- by welcoming the presence of boys in girls' bathrooms and by continually "overstepping parental rights during the pandemic". When a male student raped a female student in a Loudoun County school bathroom in 2021, the incident and the school's mishandling of it rightfully became a national scandal -- at least in the "right wing" media. The liberal media downplayed and/or ignored the story after an initial cursory report, with a majority of voters in upscale, liberal Loudoun County probably being totally unaware of what had occurred right in their own backyard. But many good voters in the rest of the state were aware of this atrocity, and their reaction to it may have helped Youngkin considerably.
  
  
  
• Virginia is not exactly known for the cleanliness of its elections in recent years, but Youngkin was perhaps not taken as seriously by Democrats as he should have been even though he was close or even slightly led McAuliffe in polls which were taken in the closing weeks of the race. Trump also was not given a serious chance to win in 2016, and liberal pollsters right up to election day helped the Democrats maintain their (false) overconfidence; Democrats and Deep Staters of both parties did prepare for the eventuality of Trump's election by fabricating the "Steele Dossier" and all the phony "Russia, Russia, Russia" crap to attempt to hamstring him after the fact, but they apparently didn't put as much -- let's call it "extra effort" -- as usual into achieving their desired electoral outcome in the first place.
  
  Underestimating the amount of voter support which both Trump and Youngkin actually had, the Democrats apparently did not feel the need to ensure victories by their usual methods (cough, cough). Trump was able to achieve narrow victories in critical states such as Pennsylvania (by 0.7%), Michigan (0.2%), Wisconsin (0.7%) and Florida (1.2%) and thus win the electoral vote despite losing the popular vote by 2.1%. Youngkin improved his party's showing from 2017 in several areas of the state, winning in the Tidewater and Richmond areas, and vastly reducing the deficit in NOVA -- even in Loudon County, but still lost by 11 points there.
  
  In the aftermath of that glorious 2021 outcome it was reported that one of the major reasons for it was the "Virginia Project", a Republican effort to increase election integrity (something Democrats always oppose) by, for one thing, recruiting poll watchers for as many precincts as possible. With 36% of the votes in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election being cast early or absentee, the impact of GOP poll watchers was somewhat muted unless they were present when the envelopes were being opened and the ballots counted; their presence on election day was still helpful, though.
  
  With it seeming to work so well in Virginia that year, the Virginia Project (we were told) would serve as a model for helping ensure the honesty of future elections, and would be expanded to states beyond Virginia. Looking at many important outcomes from 2022 onward, the proponents of the Virginia Project either never implemented their model or it didn't function as well as expected. For one thing, there's much more to the concept of election integrity than poll watchers can accomplish.
  
  
  
• Even with all of those advantages, both Trump and Youngkin won rather unconvincingly. The mistakes which national Democrats made in 2016 at the presidential level were "rectified" in 2020; the mistakes which Virginia Democrats made in 2021 began to be rectified almost immediately: the 7-seat gain which gave Republicans the Virginia state House starting in 2022 was erased in November of 2023 when Democrats added 3 seats and seized control of the House, 51-49; they have held the state Senate throughout Youngkin's term, by a 21-19 margin.

Photo credit: lifenews.com

GOP nominee Winsome Earle-Sears is an immigrant from Jamaica who arrived in the U.S. at the age of 6. She served in the United States Marine Corps for 4 years in the 1980's and became an American citizen during that time. Her political career commenced in the early 2000's when she won a race for the state House, upsetting a black Democrat who had been in office for two decades. She was the first Republican to win a state House seat in a majority-black district in Virginia since 1865. She later became the state's first female Lieutenant Governor (elected in 2021) and is the first black female to be elected to any statewide office in Virginia.

Although Sears endorsed Donald Trump in 2020 and served as the chairman of a PAC called "Black Americans to Re-elect the President", she broke with Trump in 2022 because she believed that the candidates Trump had endorsed that year were too conservative and therefore unelectable (in fact they weren't elected, but Sears was wrong about the reason for their defeats). At that time Sears declared she would not support Donald Trump's election bid if he were to run in 2024.

Probably for this reason (yeah, "probably"), Trump for a long time refused to support Sears for Governor in 2025, though he belatedly came through with an endorsement earlier this week.

Sears also has the endorsements of Governor Youngkin, state Attorney General Jason Miyares, the entire Virginia Republican congressional delegation, and some congressmen from other states. Sears is pro-life, supports "common sense" tax cuts and government spending cuts, and opposes Democrats' radical pro-crime policies such as "catch and release" and sanctuary cities. She opposes incompetent (but powerfully unionized) teachers and favors school choice and parents' rights. Sears also strongly supports Virginia's "right-to-work" law. These positions stand in stark contrast to that of her allegedly "moderate" Democrat opponent, Abigail Spanberger.

Photo credit: twitchy.com

Spanberger, a native of New Jersey, went from being a substitute schoolteacher and a postal inspector to (as of 2006) being a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency; a rather unique career change. When she first entered politics, Spanberger's CIA resume was sanitized so that it could be declassified and, according to ABC News, the former spook stuck "to carefully scripted lines, approved by the agency, when talking about her work" on the campaign trail.

In 2018 CIAbby was recruited to run against Republican incumbent Dave Brat for a seat in Congress. Brat had irritated many GOP bigwigs by daring to oppose -- and defeat -- golden boy Eric Cantor, a squish who was a member of the GOP leadership (House Majority Leader) when he was shocked by Brat in the 2014 primary. We wrote at length about Brat's situation here, and his parallels to ex-congressman Bob Good. Good, a very solid conservative like Brat, fell out of favor with his party's leadership in 2024, and irritated the biggest bigwig of them all (Donald Trump). Good was defeated in the 2024 primary.

VA-7, the formerly Republican-oriented district in which Brat toppled Cantor and then 4 years later was defeated by Spanberger, was altered to give Democrats a much greater chance of success after 2014. Brat survived in 2016 because the Democrats pretty much gave him a free pass, but in 2018 Spanberger was able to raise and spend over $7 million dollars to purchase that House seat. That was more than double the amount which Brat could raise (or obtain from his indifferent party leadership). The surplus millions which Deep State Abby was able to throw around proved to be critical as she eked out a 1.9% win in the recently-gerrymandered district; her margin of victory came almost exclusively from the new Democrat areas in the Richmond suburbs which were added after 2014.

Democrats spent lavishly while procuring numerous House seats in 2018 and, coincidentally, another new Democrat who was the recipient of an astronomical "investment" that year was New Jersey's Mikie Sherrill who is now her party's gubernatorial nominee in that state.

Photo credit: NRCC

Republicans picked up 13 House seats in 2020 but Spanberger's wasn't one of them although a serious effort was made. Her district, which had been rated as R+10 prior to the 2016 Democrat gerrymander, was still slightly "red" and Republicans had it high on their list of potential pickups. Spanberger, then as now, occasionally talks like a moderate and did cast a highly publicized (and highly choreographed) vote against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in January, 2019. Spanberger then spent the remainder of her first term in Congress establishing her liberal bona fides, but was able to conceal that fact from the voters.

Nick Freitas, a solid conservative, defeated squishy John McGuire (now a congressman from Virginia's Fifth District) in a contentious Republican party primary convention in July of 2020, and won the right to oppose Spanberger in November. As in 2018, the Republican carried all areas of the district aside from the deteriorating Richmond suburbs, but that was not sufficient to prevail district-wide. Or was it?

In the afternoon of the Wednesday following the 2020 election, Freitas had a lead of a little more than 1,300 votes over Spanberger. Then came the discovery of a "flash drive" by the husband of a Democrat operative in Henrico County, and that flash drive miraculously contained over 14,000 as yet uncounted votes in the 7th District. Just as miraculously, Spanberger happened to receive a tremendous percentage (64%) of those flash votes. The Democrats later found even more votes for CIAbby, making sure that her final margin was outside the range which would require an automatic recount. In 2022, Spanberger spent over $9 million dollars to successfully retain the 7th District seat; redistricting by that time had moved the district even further left in order to help ensure her another term. Spanberger did not seek re-election in 2024 in order to focus on her gubernatorial run.

Geography:

As we did with New Jersey, we have split Virginia into 6 regions:

• Rural Chesapeake Bay area
• Greater Richmond
• Hampton Roads
• Northern Virginia
• Piedmont / Southside
• Shenandoah Valley / Southwest Virginia

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2025 Governor New Jersey Virginia

Over the past few days, two moderate Republicans have announced that they will not be seeking re-election in 2026: Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Both of these anti-conservative politicos have taken great pride in being a thorn in the side of the majority of their party, and they bask in the positive media attention they get when they oppose President Trump.

Trump normally saves his greatest degree of vengeance for those who oppose him from the right (such as ex-Rep. Bob Good or current Rep. Thomas Massie) while going easier on Republicans who come at him from the other direction (such as Impeachment RINO Dan Newhouse of Washington), and he nearly always endorses squishy moderate incumbents over conservative challengers even in the safest of Republican districts. However, Trump recently declared War on Tillis and, probably as a result of that, Tillis has decided to scram. Trump's reaction notwithstanding, Tillis did not become a darling of the left only recently; he had already sealed his probable re-election fate months earlier.

Fried Bacon:

Photo credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Although he did not make the official announcement until June 30, there had already been chatter that Bacon was through after this term. He was first elected alongside future nemesis Donald Trump in 2016, defeating erratic Democrat incumbent Brad Ashford by 1.2%. Ashford started out as a Democrat, switched to Republican, then became an Independent, then back to Democrat again. He used his scattershot background to provide cover for his natural liberalism; although Ashford campaigned as a moderate he nearly always voted as a liberal during his lone term in Congress.

Bacon survived the anti-Trump liberal landslide of 2018 because the so-called moderate Ashford was edged out by far-leftist Kara Eastman in the Democrat primary that year; Ashford would have likely won the general election rematch, but Bacon lucked out by having a more "progressive" opponent who repelled enough moderate voters to seal her defeat.

Bacon was truly a moderate during his first term and part of his second one (2017-2019) but he began to panic and/or seek liberal media approval for his "maverick" status during the COVID year, and his voting record jumped noticeably to the left. His record has stayed that way ever since. It could be successfully argued that, as bad as Bacon is, he remained a good fit for his ever-deteriorating district (NE-2) which is based in and around the city of Omaha. Bacon won 5 times without ever getting even 52% of the vote in this highly marginal district, which is impressive in its own way.

Bacon's greatest achievement was his most recent victory in 2024. It's rare that a long-term House incumbent suddenly becomes an underdog absent some scandal or adverse redistricting (neither of which applied to Bacon in 2024), but liberal Democrat Tony Vargas was leading in every poll taken from mid-August on and nearly every prognosticator -- including us -- expected Bacon to lose; he won by 1.8% in one of the most surprising outcomes on election night.

Nebraska congressional district 2

Nebraska's Second Congressional District contains all of Omaha, and the city comprises 75% of the district. It is the other 25% which (so far) has kept this a Republican seat in the House. By 2024, the White percentage of the district was down to approximately 65% (it had been 80% as of the early 2000s) while the Hispanic percentage continues to rapidly increase. This district -- which awards its own Electoral Vote in presidential elections -- not only has rejected Trump twice in a row now, it also voted heavily against incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer in 2024, preferring "independent" Dan Osborn by a whopping 12 points. NE-2 did vote Republican for Governor in 2022 and for the other Senate seat (Ricketts) in 2024, however it was by the narrowest of margins. Led by Omaha, the district is obviously trending leftward and is now rated as D+2. Even as recently as 2020 it was rated as leaning to the right by a miniscule amount, but those days are gone.

Photo credit: 3newsnow.com

Minor error #1: former Omaha Mayor and nominal Republican Jean Stothert (elected in 2013, 2017 and 2021) is not a transvestite and therefore is not a "he" as a quote from the article states; a minor error but one which reveals a certain amount of cluelessness on the part of the quoter, who was a former chairman of the Nebraska Republican party. That guy did get one thing right -- Stothert is surely no conservative. Stothert had her easiest election in 2021 when three liberal Democrats split the primary vote and could not reunite in time for the general election one month later. Stothert lost in May of 2025 by almost 13 points to a liberal black Democrat, conclusive evidence of how the city of Omaha has finally completed its journey to the dark side. Even granting that Stothert's general election campaign in 2025 was sabotaged by Republican primary loser Mike McDonnell (who spitefully endorsed the Democrat), it seems that even moderate Republicans no longer need apply for electoral employment within the city limits.

The mayor of Omaha is technically a non-partisan position (like the state legislature) but the parties of the candidates and officeholders are rarely a secret.

Major error #2: Gizzi's own blunder in the article is a real howler: claiming that Brett Lindstrom, the presumptive GOP nominee for the open NE-2 seat in 2026, is "considered a strong conservative". In reality, Lindstrom is just so much leftover Bacon. He can usually be found on the left flank of the Republican party in Nebraska and at one time was the most liberal Republican in the Nebraska state legislature. During his time in Lincoln, Lindstrom's conservative ratings from CPAC were:

2015: 64%
2016: 54%
2017: 75%
2018: 73%

Having moved to the right while running for re-election for the first time in 2018, Lindstrom was safely returned to office for a second term -- and safely returned to being the liberal which he really always was. When he decided that he wanted to be Governor and would therefore have to appeal to conservative voters statewide by moving rightward (if he could win the primary while running to the left) -- a neat trick, but a common one for liberal Republicans -- Lindstrom began moderating his voting record in 2020.

2019: 52%
2020: 63%
2021: 64%
2022: 80%

In 2022 Lindstrom was absent (or failed to take a position) for nearly half of all key votes including one on abolishing the state income tax and another vote on preventing election fraud.

In 2022 Lindstrom finished third in the GOP primary for Governor. Moderate Jim Pillen won that primary (and then the general election, easily) and conservative Charles Herbster finished second after leading in the polls; he was slimed with some Clintonian-type accusations of sexual indiscretions. Herbster was endorsed by Donald Trump and others on the right; Pillen had all the moderates in his corner; Lindstrom was supported by some ex-Republicans who became Democrats, and he was endorsed by moderate-liberal Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert.

Even a squish like Pete Ricketts (a Pillen supporter) considers Lindstrom to be too liberal. Here is a quote from Ricketts which appeared during the '22 gubernatorial campaign: "Brett Lindstrom raised the gas tax 23%, opposed voter ID, gave taxpayer benefits to illegal immigrants, repealed the death penalty, and even tried to gut the Property Tax Credit Relief Fund. It's no wonder Democrats are supporting Lindstrom -- his liberal record speaks for itself."

And this guy is the best we can do while trying to hold the NE-2 House seat? Sadly, that may be the case.

Photo credit: Washington Post

Business executive Thom Tillis was elected to the North Carolina state House in 2006 after one term as a city commissioner. Tillis compiled a conservative voting record (but was a more bipartisan type aside from some of his positions on key votes) during his 4 terms, and was Speaker of the NC House from 2011 through the end of his tenure there. True conservatives very rarely ascend to the position of Speaker even in the most conservative of states, and North Carolina isn't one of those anyway.

Liberal Democrat Kay Hagan, defeater of Elizabeth Dole and a rubber stamp for the Obama agenda in the Senate, was up for her first re-election bid in 2014. Polls showed her as being increasingly vulnerable heading into that election year, and numerous Republicans were considering opposing Hagan. Tillis jumped into the GOP primary as the favorite and received endorsements from high-profile squishes like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. Tillis' major opponent for the nomination was conservative "activist" and physician Greg Brannon. But Brannon was not a serious threat, never led in any poll against Tillis, and finished second in the primary, with 27.1% to 45.7% for Tillis.

For the general election, Democrats flooded the state with oodles of money on behalf of their doomed candidate and additionally invested $36 million in "independent" expenditures against Tillis. Despite the massive disparity in funding in favor of the Democrat (an extremely common occurrence in Senate elections in recent years), Tillis eked out a 1.5% upset victory over Hagan.

North Carolina Senate election results, 2014

Tillis carefully walked a line down the middle of the road during his first two Senate years (2015-2016) which corresponded with the final two years of the Obama administration. Desperately seeking to project an image of moderation in his sharply divided state, Tillis supported Obama somewhat more often than he opposed the president on Senate votes. Tillis was a staunch (though not entirely reliable) supporter of Donald Trump during Trump's first term in office.

In 2020 Tillis faced another big spender, Democrat Cal Cunningham. Cunningham, a former U.S. Army lawyer, tried to portray himself as a sensible, patriotic moderate who was not on board with fashionable radical leftist causes like "Black Lives Matter" and "Defund the Police". As in 2014, Tillis -- though now having the advantage of incumbency -- trailed throughout the COVID summer and into the fall. Even the final polls predicted a 2-4 point win for Cunningham. A month before the election, the married Democrat patriot was found to have engaged in "sexting" with a woman not his wife. These revelations were typically downplayed by the media and Cunningham suffered no damage in the polls. But just like in 2014, Tillis pulled off the upset and prevailed by a small margin in November.

Romney and Tillis: Birds of a Feather
Photo credit: newsmax.com

With Trump safely out of the picture now, Tillis emerged as even more moderate (actually, liberal) than he had been in the past; his support for the Biden administration's policies and his opposition to conservative principles were both running in the 40% range from 2021-2024; that's Mitt Romney territory, though not quite as reprehensible as Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski.

Trump's return to the White House has caused Tillis to largely abandon whatever was left of his principles. All politicians (not just Donald Trump) have massive egos, and few of them have larger egos than the "Elite 100" who occupy the United States Senate. Tillis, among some others, objects to the pressure to blindly obey the president's every wish regarding legislation. Occasionally in 2025 this is a good instinct for a Republican, but most of the time it is not. Tillis began the second Trump administration by railing (and voting) against worthy presidential nominees like Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense and Ed Martin for U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Tillis singlehandedly derailed the Martin nomination and his ex-sister-in-law was the driving force behind the smear campaign against Hegseth. So Tillis wasn't just voting the wrong way -- he was doing much more damage than that, whether directly or indirectly.

Those actions, along with his other recent anti-conservative tendencies, made Tillis' 2026 re-election prospects quite dubious. The last straw was his vote against the "Big Supposedly-Beautiful Bill", which triggered Trump's wrath. Tillis The Moderate would be highly vulnerable in the Republican primary while remaining an underdog in the general, still reviled by North Carolina Democrats no matter how much of a centrist he thinks he is now.

Photo credit: Carolina Journal

The Republican side is wide open. Lara Trump, chairman of the Republican National Committee for a little over 10 months in 2024-25 (and the daughter-in-law of President Trump) is the heavy favorite for the GOP nomination if she chooses to seek it. A native of the Tarheel State, Trump will still face allegations of carpetbaggery because she has spent much of her adult life elsewhere.

A hypothetical matchup between Trump and Cooper shows -- guess what? -- a close race! Lara Trump will face unprecedented amounts of hatred in 2026 if she is on the ballot, but Roy Cooper is far from unanimously popular despite a media-burnished image as an alleged moderate. Cooper would probably win against any Republican, but November, 2026 is an eternity away and gleeful Democrat prognosticators may find 17 months from now that their crystal balls weren't so accurate.

Other potential Republican Senate candidates include a large number of opportunistic congressmen, several of whom are still in their first term:

• Pat Harrigan, newly elected in the 10th district (mostly suburban areas like Mooresville, but also part of urban Winston-Salem) and one of the best of the non-Trump alternatives. Harrigan is a young military veteran, a Green Beret who served in Afghanistan and a solid conservative so far in Congress. Harrigan has declared that he will not run for the Senate if Trump does, so as not to split the right-wing vote.
  
  
• Tim Moore, newly elected in the 14th district (Gastonia, Shelby, Charlotte suburbs). He is a lawyer and career politician with a resume much like that of Thom Tillis (uh oh). Moore spent 22 years in the N.C. state House before moving up to D.C. He was the Speaker of the House for 10 years but is still thought to be somewhat conservative.
  
  
• Greg Murphy, currently in his fourth term in the House after winning a 2019 special election to replace the late Walter Jones in the 3rd district. Murphy has been re-elected easily three times and has compiled a record which began as fairly conservative but has moved a bit to the left since his initial term.
  
  
• Addison McDowell, another very young (31 years old) freshman House member from the 6th district (suburban areas around Concord, Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem). McDowell's main electoral challenge came during the 2024 primary where he narrowly defeated former congressman Mark Walker. Walker was the true conservative in the race. McDowell faced no Democrat opposition in November, but a Constitution party candidate received 30% of the vote (which is a lot for a penniless third-party candidate) and even won the portion of the district closest to Greensboro. McDowell has been a reliable party-line voter in the House so far, but it's early yet.
  
  
• Dan Bishop, former 2½-term congressman and one of the most conservative representatives during his 6 years in D.C.; he along with Harrigan would be the most conservative Senate options if Lara Trump takes a pass. Like Murphy, Bishop was initially elected in a 2019 special election. He opted to seek higher office (NC Attorney General) in 2024 but was dragged down by the Mark Robinson Debacle and lost to liberal Democrat Jeff Jackson for that important position.
  
  
• Brad Knott, the fourth freshman congressman on this list. He represents a suburban/rural ring of territory around Raleigh. Knott's voting record is indistinguishable from that of his freshman Republican colleagues -- loyal, but not enough data to draw conclusions from yet. Knott finished second to Kelly Daughtry in the 14-way House primary in 2024. She had more money and openly supported conservative/Christian values; he had Donald Trump's endorsement and also that of Senator Ted Budd. Daughtry graciously declined the runoff election and backed Knott.

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U.S. House Senate 2026 Nebraska North Carolina

Photo credit: CPAC.org

There is more to a congressman than his voting record -- there is his role in sponsoring or facilitating legislation; his role in various committees and subcommittees; providing services for his constituents, and other duties. Only the voting record provides a significant amount of quantifiable data about where he stands on the important issues of the day. Congress takes numerous votes over the course of a year. Many votes are not even officially tabulated -- these are "voice votes" -- but others ("roll-call votes") require an explicit enumeration of the Yeas and Nays.

In 2024 there were 516 roll-call votes conducted in the U.S. House of Representatives. Many of these were on topics that are frivolous, or they pertain to issues on which the correct position is so obvious as to be almost unanimously supported by our elected representatives. Some of these frivolous or obvious votes included:


Billie Jean King Congressional Gold Medal Act for the purpose of "recognition of her courageous and groundbreaking leadership" in being a non-heterosexual female who participated in professional athletics (paving the way for today's WNBA, though we are aware of no evidence that Ms. King was a hardcore racist against Whites). Also, at the age of 29, she once beat a 55-year old man in a highly publicized tennis match.

Enhanced Presidential Security Act, which was passed in September after a few assassination attempts were made against one particular 2024 presidential candidate. Even the most Trump-hating Democrats didn't want to be on the record against this bill (it passed 405-0).

A mandate for alarmist labeling on packages of pre-moistened baby wipes, a clear-cut issue of major importance which 56 Republican meanies still voted against.


The majority of House votes each year are far from frivolous, and there are hundreds of them. Therefore it is not possible for voters to keep detailed balance sheets in their heads regarding how each congressman voted.

Various special interest organizations such as the AFL-CIO, ACLU, League of Conservation Voters, pro-abortionist groups and numerous others (not all of them are on the left) try to help their followers know which politicians they should like and which they should hate, by producing narrowly-focused ratings of congressmen every year. These groups select a tiny subset of votes which are of interest to them, and they grade members of Congress based on the percentage of the time the member's vote aligned with the wishes of the group doing the rating.

There are two groups which produce more broadly-based ratings -- Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) on the left, and CPAC (formerly known as the American Conservative Union) on the right. Neither of these organizations exactly provide up-to-the-minute data; the ADA has published one set of yearly ratings since 2021, and here in June of 2025 CPAC has finally released its ratings for 2024.

Like all other ratings organizations, both of these groups identify certain important ("key") votes and compute the percentage of the time that each congressman voted their way. CPAC selected 23 key votes which took place in the House in 2024, and has issued ratings based on those votes.

Photo credit: c-span.org

At RightDataUSA.com, we have a complete record of CPAC/ACU key votes and their results going all the way back to 1970, which is when the ACU began issuing ratings. We have also created our own ratings, based on likely ACU criteria, for the years 1961-1969 for those who are interested in ancient history.

More pertinently, we generate our own House ratings during each year, while those two higher-profile organizations do not release their data until well into the following year (if at all, in the case of the ADA). Our source for data is voteview.com, which is typically updated every few weeks and contains information on every roll-call vote taken in Congress. Aside from identifying what we consider to be key votes, we use this data to calculate Party Unity scores along with the percentage of the time each representative actually showed up for work (their Voting Percentage). An example is shown here, for Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY)

Explanations of the various columns are provided underneath the data table. The numbers in the last two columns represent the percentage of the time which Stefanik voted liberal (according to the ADA) or conservative (according to CPAC). These numbers, for recent years, are linked to their corresponding data sets. For example, click on the number "71" in the "Conserv." column for the year 2024, and you will be taken to a page which lists all 23 CPAC key votes -- one of which was so important to them that it is double-counted -- and how Stefanik voted on those 23 issues. Her rating of "71" means that CPAC believes she voted the conservative position 71% of the time in 2024.

As noted in the explanations, the liberal and conservative figures for a year do not necessarily add to 100% because ADA and CPAC use different sets of key votes for their evaluations.

Click through to this page to see details regarding all CPAC key votes for 2024. The subject of the first one was the Biden administration exempting electric vehicle chargers from "Buy American" requirements. Stefanik voted the right way on this issue. To see how the entire House voted, click on the Result ("Passed 209-198"):

Vote Data for SJRES38 (118th Congress) Subject: Waiver of Buy American Requirements for Electric Vehicle Chargers

That page is sorted by Yeas/Nays by default, but can also be sorted alphabetically, or by party or state. A green check next to a member's name indicates that he voted the right way; a red X means that member voted the wrong way. There are pages such as this on RightDataUSA.com for every single key House vote since 1961, but probably few users have discovered them up to now.

• Economic
• Social
• Foreign

• 62.5% Economic
• 29.2% Social
• 8.3% Foreign

• 20.5% Economic
• 59.0% Social
• 20.5% Foreign

1. Denouncing the Biden administration's open-borders policies
2. Impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security
3. Extension of continuing appropriations for 2024
4. Laken Riley Act
5. Denouncing the Biden administration's immigration policies
6. Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act
7. Denouncing the Biden administration's anti-American energy policies
8. Cutting Green Corruption and Taxes Act
9. Prohibiting warrantless searches of U.S. personal communications in the FISA database
10. Renewing FISA (the FBI's tool often used against conservatives) for 5 years
11. Expanding prohibited disclosures of stored electronic communications
12. Rescinding Biden's waiver of Iran sanctions
13. End the Border Catastrophe Act
14. "Emergency" spending on Ukraine
15. Alaska's Right to Produce Act (also selected by CPAC as a key vote)
16. Reinstating Migrant Protection Protocols
17. Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act
18. Equal Representation Act (also selected by CPAC as a key vote)
19. DC CRIMES Act
20. Security assistance for Israel
21. Banning non-citizens from voting in DC elections
22. Sanctions against the International Criminal Court
23. Defense Department funding of sex change operations
24. Defense Department funding of abortions
25. Eliminating DEI in the Defense Department
26. Requiring proof of citizenship to vote
27. Finding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt
28. Condemning "border czar" Kamala Harris for dereliction of duty
29. Obedience to the World Health Organization
30. Chinese spying and other issues pertaining to Communist China
31. No Foreign Election Interference
32. Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act
33. FY 2025 continuing resolution
34. End Woke Higher Education
35. No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities
36. Accountability for key officials in the Biden-Harris administration
37. Leaking the Ethics Committee report on Rep. Matt Gaetz
38. Midnight Rules Relief Act
39. American Relief Act

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U.S. House Ratings CPAC

Not all House districts are created equally, in partisan terms. Some are designed to elect Democrats, some are designed to elect Republicans, and a comparatively small handful could go either way. When U.S. House elections roll around, as a couple of special ones did in Florida earlier this month, there is a desire to quantify districts so that people can anticipate the outcomes. Does Candidate A have any chance at all against Candidate B? How close should the race be? Could there plausibly be an upset?

Analysts often describe the direction (and degree) to which a House district leans by referring to something called a PVI, which stands for Partisan Voting Index. Here is a rare example of an unbiased and almost factual statement (which references PVIs) from a typically biased article published by a thoroughly left-wing source:

"The Cook Political Report's partisan voting index (PVI) classifies both [Florida special election] districts as Republican-favored, with FL-1 as R+22 and FL-6 as R+7."

Florida congressional district 1

Let us illustrate. Both Republicans on April 1st won easily in their respective Florida special elections, however given the lean of their districts they appear to have underachieved. This enabled the media and other Democrats to claim hollow "moral" victories in the wake of Democrat defeats, because the GOP candidates did not obliterate their liberal rivals by as much as they were supposed to.

Nevermind that at least one feverish poll in late March -- this one by the rabidly liberal "St. Pete Polls" -- was gleefully anticipating a possible actual Democrat victory in FL-6 and not merely a moral one. Sounds more like the Democrat was really the true underachiever in that case, seeing as how he ended up losing by almost 15 points; but only if you believe polls which are published in the liberal media for no purpose other than gaslighting -- energizing Democrat voters and attempting to suppress Republican turnout. The gaslighting in Florida, along with astronomical Democrat funding by wealthy out-of-state contributors, certainly did have an effect on these outcomes.

How do we know how much the two Republicans were "supposed to" win by? The PVI of the districts tells us.

Using FL-1 as an example, its rating of R+22 does not mean "a Republican typically wins this district by 22 points". What R+22 does mean is "a Republican in this district typically does 22 points better than average". Those are hardly equivalent statements.

In any 2-way race the average is 50%. If the Republican does 22 points better than average, he gets 72% of the vote. Which means the Democrat gets 28%. The Republican therefore does not win by a margin of only 22% in a typical 2-way race in an R+22 district; he wins by 44%. Winning by only 14%, as Patronis did in FL-1, was indeed a substantial underachievement. Sub-par Republican performance is a regular occurrence in special elections and, as we have pointed out many times, does not necessarily portend anything for the future. Neither FL-1 nor FL-6 are suddenly lurching leftward, and even the Democrats know it.

Florida congressional district 6

Randy Fine won FL-6 (PVI of R+14) by exactly 14 points, which sounds like a precisely typical result there. But R+14 does not mean the Republican should win by 14%; it means the Republican should win by 28%. So yeah, another "moral defeat" (LOL) for the GOP. Once again, this outcome is not a harbinger of future performance. In November of 2026 the GOP will win that district every bit as easily as it usually does, and Democrats will not be pissing $10 million of billionaires' money down the drain as they did a few weeks ago, no matter how easily they can afford to do so.

• 2020 presidential election result in the district
• 2024 presidential election result in the district

Map of 2026 battleground districts, created using mapchart.net

First, a note about the most competitive districts: Battleground districts are highlighted in the map above and in the table of all House districts which appears further down this page. It is unusual for a House member to win election in a district which tilts 6 points or more towards the opposite party although it does occasionally happen, so we define a "battleground" district as one in the range from D+5 through R+5. When upsets occur in House elections, they normally take place in these marginal districts, and therefore aren't truly "upsets".

Twelve House districts flipped (switched from one party to the other) in the 2024 House elections, not counting those flips which were solely caused by 2024 redistricting. We omit the court-ordered gerrymandered Democrat victories in AL-2 and LA-6. We also exclude the three North Carolina districts in which Democrats were replaced by Republicans after the N.C. Supreme Court discarded a couple of Democrat gerrymanders and allowed the state legislature to handle the drawing of the district map in accordance with state law. The previous Democrat-controlled court had appropriated that task for itself in 2020 and 2022. Here are our ratings for the other 12 flippers:

• AK-at large (went from D to R): R+5
• CA-13 (R to D): even
• CA-27 (R to D): D+2
• CA-45 (R to D): even
• CO-08 (D to R): D+1
• MI-07 (D to R): D+2
• NY-04 (R to D): D+5
• NY-19 (R to D): D+1
• NY-22 (R to D): D+4
• OR-05 (R to D): D+2
• PA-07 (D to R): D+1
• PA-08 (D to R): even

• AZ-01 (Schweikert): D+1
• AZ-06 (Ciscomani): D+2
• CA-21 (Valadao): D+1
• ME-02 (Golden): R+3
• MI-10 (James): D+1
• NE-02 (Bacon): D+2
• NH-01 (Pappas): R+2
• NH-02 (Goodlander): R+1
• NY-17 (Lawler): D+4
• OH-09 (Kaptur): R+1
• PA-01 (Fitzpatrick): D+3

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PVI Charlie Cook U.S. House Ratings More Data = More Accuracy

Prior to November in 2024 there was considerable wailing and pearl-clutching on the right (and gloating on the left) over the underperformance -- if not worse -- of Republican candidates in special elections at the congressional and state levels.

Photo credit: abc7ny.com

It's true that Democrats did win the most important special election of them all. That took place in February in New York's 3rd congressional district, where ex-incumbent Thomas Suozzi (D) easily defeated newcomer Masi Melesa Pilip (R) in that D-leaning district. The election was held in order to select a replacement for freshman Republican George Santos, who was expelled from Congress in December, 2023. The impetus to oust Santos came not so much from Democrats, but mainly from Santos' own party and particularly his fellow Republican freshmen in the New York delegation. Those frightened frosh were fearful of Santos dragging them down with him in November, so they pre-emptively removed him and thought they had solved their problem.

They hadn't. As we noted even before the February special election outcome, those NY freshmen congressmen were greatly endangered regardless of the disposition of the Santos situation. Most of the other Five Freshmen -- Nick LaLota (CD-1 and the only real non-fluke), Anthony D'Esposito (CD-4), Mike Lawler (CD-17), Marc Molinaro (CD-19), Brandon Williams (CD-22) -- had won in fluke outcomes in 2022 and it was always likely that their numbers would be thinned considerably in November, 2024.

Photo credit: desposito.house.gov

They sure were, exactly as we predicted. In CD-22 Williams was victimized by a Democrat gerrymander which removed good areas of his marginal district and replaced them with bad ones; it didn't require a major change to the lines, just a little push further to the left was sufficient. In September, anti-Santos ringleader D'Esposito was accused by the liberal media of having an affair and then putting the woman on his payroll, but he was a dead man walking even before that. Molinaro went down in flames in CD-19 as well.

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2024 House Special (?) elections

November 5th was a wonderful night to be an American, and we get to begin enjoying the election results today!

As we had been stating all along, the "landslide" which delusionals on both sides were certain was going to happen (Virginia to Trump! Iowa to Harris! Cao wins VA Senate! Allred defeats Cruz! LOL!) was never going to materialize. But Donald Trump was able to get back to where he was on election night of 2016, and he will be the 47th President of the United States. The Senate has gone almost exactly as expected as well, with GOP pickups in West Virginia and Montana as well as a big tossup win in Ohio. Republicans may even get a bonus Senate seat or two in Pennsylvania and Nevada once all the votes are counted, although those are likely to turn out to be mirages. [Update: PA is being declared a win for McCormick though Democrat election-deniers refuse to concede; Nevada did what it always does to Republicans, though at least Trump won there.]

But the extremely important U.S. House is still up for grabs.

As we predicted, a Trump win in 2024 could easily be accompanied by Republicans losing control of the U.S. House of Representatives. We forecast a net loss for the GOP of 2 to 8 seats and that is very likely what is going to happen -- though we won't know for sure for possibly as long as a month. Democrats need a net gain of four seats in order to seize control of the House from the Republicans. Surely they are planning for that coup by working on articles of impeachment for President Trump already.

The reason for the delay is Ballot Harvesting Month in the state of California. This is where party operatives (mostly Democrats) try to locate people who did not vote, and get them to fill out a ballot for the candidates of their choice. The party's choice, that is.

This will not affect the outcome of the races for President or Senator in California, but it will massively affect approximately half a dozen House races or perhaps even a larger number.

As this is being written on the morning after the glorious election, there are another two dozen or more House districts where insufficient votes have been counted or which are still too close to call despite nearly all votes having already been tabulated. We will enumerate these below.

Here are the districts which have been called as of Wednesday morning, and which have flipped from Republican to Democrat:

• AL-2
• LA-6
• NY-22

• MI-7
• NC-6
• NC-13
• NC-14

• CA-47 (open seat) Scott Baugh gave it a good shot in this D+3 district. No GOP pickups in CA this year but only minimal losses.
• ME-2 (Golden) Golden pulls it out again, unfortunately. He is the most "moderate" Rat in the House, though.
• WA-3 (Perez) Southwest WA rejects a good conservative for the second time in a row; Perez holds on.
• CO-8 (Caraveo) One of the top GOP House targets finally comes through almost a week after election night.
• OH-9 (Kaptur) Got the Ohio Senate seat, but the GOP really blew it in OH at the House level, where +2 was quite possible.
• AK-at large (Peltola) See what happens when the GOP gets smart for a change and limits intra-party warfare?
• NV-3 (Lee) Another close-but-no-cigar, as so often happens in Nevada.
• PA-7 (Wild) For the first time since these PA districts were gerrymandered into existence...
• PA-8 (Cartwright) ...the GOP takes them! They had been 0-for-2 for three straight elections.
• MD-6 (open seat) Would have been a big upset, but the Rat was so repugnant that it almost happened.
• CA-9 (Harder) The GOP didn't really try hard here, but came close anyway.

• NY-4 (D'Esposito) D'Espo has bitten the dust; the GOP needs all possible seats, but good riddance to this scumbag.
• NY-19 (Molinaro) Molinaro went down too in the bloodbath in NY; GOP frosh lost 3 of 5 (4 of 6 if you count Santos).
• CA-13 (Duarte) A victim of California's Ballot Harvesting Month.
• CA-22 (Valadao) An unexpectedly early and positive result!
• CA-27 (Garcia) It was never reasonable to think that ALL vulnerable Republican incumbents in CA were going to win, as we have noted since 2022.
• CA-41 (Calvert) But this one did; good for Calvert for defeating a particularly slimy and hateful Democrat.
• CA-45 (Steel) Another victim of California's Ballot Harvesting Month.
• NE-2 (Bacon) Bacon has won (!). He's no bargain, but he's better than the alternative.
• PA-10 (Perry) Perry (barely) survives as GOP sweeps the winnable eastern PA districts!
• OR-5 (Chavez-DeRemer) Another lost seat. The 2022 (R) win here was an obvious fluke right from the start.
• CO-3 (open seat) The Rat spent more ($15 mill) than any House challenger in the COUNTRY. And still lost. Ha ha.
• IA-1 (Miller-Meeks) By a razor-thin margin, MMM has been declared the winner.
• AZ-1 (Schweikert) A good conservative holds on to his seat.
• AZ-6 (Ciscomani) This moderate-to-somewhat-conservative freshman wins a second term.
• MI-10 (James) James won.

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2024 House? We'll find out in December

Photo credit: CNN

With just a few more hours until the 2024 election campaign season mercifully concludes, we are on track for one of the closest elections in U.S. presidential history if the polls can be believed. But some folks are not so sure about that, and are thinking in terms of "waves" and "landslides" that will deliver not just the White House but also the U.S. House and Senate. For example (just from the past few days):

• Donald Trump Now Set for Landslide: Forecaster Who Backed Kamala Harris
• The most accurate poll of 2020, AtlasIntel, releases their final battleground poll showing Trump winning all 7 battleground states
• Polls Show Trump Closing in on Blue Virginia and Minnesota!
• CNN Data Analyst: Trump on Course to Win Popular Vote

• Democratic Voter Enthusiasm Ahead of Republicans by Double Digits: Poll
• Women dominate early voting across the country and leave Trump's allies nervous
• Donald Trump Suffers Triple Polling Blow in Battleground States He Must Win

  [Miscalculating voter enthusiasm was a huge mistake by Republican analysts in 2020 also.]

Photo credit: Palm Beach Post

Early Voting

We've heard a great deal about how well the GOP is allegedly doing in Early Voting, even in heavily Democrat states like New Jersey, and it's being claimed that Early Voting is going to be the critical determinant as to which side wins once all the votes are in.

The only available facts about Early Voting pertain to the number of ballots requested and returned, which are normally broken down by party registration in those states which actually register voters by party. Until election day when the ballots are counted, there is no way to know who the early voters actually voted for in any race. Therefore it is nothing more than assumptions at this point regarding any of the following:


Assumption #1: "Republicans vote for Trump, Democrats vote for Harris, and we have no clue about independents but we'll pretend that we do." A related happy assumption is that there will be less defections among Republicans than Democrats; i.e. more Democrats are crossing party lines to vote for Trump/Vance, than Republicans who are voting for Cackles and Tampon Timmy. This could turn out to be an unfortunately specious assumption, though not a particularly impactful one.


Assumption #2: Independents are "breaking for the challenger (Trump, in this case) as they normally do". That's probably just an old wives' tale to begin with, and yet another possibly incorrect assumption. All states have a significant number of so-called independent voters, and in numerous states there are more such voters than either Republicans or Democrats. Most people are likely unaware of this fact. So even if Trump, for example, holds 94% of Republicans but Harris only takes 92% of Democrats, that minor difference is absolutely swamped by how the indies vote.

A good illustration of the above comes from 2016 exit polling. Hillary did infinitesimally better (89%) among Democrats than Trump did among Republicans (88%). Both candidates lost 8% of their party to the other side and the remaining 3-4% voted for neither Trump nor Hillary. For every White lower/middle-class Democrat blue collar worker who was attracted by Trump's populist messaging, one liberal suburban soccer-mommy "lifelong" Republican ran sobbing hysterically over to the left and so it was a wash.

Indies made the difference in 2016. Trump did better with them than Hillary, 46% to 42%, though it wasn't sufficient to win the overall popular vote. But it was sufficient to help put him over the top in the closest states. That was 2016; Trump lost indies by 13 points in 2020 (54%-41%), while both he and Biden retained 94% of their own party's votes. Polls in 2024 are all over the place as they flail around trying to figure out how this critical segment of the electorate is going to vote; their sub-sample sizes are normally much too small to draw any conclusions from.


Assumption #3A: Increased GOP turnout in Early Voting will not "cannibalize" their turnout on election day. They'll still have enough voters who are willing to "crawl over broken glass" to get to the polls, and therefore the extra turnout we're seeing prior to November 5th is mostly a bonus!

Assumption #3B: On the other hand, relatively decreased Democrat turnout in Early Voting will persist through election day because many Democrats are too lazy to get up off their fat asses and stand in line; if they don't vote early, they likely won't vote at all!


The amount of bullshit those twin assumptions contain for 2024 remains to be seen. Perhaps, by coincidence, all of these assumptions will finally be correct and those who pretended they "knew" it all along will get to say "we told you so!". That would be great.

In the past, when Democrats thoroughly dominated Early Voting, we were assured that the Republican surge on election day would counterbalance the early Democrat advantage, and then some. But it never came close to doing so, even though Republican voters were often instructed to wait -- and specifically avoid voting early -- because of the fear of turnout cannibalization on the big day, and something about Democrats knowing exactly how much fraud they would need to commit.

Put it all together and you can see that there's a substantial disconnect from:

"GOP is doing a little better in early voting (we up, they down!)"

to:

"WE GONNA WIN RED WAYVE BAY-BEE!!!"

The main value these early voting stats have is propaganda value. In prior years the media and other Democrats could crow about what a huge advantage their party had and how it portended eventual victory; this year Republicans are crowing about how they have narrowed the gap a little bit or, in some cases, more than a little bit. What does it matter? Basically, it doesn't. A vote is a vote, no matter when it is cast. Even, when Democrats get their way, ones which come in well after election day.

Photo credit: Twitchy.com

The 2024 Presidential Election:

As most observers have known all along, it's going to come down to the seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It's entirely possible that all seven will be decided by less than 5 points, possibly much less, and right now nobody knows for a fact exactly which way they are going to go. Maybe that's why they're called "swing" states.

Crackheads on the left are dizzily contemplating Harris winning. . . Texas! And Florida! And Ohio! And IOWA!

Their hopium-snorting counterparts on the right figure Trump has a damn good shot in. . . New Jersey! And Minnesota! And New Mexico! And VIRGINIA!

For another few hours they can still dream before the Methadone of reality kicks in. It will be just peachy if Trump can merely replicate what he did in 2016, by squeaking out razor-thin victories in enough of the swing states to get to 270. The Real Clear Politics recent polling averages show the following:

[As of 7:00 AM ET on 11/5]

• Trump up 2.8% in Arizona (11 EV)
• Trump up 1.3% in Georgia (16 EV) -- but Democrats are already working on the steal.
• Trump DOWN 0.5% in Michigan (15 EV)
• Trump up 0.6% in Nevada (6 EV)
• Trump up 1.2% in North Carolina (16 EV)
• Trump up 0.4% in Pennsylvania (19 EV)
• Trump DOWN 0.4% in Wisconsin (10 EV)

• Blowout fantasies notwithstanding, the pollsters aren't wrong about how close things are.
  
  Or are they?
  
  Nate Silver thinks they're not only wrong, they are outright lying. He doesn't say for whose benefit they are lying (it's for their own benefit, actually, so as to keep themselves relevant). So who does he think is clearly ahead?
  
  He says: Trump 55%, Cackles 45%. That's not an expected popular vote percentage (obviously), it's the probability of victory as Silver sees it. However just a few days earlier (October 23), Nate claimed "the election remains a 50-50 coin flip". Now he's angry at pollsters who say the same thing. Have things changed so dramatically since then? Has Trump really surged that much in two weeks?
  
  
  
  Real Clear Politics polling average as of 11/2: Trump vs. Harris (click image to enlarge)

  Trump has apparently improved his position, and it's not like a 55% chance of victory makes his election a mortal lock anyway. Presidential contests in the swing states really are likely to be nailbiters, regardless of whether Nate Silver objects or not. If the actual margins aren't quite as small as the pollsters are claiming and, for example, Harris wins and obtains a significantly greater number of votes than was expected, the pollsters will shed some crocodile tears regarding their lack of credibility. While at the same time gleefully accepting the outcome.
  
  Even better for them: when 2028 rolls around these pollsters can be accused of having overstated Republican percentages in the recent past, instead of simply being shills for the Democrats. That would undoubtedly be a first in U.S. polling history, at least since the days of "Dewey Beats Truman!". It would remove a vital "crutch" ("ALL POLLZ ARE BI-USSSED TO THE LEFT!!1!) from amateur polling experts on the right. Let's pray it doesn't happen that way.

  
  

• By declaring so many tossups, the pollsters can't really be blamed if the result is slightly the opposite of what they predicted. Exactly how many decimal places are polls supposed to be accurate to?
  
  For example, the final Pennsylvania poll from left-leaning (to put it mildly) Quinnipiac College asserts that Donald Trump will win by 1% there (47% to 46%) with a margin of error of 2.1%. If/when it turns out that Heels-Up Harris wins PA by a small amount then Quinnipiac can hardly be roasted for inaccurate forecasting; a swing of, say, 2% between their poll and the final outcome is not remarkable and only the perpetually-outraged would say otherwise. Besides, if the phrase "President Harris" ever becomes "a thing", there will be a hell of a lot more to be outraged about than some minor polling variance.

Photo credit: National Review

The Senate:

The Democrats currently hold a 51-49 advantage, including the four so-called "independents" who march along with the Rats. If there is one certainty in the Senate this year, it is the Republicans picking up the West Virginia seat from the retiring Joe Manchin. Recent polling is somewhat sparse, but GOP challenger Tim Sheehy is supposed to be up by about 6 points against ultra-liberal Democrat incumbent Jon Tester in Montana and, along with everyone else who is already counting that chicken as having hatched, we'll agree that in 2024 Tester finally goes down in flames after a Senate career that was much longer than it should have been.

With those two seats in hand, it would be Republicans with the 51-49 advantage next year.

Next on the potential flip list is Ohio, a supposedly crimson "red" state (like Montana) which (also like Montana) has been electing a far-left Democrat to the Senate for far too long. This race is a tossup. Incumbent Sherrod Brown has won three times in the past, by 12 points in 2006, 6 points in 2012, and 7 points in 2018 (crimson red, my ass). But that was then and this is now. Brown is in a dogfight for the first time, with polls favoring him over Bernie Moreno by perhaps a single point. Brown's margin is slender, but he is ahead in almost 100% of the polls even including Trafalgar (R).

Photo credit: The Hill

It's not necessarily about voters actually supporting the dim-bulb Democrats in FL & TX; it's more about voting against the Republicans. Neither Scott nor Cruz are popular with anything more than the tiniest majority of the electorate in their states. Trump is going to win Florida and Texas and even though casual observers will be surprised to hear that a coattail effect might be required for Scott and Cruz, that very well may be the case. We'll say they both pull it out in the end.

Nebraska could be different (though it probably won't be), and that would be the biggest upset of them all. Trump will win Nebraska by an even larger percentage than Texas and Florida, but Fischer is claimed to be running so far behind Trump that she might lose her grip on his coat; she should hardly need such assistance in the first place. Trump is not universally popular in the Cornhusker state -- he is going to lose CD-2 (Omaha) again, and the electoral vote which goes with it; and the liberal GOP House incumbent in CD-2 (Don Bacon) is looking likely to be defeated by the slimy Democrat insect who's opposing him. Trump's support in Nebraska is enormous in the rural western two-thirds of the state, but is tenuous in the Lincoln area and underwater in Omaha.

And now for the potential good news:

In the House, Republican control is in serious jeopardy because of the number of toss-up districts they must defend, because of where the toss-up districts are located, and because of the dynamics of those districts including their partisan composition and the astronomical amount of "possibly" illegally-laundered "ActBlue" money Democrats are spending.

No, that's not the good news.

The good news is that in the Senate the situation is the opposite of the House in one important aspect: it is the Democrats who must do the defending in the marginal states. Those states are:

• Arizona (open; was Kyrsten Sinema)
• Michigan (open; was Debbie Stabenow)
• Nevada (Jacky Rosen)
• Ohio (Sherrod Brown)
• Pennsylvania (Bob Casey, Jr. )
• Wisconsin (Tammy Baldwin)

Photo credit: Fox News

As far as the likely outcome: as we have noted on numerous occasions, having only 51 or 52 seats is not satisfactory to give the GOP anything but nominal control. There are at least two Republican senators -- Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) -- who are for all intents and purposes Democrats. They can continue to sabotage GOP efforts from within as the leadership would prefer; they can drop the charade and become Democrats; or they can go the "independent" route. Regardless, GOP "control" of the Senate will be largely illusory in every way aside from perhaps mathematics.

Current U.S. House breakdown by district
(Map created using mapchart.net)

The House:

As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, there are 40 (out of 435) House seats that can be truly considered as toss-ups this year, with perhaps another 25 lying near toss-up territory. The other 370 seats are just about 100% safe for whichever party currently holds them.

The current split in the House is, effectively, 221 Republicans and 214 Democrats; 218 is the magic number needed to have control, which means that a net loss of merely 4 House seats and it's "Say hello to Hakeem Homeboy" as the new Speaker of the House. And that means, assuming Trump wins the presidency, "Impeachment begins on day one!". It may sound incongruous that Trump could be elected while at the same time the GOP loses its grip on the House; that is not an unlikely parlay at all. When Trump "lost" in 2020, Republicans actually gained 13 House seats that November; it was as if Trump had coattails. . . but no coat for himself. This year could be the opposite, with a Trump win and GOP House losses.

Negative factors in the House:

• Republicans have far more marginal seats to defend than Democrats do.

• Republican candidates, on average, have less (sometimes much less) funding than their Democrat opponents.

• The most marginal seats are almost entirely (34 out of 40) in "blue" states which Trump is definitely going to lose, or in swing states which could go either way. Only six of the 40 are in states which Trump is going to win.

• ME-2, held by Jared Golden since 2018 when he won only because Maine has Rigged Choice Voting (RCV). RCV may save him again.
• AK-at large, held by Mary Peltola since 2022. Alaska also has RCV, and Peltola also may be saved by it.
• MI-7, an open seat vacated by Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin.
• CA-47, another open seat vacated by a Senate candidate (Katie Porter).
• WA-3, held by Marie Gluesenkamp Perez since 2022; she is facing a rematch with Republican Joe Kent.
• CO-8, held by Yadira Caraveo since 2022; this is a marginal district situated north of Denver.

• NY-22, Brandon Williams was always in danger and the 2024 Democrat gerrymander in New York sealed his fate.
• NY-04, say goodbye to Anthony D'Esposito, who will have the distinction of costing the GOP two seats in 2024 (his own, and the adjacent one formerly held by George Santos).
• NE-2, liberal Republican Don Bacon, as mentioned above in the Senate commentary.
• OR-5, freshman Lori Chavez-DeRemer won in a fluke in 2022 but is likely toast now.
• PA-10, conservative Scott Perry won't be missed by the GOPe after being defeated by an ultra-liberal media bimbo.
• IA-1, moderate Republican Marianette Miller-Meeks is being overwhelmed by a flood of Democrat cash. Republicans could lose two of their four seats in Iowa, even though Trump should win the state easily. Probably the House loss will be just one seat (this one) at most.
• AZ-6, freshman Juan Ciscomani is too conservative for the GOPe and too liberal to suit actual conservatives. He could lose to a well-funded femiNazi, similar to the one Miller-Meeks is facing in Iowa.

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2024 House Senate Presidency Hope we're wrong about the House

Current U.S. House breakdown by district
(Map created using mapchart.net)

1. Competitiveness

As happens every two years, all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (one for each congressional district) are up for re-election. Some folks equate this to 435 flips of a coin, and believe that -- with some luck -- Republicans could win 250 seats, maybe 300, maybe more!!!! That rosy outlook reflects considerable ignorance as to how these districts are constructed.

The fact is that somewhere around 360 of those 435 districts are not competitive at all and have only the most miniscule chance of changing hands; they are almost 100% safe for whichever party currently holds them. That leaves approximately 75 districts which are truly competitive to any extent -- or which should be hotly contested, but sometimes aren't. These 75 are the ones where control of the House will be determined in a few weeks, and of those 75 it's really only about 40 which are truly "toss-ups" this year.

We use objective criteria to determine which districts are the "swing" districts; in addition to recent past results, we consider:

• Partisan composition of the district
• Suitability of the candidates to the district
• Potential effects of other races (like the one for President) on downballot elections like these
• How hard the parties are trying to win, which is easily measured in terms of $$$$

• CT-5: Hayes (D)
• ME-2: Golden (D)
• NJ-3: open (D) -- D+5 district, limited GOP funds are better spent elsewhere
• NJ-7: Kean (R)
• NY-1: LaLota (R)
• NY-2: Garbarino (R) -- Democrats have other far better pickup opportunities in NY
• NY-4: D'Esposito (R)
• NY-17: Lawler (R)
• NY-18: Ryan (D)
• NY-19: Molinaro (R)
• NY-22: Williams (R)
• PA-1: Fitzpatrick (R)
• PA-7: Wild (D) -- R+2 district but Republicans seemingly conceding defeat anyway
• PA-8: Cartwright (D)
• PA-10 Perry (R)
• PA-17: DeLuzio (D) -- district rated even but same story as PA-7

• MD-6: open (D) -- GOP retread has little chance against mega-$$$$ Democrat
• VA-2: Kiggans (R) -- could be a battleground but GOPe ($$$) loves this moderate freshman
• VA-7: open (D)

• FL-13: Luna (R) -- local (biased) "shock" poll showed her losing; even Rats don't believe that
• NC-1: Davis (D)

• IA-1: Miller-Meeks (R)
• IA-2: Hinson (R) -- a rare potential battleground that Democrats declined to compete in
• IA-3: Nunn (R)
• IL-17: Sorenson (D) -- only D+2 but seems farther left; GOP basically punting here
• MI-3: Scholten (D) -- only D+1 but another GOP punt
• MI-7: open (D)
• MI-8: open (D)
• MI-10: James (R)
• MN-2: Craig (D) -- Rats have always spent big to support this carpetbagging dyke from Arkansas
• OH-1: Landsman (D) -- another winnable district in which the Republicans have bailed
• OH-9: Kaptur (D) -- Republicans showing a faint pulse here, but not much more
• OH-13: Sykes (D) -- see OH-1, and this district is even MORE winnable than that one
• WI-3: Van Orden (R)

• CO-3: open (R)
• CO-8: Caraveo (D)
• KS-3: Davids (D) -- yet another R+ district with a radical leftist Rat incumbent; GOP punts again
• MT-1: Zinke (R)
• NE-2: Bacon (R)
• TX-15: de la Cruz (R) -- a marginal district where the Republican seems to be safe
• TX-28: Cuellar (D) -- Democrat with ethical issues; Republicans let him completely slide
• TX-34: Gonzalez (D)

• AK-At Large: Peltola (D)
• AZ-1: Schweikert (R)
• AZ-6: Ciscomani (R)
• CA-3: Kiley (R)
• CA-9: Harder (D) -- D+5 isn't that far left for CA but GOP pulled the plug to play defense elsewhere
• CA-13: Duarte (R)
• CA-22: Valadao (R)
• CA-27: Garcia (R)
• CA-40: Kim (R) -- she's no conservative and has a lot of $$$; Rats are sort of giving her a pass this time
• CA-41: Calvert (R)
• CA-45: Steel (R)
• CA-47: open (D)
• CA-49: Levin (D)
• NM-2: Vasquez (D)
• NV-1: Titus (D)
• NV-3: Lee (D) -- a vulnerable but well-funded Rat in a marginal district; GOP not trying hard enough
• NV-4: Horsford (D) -- ditto
• OR-5: Chavez-DeRemer (R)
• WA-3: Perez (D)
• WA-8: Schrier (D) -- district is more marginal than it appears, but Republicans haven't noticed

• CT-5 -- GOP candidate from '22 back for a rematch; came within 1 point last time
• MI-10 -- also a 2022 rematch and it was very close (0.5%) then
• MT-1 -- and yet another rematch; Zinke should win somewhat comfortably
• NV-1 -- a D+1 district in which the GOP is at least trying to compete
• PA-1 -- the 4th 2022 rematch in this section; lots of D $$$ here (unlike '22) but probably won't prevail
• PA-8 -- an R+4 district held by a very wealthy slimy trial lawyer D incumbent; don't get your hopes up

• AZ-2: Crane (R)
• CO-4: open (R -- Lauren Boebert moving over from CO-3)
• FL-9: Soto (D)
• FL-27: Salazar (R)
• FL-28: Gimenez (R)
• IN-1: Mrvan (D)
• NH-1: Pappas (D)
• NH-2: open (D)
• OR-4: Hoyle (D)
• OR-6: Salinas (D)
• TN-5: Ogles (R)
• WI-1: Steil (R)

Tags:

2024 House "Red" wave in the House? Not likely

Photo credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

The caption at rollcall.com which accompanies the above photo describes Senator Bob Casey, Jr. (D-PA) and his wife as they "celebrate on the final night of the Democratic National Convention". That's one grim-looking "celebration". It seems they aren't feeling the "joy" which, as you surely know by now, is one of the laughable emotional buzzwords that has been assigned to Queen Kamala's campaign by the gaslighting liberal media. It looks more like the Caseys are feeling a bit of constipation, and there's some chance they may get that sensation again in November, whenever Pennsylvania finally decides to stop vote-counting.

The article linked above was published on Thursday and ranges from the mundane to the ludicrous. It's mostly good news for Republicans, with (on the mundane side) the five Senate seats most likely to flip being ones currently held by Democrats. On the ludicrous side, they dredge up the highly unlikely possibility of upsets in dead-red (proper color usage) New Mexico and true-blue Nebraska.

We'll give our detailed analysis below, which provides much more depth than the cursory evaluations published by left-leaning Roll Call. What follows are the Senate races, in order of their likelihood to move from R to D based on the outcome of the 2024 elections. The current partisan breakdown of the Senate is 51-49, with Democrats in control. There are only 47 actual Democrats, but there are four so-called "independents" and every one of those four are highly dependent on the Democrat party. Even the ones who are retiring after 2024 (Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema) are still showing their true colors and voting with the Democrats as often as ever.

Photo credit: CNN

1. West Virginia

West Virginia is going to be a Republican pickup, period, and at this point there's nothing pertinent left to say about the Mountain State's Senate race. Incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin ran away rather than see his perfect record of election victories shattered into pieces, and doddering moderate Governor Jim Justice will be the new senator from West Virginia in 2025. His voting record may not differ much from Manchin's, and Justice will be a reliable tool for Mitch McConnell or whichever one of his sock puppets becomes the party leader in the Senate next year.

West Virginia will finally have two elected GOP senators for the first time in nearly a century. It's a shame that this now heavily-Republican state still won't have any conservative senators.

Photo credit: Fox News

2. Montana

The Senate race in Montana is looking OK for now, but don't count those chickens yet; the Biden-Harris administration may quietly transport some Haitian "refugees" into Montana, and those chickens (and geese, cats, dogs, etc.) would become greatly endangered.

A few months ago the GOP establishment, or those who work on its behalf, used threats of violence against conservative Rep. Matt Rosendale and his family in order to intimidate him out of the Montana GOP Senate primary (and out of Congress altogether) just moments after he entered that race.

Moderate businessman Tim Sheehy thus was effectively unopposed for the Republican nomination to take on three-term liberal Democrat Jon Tester. Tester has never been truly popular with the Montana electorate -- he's cleared 50% just once in three tries, and even that one was by a mere 0.3% -- but he is adept at campaigning as something other than the ultra-liberal that he is, he has the state's major media outlets thoroughly on his side, and he has benefited in the past by the presence of Libertarian candidates who suck votes away from the Republican. The last time Tester ran (2018) the Libertarian saw that he was being used as a pawn for Democrat dirty tricks, and he withdrew from the race and endorsed the Republican. But since he exited only one week before the election, it had little effect aside from highlighting the dirtiness of the Democrats.

Montana is far from the monolithically-Republican state that some may think it is. It almost never votes Democrat for President (just once since 1968, and that was only because of the Perot Factor in 1992), but Democrats have won 9 of the last 12 elections for Senator or Governor. One of Montana's two House districts is somewhat marginal; the other is solid GOP.

Photo credit: AP News

At long last it appears that Tester's appeal has diminished to the point where he is in serious trouble. He may be in trouble in the polls, where surveys lately show Sheehy ahead by about 5 points, but if money alone determined the election outcome Tester would be winning in a landslide. As of the latest FEC filings, Tester has spent over $33 million as opposed to just over $10 million for Sheehy. As we have mentioned here on numerous occasions, there's not a House district or Senate seat in the U.S. where Democrats can't outspend Republicans by incredible margins if they want to. This will be proven to be true in almost every single hotly-contested Senate and House race in 2024.

This race is not nearly over yet, and Sheehy's lead is hardly insurmountable. Even months-old data shows Tester with nearly $11 million still in the bank, and those funds will be used to saturate the airwaves and mailboxes of Montana with typical Democrat ads full of hate and lies about Sheehy (and lies about what a great senator Tester has been). Sheehy may not yet comprehend what's going to hit him between now and November, but he will find out shortly and he'd better be prepared. His lead could evaporate as quickly as it materialized.

Photo credit: 10TV

3. Ohio

The current Senate campaign in Ohio bears a strong resemblance to the one which took place in that state two years ago. The only substantial difference is that there was no incumbent seeking re-election in 2022 however there is one running in 2024. Incumbency is normally a distinct advantage, and this race is no exception even though the incumbent is a Democrat and Ohio (like Montana) is thought to be unfriendly territory for those on the far left of the political spectrum.

In 2022, Republican senatorial squish Rob Portman retired and there was a fractious 3-way primary to determine the GOP Senate nominee, while slimy Democrat challenger Tim Ryan faced no intra-party opposition and was able to keep his powder dry while watching three Republicans stab at each other.

In 2024 there was a fractious 3-way primary to determine the GOP Senate nominee, while slimy Democrat incumbent Sherrod Brown faced no intra-party opposition and was able to keep his powder dry while watching three Republicans stab at each other.

Photo credit: WCPO

The 2022 Republican nominee, J.D. Vance, was (and still is) unacceptably conservative according to the wimpy wing of the Republican party, he had some trouble raising money and seemed to be off the air for long periods in the summer while Ryan was on the attack 24/7. Smelling blood in the water and sensing an unexpected pickup opportunity, Democrats flooded the state with oodles of cash and Ryan was able to outspend Vance by the margin of $57 million to $15 million. After trailing most of the time, finally in October Vance consistently pulled ahead in the polls and then won in November, but it was uncomfortably close in supposedly "dark red" Ohio.

Photo credit: Ohio Star

The 2024 Republican nominee, Bernie Moreno, is unacceptably conservative according to the wimpy wing of the Republican party, he has had some trouble raising money and seemed to be off the air for long periods in the summer while Brown was on the attack 24/7. Democrats flooded the state with oodles of cash and Brown has so far been able to outspend Moreno by the margin of $43 million to $11 million. After trailing the entire time, finally in September Moreno appears to be closing the gap in the polls, but has yet to be shown in the lead in any poll. Will "dark red" Ohio come through for Moreno, with Trump dragging him across the finish line?

We'll see.

Trump may have difficulty attaining the 8-point margin he received in Ohio in 2020, which means his coattails aren't going to be as long as might be hoped.

Photo credit: Market Realist

4. Michigan

Retiring liberal Democrat incumbent Debbie Stabenow was first elected to Congress in 1996 when she unseated conservative freshman Republican Dick Chrysler in Michigan's 8th congressional district. At the time that district was rated as "even" although it included all of Ingham County (Lansing) and a heavily-Democrat suburban portion of Genesee County (Flint). The presence of suburban Livingston County helped balance out the bad areas of the district, and Chrysler had won in the glorious year of 1994 because of Livingston alone (he very narrowly lost the rest of the district).

As you will see, there has been a cozy relationship between this Senate seat and that particular congressional district ever since.

Stabenow moved up to the Senate in 2000, failing to win a majority of the vote but still defeating incumbent one-termer Spencer Abraham. Abraham's win in 1994 was the last time a Republican was elected to the U.S. Senate from the state of Michigan, and Stabenow was re-elected with relative ease in 2006, 2012 and 2018, all of which were anti-GOP years. Like nearly all Democrats in elections which are even slightly contested by Republicans, Stabenow was able to outspend her GOP opponents each time by considerable margins.

Photo credit: Rogers for Senate

Stabenow's replacement in the 8th congressional district in 2000 was Republican Mike Rogers -- the same guy who is now trying to replace her in the Senate in 2024. Rogers, who was at the time a Michigan state senator, defeated fellow state senator Dianne Byrum in 2000 by just 160 votes out of nearly 300,000. Rogers campaigned as a moderate and was even able to obtain some endorsements from Democrat politicians.

Rogers' voting record in the House was a shade to the right of "moderate" for most of his 14-year career, which ended when he chose not to run for re-election to an 8th term in 2014. The 8th district was moved to the right in the 2001 redistricting, perhaps emboldening Rogers to show a little more backbone in his congressional voting. Or maybe it forced him to move a little to the right, lest he be vulnerable to a conservative challenge in a primary election.

The district's partisan composition notwithstanding, Rogers anticipated that he would never face the voters again and therefore he dropped the charade and lurched to the left in his final term. He announced his retirement in March of 2014, and pointedly declined to endorse a conservative Republican state legislator as his successor (claiming that the guy might "embarrass" the district) and opted instead to back the more moderate Mike Bishop.

After two terms in the House, Bishop was sent packing in the anti-Trump referendum election of 2018. Bishop's ultra-liberal Democrat opponent and her party were able to spend a whopping $7.5 million to purchase that House seat -- and that doesn't even include the $5.5 million which was accumulated on her behalf by "independent" groups.

Who was that extremely well-funded Democrat?

Photo credit: CNN

It was Elissa Slotkin -- the "former" Deep State operative who is now the Democrat nominee for the 2024 Senate race against Mike Rogers.

Financially, it's the same story as in all other swing states this year: the Democrat has raised and spent far more money than the Republican. As of two months ago, which is the latest available data at this time, Slotkin has raised $24 million to $5 million for Rogers; she has spent $15 million while Rogers has forked out less than $3 million.

You don't have to be in some Michigan media market to understand that voters are being influenced by non-stop Democrat ads, while Rogers probably has his hands full just playing defense and trying to fight off the attacks. Rogers has done well to stay within the margin of error (but always on the losing side) in the polls. A poll which was released on September 13 showed him down by 3 points, which is his high-water mark over the last several months.

Can Rogers break the 30-year iron grip which liberal Democrats have had on Michigan's pair of Senate seats? The probability of that happening is still less than 50%, but his chances seem to be improving at this time.

Photo credit: Lancaster Online

5. Pennsylvania

Current senator Bob Casey, Jr. is dumber than a chimp (or even Kamala Harris). But unfortunately so are a slim majority of PA voters, as has been consistently demonstrated in recent years with the exception of the 2016 presidential election, when Democrat overconfidence led to a (relative) lack of fraud on their part, and Trump was able to win the Keystone State by a fraction of a percent.

Part of that slim majority of ignorant PA voters consists of Gullible Geezers who tend to believe whatever lies ("Republicans are going to ELIMINATE your Social Security and Medicare! For real this time!") the liberal media continually spouts on behalf of their party.

PA is a fairly elderly state, with a percentage of over-65s (18.8%) that is nearly as high as Florida's (20.3%). When they see the name "Casey" on a ballot, some portion of Pennsylvania geezer-dom undoubtedly believes that it is Bob Casey SENIOR they are voting for. Senior was a much-beloved Governor in the 1980s and 90s who became famous nationally when he was prohibited from speaking at the 1992 Democrat National Convention due to his outspoken anti-abortionist position. Senior was totally in line with liberal Democrat orthodoxy on every other issue, however.

Photo credit: Dave McCormick PA

Casey's (the Junior one) challenger this year is Dave McCormick. McCormick spent lavishly of his own money in the 2022 Republican primary vs. "Electable" Dr. Oz, but lost by less than 1,000 votes out of 1.34 million which were cast. McCormick graciously conceded and now has returned for another shot at the Senate -- this time with the GOP field cleared for him; no more dealing with pesky moderate dilettantes like Oz or staunch conservatives like Kathy Barnette. McCormick is again funding a large part ($4 million as of late June) of his own campaign and, aside from a recent left-biased outlier poll from CBS, appears to be inching closer to a possible -- but still unlikely -- upset.

Casey is now in his 18th Senate year, and has voted the liberal position 94% of the time during his tenure. He has been a reliable supporter of the Biden-Harris agenda and marches out of lockup on only the rarest and most unimportant of occasions. McCormick is a wealthy moderate businessman -- the kind of candidate the GOP establishment absolutely adores. Wealthy businessguys often lack icky conservatism and they have the ability to waste spend lots of money on their own behalf. It could be argued that a true conservative would have little chance of being elected statewide in Pennsylvania, and a nominal conservative like Pat Toomey or Rick Santorum is the best we can do.

Should McCormick somehow pull off the upset, his voting record in the Senate would likely be a little to the left of Toomey-Santorum though nowhere near (hopefully) as lunatic leftist as ex-Republican Senator Arlen "Judas" Specter, who went out in a blaze of bitterness back in 2010. Anything even close to Toomey-Santorum territory would be a tremendous improvement over the Casey pup in the empty suit.

PA may be 51% Democrat at the ballot box, but it deserves better than a pair of 100% liberal Senators; one is quite enough.

• Democrats are desperately wishing for major upsets of Republican Senate incumbents in Florida and Texas; there are no other GOP-held Senate seats which are even close to being in play. Republicans are desperately hoping for major upsets in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin or Maryland. The probability is that none of the above will happen, although the loss of Florida or Texas for the GOP has a greater chance of occurring than pickups elsewhere.
• GOP candidates are particularly floundering in the southwest (AZ, NV) and Ted Cruz is underperforming in Texas. We've already written in great detail about how Texas is absolutely not the solid "red" state that it might have been a few years ago, and people have quickly forgotten how marginal Florida is capable of being; 2018 wasn't all that long ago.
• Even after Governor Ron DeSantis' successful election integrity measures which targeted shady Democrat election officials in places such as Broward County and Palm Beach County, Florida can still be finicky and Rick Scott may not be taking this Senate race as seriously as he should. Scott has raised a handsome sum of money, but he may have shot his wad too early -- the femiNazi running against Scott actually has more cash on hand as of the end of July. She is also a lot closer to Scott in the polls than she should be.
  
  Debbie Mucarsel Hyphen Powell isn't right on Scott's tail because of anything desirable or positive on her end; she may as well be listed on the ballot simply as "Not Rick Scott". Scott is the "Jon Tester" of Florida -- he has won three elections and only once has he cleared 50% (he received 50.1% in 2018). He is not popular and never has been; he has been just barely popular enough in the past.
• Only one outlier poll has showed the Republican within true striking distance in Wisconsin. In Maryland, although Larry Hogan is keeping it somewhat close against his affirmative-action opponent, Hogan seems less interested in winning a Senate seat than he does in using his campaign as a vehicle for virtue-signaling and Trump-hating.
  
  Perhaps Maryland's version of Chris Christie is trying to position himself as a GOP presidential candidate for 2028? Or maybe he's looking to be the Democrat nominee? Either way, Hogan's not winning anything in 2024 absent divine intervention. He's going to get beat down hard in the Baltimore-D.C. corridor.

Tags:

2024 Senate Montana Ohio Michigan Pennsylvania

Your humble author here at RightDataUSA can now see that he wasted his time many years ago getting a 4-year Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Statistics, because it turns out that a person can become an expert on subjects like polling, sampling, margins of error, etc. without any expensive formal education. He can demonstrate his alleged expertise simply by parroting the same boilerplate drivel which those who are offended by unwelcome polling results routinely resort to.

As the chart above (from Real Clear Polling) shows, this year's presidential election polls were going fairly well (i.e. telling us what we wanted to hear) up to a certain point, and now most of them are absolutely bogus (i.e. telling us what we don't want to hear). These bogus pollsters obviously live in their own fantasy world. They are clearly Democrat puppets with no interest in reflecting reality, but instead are focused on trying to gaslight the public and shape reality to their liking (oh dear, there's some of that boilerplate drivel).

Of course Democrat pollsters damn well do engage in gaslighting, but that (along with the rest of the drivel) is merely a weak crutch; when these crutches are constantly used and abused in an attempt to explain away every poll we don't like -- just as "Frodd, frodd, frodd!!!" is used to explain away every election outcome we don't like -- these feeble rationalizations lose whatever factual impact they may actually have possessed, and they become a cogent explanation for precisely nothing.

Real Clear Politics polling average: Trump vs. Biden (click image to enlarge)

Donald Trump was doing reasonably well in what turned out to be the final polls against Joe Biden, but suddenly things are a lot tighter or have even flipped in some places. Weird, eh?

It's almost as if something important pertaining to the election has changed.

Like the identity of the Democrat nominee.

Real Clear Politics polling average: Trump vs. Harris (click image to enlarge)

Some who are not entirely clueless on the subject of polling claim -- with some justification -- that the reversals suffered by Trump and down-ballot Republicans lately do not necessarily mean that respondents have reconsidered whom they intend to vote for in November. But they proceed from that valid assertion to declare that the numbers have begun heading the wrong direction merely because the pollsters are "cooking the books" -- meaning that they have baselessly altered their underlying sampling schemes in various ways which appear to energize the left and demoralize the right. What these folks identify as the pollsters' motivation for this (e.g., "setting up the Democrat steal in November") descends back into boilerplate drivel territory, but regardless of motivation the dynamics of the upcoming election have changed and the forecasting models which are employed by pollsters therefore must also change.

Polling companies vary in their methods for determining the composition of the American electorate. They must make alterations in their samples regarding respondents' sex, race, political identification, geographic location, education level and a myriad of other factors whenever necessary. Some companies make subtle alterations (which can still be sufficient to generate significant movement); some companies make more blatant alterations; and some perhaps make none at all.

Like the captain of the Andrea Doria, there are pollsters who do not accept that danger lies ahead; they refuse to change course and continue on just as if conditions haven't changed. Continuing that analogy, there are a tiny number of pollsters including Rasmussen Reports which those on the right cling to like a life raft when everything else around them seems to be sinking. Like some others in the business, Ras will only reveal the recipe for their secret sauce for a price, so we can't determine whether the relatively happy (outlier) polling results which they continually provide -- for now -- are based on ignorance of reality or on something else which might be justifiable. Other life rafts for the right (or perhaps just flotsam and jetsam) currently include Fox News (!) and Trafalgar.

Photo credit: CNN

Picture, if you will, an alternate universe where Nikki Haley easily won all of the 2024 GOP primaries because she was unopposed except by some pissant candidate like whoever the Republican equivalent of Dean Phillips is (some alleged "moderate" who nobody's ever heard of).

Then the conservatives in the GOP stage a "coup" and force Haley out of the race in favor of Donald Trump, who wasn't even on the ballot in the primaries.

Now let's say the pollsters do not change their forecasting models, and therefore they show Trump doing no better than Haley against the Democrat, or perhaps doing even worse than her.

What would we be shrieking about then?

Photo credit: Ethan Hyman

Among other things, we'd be hearing:

"Pollsters are still 'oversampling' wimmen! But Trump is the nominee now and that's going to bring out more men as a percentage of voters! They need to account for that!"

"Trump is White and Haley is a minority (either Asian or black depending on whichever is most helpful at any given moment), but pollsters are still oversampling non-Whites!"

"They aren't acknowledging our exponentially-increased enthusiasm and that's the biggest factor of them all! They've tried to wave that off by claiming that Trump is just enjoying a brief 'honeymoon' period and they believe our enthusiasm will greatly diminish by November. No way, Jose! Trump really is a rock star -- just look at his rallies -- and our excitement is going to peak on election day! It's never going to wear off!"

"We grudgingly voted for Haley in the primaries because we had no other choice; she wasn't inspiring at all. Her support was a mile wide and an inch deep, and yet she wasn't faring too poorly in the polls against the Democrat. But now that Trump is our guy we have discovered the meaning of 'joy'! The pollsters still aren't budging and are refusing to accept what will surely be a dramatic turnout spike on the GOP side! We're pumped! We're stoked! We haven't seen passion like this since Ronald Reagan was running! We'd crawl over broken glass, blah blah blah...."

"In short, everything is different now, but these lying partisan Democrat pollsters haven't changed one thing. They truly live in a bubble!"

But not us. Definitely not us.

We don't like the polls but we can't change reality if we can't even bear to face reality. This election is far from over, but doing an impression of an ostrich from now until November is not the recommended way to try to achieve the best result for America.

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2024 Polls Alternate Universe

In 2020 the voters of Alaska allowed themselves to be bamboozled by a slick advertising campaign bankrolled by tons of out-of-state liberal money, and approved Rigged Choice Voting (RCV) by the margin of 50.5% to 49.5%; it took effect with the 2022 elections. Under RCV as it is still being used in Alaska in 2024, all candidates for an office run together on a single primary ballot, with the top 4 -- regardless of party -- advancing to the general election ballot. If no candidate gets over 50% on the "first" ballot in November, votes are shuffled around and many voters are disenfranchised, and then the Democrat (or ultra-liberal Republican) wins. At least that's how it works in practice.

The primary goal of RCV is to marginalize conservative candidates and prevent them from winning an election, and RCV therefore attempts to force Republicans to move drastically to the left in order to have any chance. Mendacious proponents of RCV claim that the same thing theoretically happens on the other side too -- with radical leftists being forced to the center as well -- yet ultra-liberal Democrats are somehow never affected. Not one Democrat has yet lost a federal election because of RCV, but several Republicans or conservatives have.

Photo credit: womenzmag.com

For example, RCV was directly responsible for the otherwise highly-unlikely Republican loss of the Alaska U.S. House seat in 2022, and this new convoluted way of counting votes assisted immeasurably with the Senate re-election of far-left "Republican" Lisa Murkowski over underfunded conservative challenger Kelly Tshibaka that year. Democrats did not even bother to contest that Senate election aside from the tiniest token effort, since Murkowski is for all intents and purposes one of them anyway; she votes more often with Democrats than she does with Republicans.

One thing which is of paramount importance in this rigged system is for a major party to enforce discipline among its potential candidates, making sure not to split the vote among party rivals. The Democrats, who don't exactly have a lot of candidates in Alaska anyway, understand this; the Republicans -- who are known as the Stupid Party, and for good reason -- have repeatedly failed to grasp this concept.

In 2022, Sarah Palin and Nick Begich split the GOP vote and allowed a liberal Democrat to steal the election even though Republicans took over 60% of the open primary vote. The Palin-haters within the GOP who initially supported Begich then "won" in November by throwing their support to the Democrat instead of to Palin.

Photo credit: Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

Buyer's remorse regarding RCV has set in, and this November the repeal of that abomination will be on the ballot after withstanding court challenges from the left. That's fine, but Republicans on August 20 took one (perhaps) last opportunity to demonstrate their stupidity. They once again ran multiple candidates for the House -- Begich is back for another shot, opposed by gadfly candidate Nancy Dahlstrom -- and once again have created a damaging intra-party rift which is likely to be costly in November.

Liberal Democrat incumbent Mary Peltola, who has been furiously faking to the center with her House votes this year, even achieved a tick more than 50% of the vote in last Tuesday's all-party primary. If this happens again in 2 1/2 months, the Rigged Choice Voting provisions won't even be necessary for the Republicans to be defeated once more in their quest for Alaska's lone seat in Congress. The disarray among the GOP in The Last Frontier may even result in the permanent retention of Rigged Choice Voting, since Republicans are the ones who oppose this Democrat scheme while Democrats (obviously) strongly support it, and the Republican fracture at the House level may carry over and jeopardize the repeal of RCV.

Those Republicans who support the repeal of RCV are currently being outspent by a 2:1 ratio by Democrat forces which desperately wish to keep it in place. Do not take this issue lightly simply because it's happening in a state which is as far away as possible from most American voters, and not normally considered to be politically significant.

Maine and Alaska have been the guinea pigs for Rigged Choice Voting and liberals couldn't be happier with the results they have achieved so far. Though a handful of states have pre-emptively banned RCV, there's still a good chance that it will be approaching a state near you in the not-too-distant future.

Photo credit: ustimespost.com

The state of Washington held its primary on August 6, but the deadline for vote-counting isn't until August 23. There were a few races worth noting in this all-mail voting state, including one which very well may continue past the stated deadline -- but only if the Republican erases the infinitesimal lead which a Democrat currently has. After all, it's a well-established state tradition that the result of a close election is not declared final until the Democrat wins (just ask Republican "Governor" Dino Rossi).

Washington is one of five states which conduct elections entirely by mail-in voting. The Democrat-controlled legislature passed a bill in 2011 which mandates that approach to elections, and it was signed into law by Democrat Governor Christine Gregoire -- the same person who reaped the benefits of the creative Democrat vote counting (and recounting, and recounting) shenanigans back in 2004 at Rossi's expense.

Since all-mail voting became the law of the land in Washington, Republicans have lost every election for Senate and Governor there, and only two Republicans have been victorious for other statewide elections (one of which wasn't even opposed by a Democrat that November) in 13 years. The GOP hasn't done too well at the state legislative level nor the U.S. House level either, both of those being things which are heavily influenced by perpetual Democrat gerrymanders.

The lone "Republican" who has enjoyed true success running statewide in the Evergreen State was former Secretary of State Kim Wyman. Wyman was elected to that office, which is in charge of election administration (including vote counting) in 2012 and then was elected again in 2016 and 2020. Her effectiveness on behalf of Democrats while in her position as Republican S.O.S. is nicely illustrated by the fact that she resigned in 2021 in order to work for -- we're not making this up -- the Deep State entity known as the "Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency" in an important position dealing with "election security". That is a term normally defined by Democrats as "making sure Republicans don't interfere with our cheating".

Photo credit: carboncredits.com

The real nailbiter of a race which is currently going on in Washington is for the office of Commissioner of Public Lands (CPL), which is wide open since the incumbent liberal Democrat commissioner, Hillary Franz, chose to run for Congress in Washington's 6th district instead. She lost her primary earlier this month and promptly blamed dark and evil forces for her defeat. Speaking of which, the easy winner in November in CD-6 will now be ultra-liberal Democrat Emily Randall, who will be a real barrier-breaker as the first Latina dyke ever to be elected to Congress.

Votes are still being tabulated, but the CPL race unofficially stands like this at the moment:

1. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R): 419.297, 22.0%
2. Dave Upthegrove (D): 396,300, 20.8%
3. Sue Pederson (R): 396,249, 20.8%

Photo credit: mynorthwest.com

Elsewhere in Washington, there were hotly-contested primary elections in the three districts (out of a total of 10) where Republicans have any real chance at victory in November.

In CD-5 (Eastern Washington: Spokane, Walla Walla, Pullman) incumbent moderate Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers is retiring at the age of 55 after 10 terms in the House. She will be replaced in the R+8 district by Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner after the formality of his general election victory in a few months. He's likely to be even more "moderate" than the woman he's replacing. This district could do better.

In CD-3 (Southwest Washington: Vancouver) it will be Round 2 for Joe Kent vs. Marie Perez. The district is rated as R+5 which means it shouldn't really even be a tossup -- the GOP should win with relative ease -- but the solidly conservative MAGA Republican, Kent, was repeatedly backstabbed by his own party in 2022 and might be again. Democrats are spending an ungodly amount of money to try to hold this seat, which is at or near #1 on the list of potential Republican pickups in the House for 2024. Kent may win this time around, but there won't be any "relative ease" about it and he'd better be wearing a Kevlar vest at all times to insulate himself from knife wounds.

After losing by less than 1% in 2022, Kent immediately declared that he would be running again in 2024. Probably with behind-the-scenes help from the GOP establishment, Republican lawyer Leslie Lewallen made her way into the race for the express purpose of sabotaging Kent's chances. She spent the primary campaign focusing solely on attacking Kent even though Democrat Perez was on the same ballot.

Kent trounced Lewallen on August 6 by over 25 points. The two Republicans combined to receive over 51% of the vote, with just under 46% for the Democrat and 2.5% for an independent. If -- and only if -- nearly all of Lewallen's voters move to Kent in November this district will have a conservative congressman for the first time since Linda Smith (1995-1998) and Smith was much more of a libertarian than a conservative.

Washington congressional district 4

The highest-profile congressional primary in Washington took place in the solidly Republican (R+11) 4th district, which covers the central third of the state geographically, including Yakima and the Tri-Cities area. CD-4 is only 52% White and 40% Hispanic (nearly all of which are Mexicans) but the non-citizens tend to not vote, and those citizens who do vote lean staunchly to the right. No Democrat has exceeded 40% in a House election here since 1996, with the exception of 2006 when the Rats barely cleared that figure (40.1%).

The 2024 election will be the third one in the last six where two Republicans and zero Democrats will battle for the win. The incumbent, liberal Republican Dan Newhouse, is the next-to-last House Impeachment RINO left standing. All others among the 10 in the House GOP who voted to impeach Donald Trump have either run away voluntarily or been defeated at the polls since they did their dirty deed. Aside from Newhouse, the only one remaining is David Valadao of California, who represents a Democrat-leaning district in the Central Valley.

While Trump had endorsed one of Newhouse's two challengers (Jerrod Sessler) in this race long ago, he decided to increase his chances of padding the Trump Winning Percentage by also endorsing the other challenger (Tiffany Smiley) on the eve of the primary. Trump's rhetoric against the liberal Newhouse was, oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), comparatively mild compared to his vitriol against 100% conservative Rep. Bob Good, who lost his primary in Virginia a few weeks back.

Photo credit: jerrodforcongress.com

Sessler is a decorated Naval veteran (not some Stolen Valor coward like Democrat VP nominee Tampon Timmy Walz) who has also beaten Stage IV cancer which was said to be 95% terminal. He is a solid Christian conservative who describes himself as an American Patriot. Perhaps at this point you are beginning to understand why the GOPe fears Jerrod Sessler.

If Sessler is elected, he should be a reliably conservative vote in the House (unlike Newhouse) and based on his background will likely be a fighter for his country and his party, as opposed to being a go-along-to-get-along spineless milquetoast like the vast majority of House Republicans.

Photo credit: Outside Groove

As an aside, Sessler's campaign bio touches briefly on the fact that he is a "former NASCAR driver". It's hardly a big part of his list of qualifications, but it almost became a sticking point two years ago. Sessler was no national star as a driver; he participated in a small regional racing series which was under the auspices of NASCAR. [BTW, Sessler is the second ex-NASCAR driver running for the House this year as a Republican; we wrote about the other one here].

Just before the 2022 primary, NASCAR executives became aware of Sessler's candidacy and were concerned that he might be pulling a "Walz" and claiming to be something he really wasn't; they apparently had no record of Sessler's racing history and would surely have ordered Sessler to cease and desist using the NASCAR trademark in his campaign if evidence had not been furnished to back his claim.

NASCAR, long ago, was considered to be a "Republican" sport and kind of the antithesis of today's leftist/racist WNBA. NASCAR was a sport with good patriotic American participants and fans (again, the opposite of the WNBA). These days, however, NASCAR is every bit as "politically correct" as the major sports it so desperately wishes to emulate, and its corporate executives and bean-counters are almost uniformly well to the left on the political spectrum.

There is no longer any controversy about Sessler's NASCAR credentials, which are unimportant anyway, so those who loathe conservatives -- including the entire Republican establishment -- are finding other weapons with which to assault Sessler. Trump's going to have to put a lot of his political weight behind this challenger, or an Impeachment RINO is going to avoid extinction one more time.

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2024 House Alaska Washington

Photo credit: Robert Deutsch, USA Today

This may become a pertinent question even sooner than expected. Kamala "Cackles" Harris isn't merely the presumptive Democrat nominee for the 2024 presidential election, she may be elevated to President any time now. Although President Biden's personal physician, who is apparently Dr. Nick Riviera, assured the nation on Monday that the President was still alive and continuing to "perform all his presidential duties", this is the same doctor who recently insisted -- everyone's lying eyes notwithstanding -- that Biden was fit as a fiddle and sharp as a tack. The comparison of those items to Biden is valid only if they had just been run over by a train.

And then came the debate. And numerous other examples of physical and mental degradation. Finally the Democrats couldn't abide the devastating polling data (must have been internal polls) any longer and threatened Biden out of the race.

With Biden out of the running and his replacement as Democrat presidential nominee all but official, the focus turns to who the vice-presidential nominee might be.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Candidates from the gubernatorial ranks include: Andy Beshear (D-KY), J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) and Tim Walz (D-MN). Beshear, a pretty boy in an empty suit, could (or so the Democrats think) plausibly pose as a moderate, but the reality is that he's no such thing, and he probably wouldn't even be able to deliver Kentucky's 8 electoral votes. Pritzker's usefulness on the ticket would be limited to donut-eating contests; Illinois is in no danger of voting anything other than Democrat for president anyway. The same applies to Walz except for maybe the donut-eating part, though there are (or at least were) some fever dreams on the right about Minnesota going for Trump in November. Democrats are rightfully unconcerned about that possibility, and will not select Walz simply to defend against it.

If a Governor is selected to run alongside Cackles, there's a greater likelihood that it would be one from a swing state and not a state which is either hopeless for Democrats or already in the bag for them. Swing state Rat Governors include Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Tony Evers (D-WI), Roy Cooper (D-NC, and unemployed as of January) and the Great Jewish Hope, Josh Shapiro (D-PA).

Of those, only Cooper could remotely be described as anything other than extreme-left, and even he isn't far off from that. Not that the Democrats require an actual moderate on the ticket; they can (and will) select an in-your-face ultra-liberal -- like Cackles herself -- and when the media controllers repeatedly lie and claim that whoever the VP turns out to be is a moderate, enough clueless and easily fooled voters will believe it. If the Rats truly wanted a moderate VP candidate, they'd have to look outside the party to someone like Mitt Romney (he's downright "conservative" by Democrat standards).

The liberal Veep-pickers could bypass governors altogether. Or they could put a rump ranger such as Colorado Governor Jared Polis or Transportation Secretary Pete Buttgieg on the ticket, but the Democrats aren't likely to be quite that "bold", and Colorado's not even close to being a swing state.

What with the overt (but totally unreported) trend of a significant portion of Hispanic voters -- particularly rural Hispanics -- towards the Republican party starting in 2020, you might expect that the Dems would look for a VP of Mexican or Puerto Rican descent, but the Democrat puppetmasters apparently believe there aren't any who are prominent enough to be worthy of serious consideration.

Finally, the one U.S. senator who is on the short list is Mark Kelly (D-AZ). Kelly has a military record and was once an astronaut, which would lead the ignorant to believe he must be a patriotic conservative or at least a moderate. He is none of those things (neither was John Glenn except maybe early in his political career), irrespective of the false image of him the media will create if he becomes the chosen one. Kelly is as ultra-liberal as any Democrat senator.

mynewsgh.com

The favorite among these has to be Pennsylvania Governor Joshua Shapiro. Shapiro is from the most important of all swing states, is known to be highly covetous of national office, and PA would instantly go from "tossup" to "likely Democrat" in the 2024 presidential election if Shapiro gets the VP slot. As we mentioned just a few days ago, without Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes Trump is going to have pull off a major upset somewhere else in order to get to 270 EV.

Furthermore, a down-ballot effect in Pennsylvania might help save the Senate seat of dim bulb Bob Casey, Jr. Joshie's presence on the ticket might also help shore up some vulnerable Democrat U.S. House incumbents, of which there are 2 or perhaps 3 in the PA delegation (Susan Wild, Matt Cartwright, Chris DeLuzio) though none of those -- including Casey -- are in grave danger of losing. They are in potentially close races, but creative vote counting on the part of Democrats, if necessary, ought to be enough to return those liberal politicians safely to their offices next year.

As far as having a Jewish candidate for VP, note that while the core of the Democrat party strongly supports the Hamas terrorists, it does not necessarily follow that the party as a whole hates Israel. They DO hate it -- for now -- but that's because of just one man: Benjamin Netanyahu. Once he is no longer in the picture and Israel is controlled by the secular, ultra-liberal, atheistic, self-loathing wing of The Tribe, Democrats will be supporters of Israel again, at least to a much greater extent than they are now.

In the meantime as they wait for Bibi's demise, they may feel it wise to nominate someone from The Tribe as Harris' VP, though of course NOT someone who supports Netanyahu: that description fits Shapiro nicely. This could be the Democrats' attempt to fraudulently claim support for Israel ("Look at our VP! He's Jewish!") -- seeing as how their embrace of anti-Israel terrorists is not completely popular with the American public, or even with some elements within the Democrat party. Democrats already have the total support of Shapiro's tribalists among the media controllers, however this move might help to get those campaign dollars from the ultra-rich Jews flowing again.

Though if we're to believe the recent gaslighting about "record-setting" Democrat contributions earlier this week, that geld may not be necessary. The Dems' ActBlue money laundry has been spinning wildly lately, splitting donations from liberal billionaires into millions of smaller fragments and assigning those fragments to smaller "contributors" in an attempt to create the illusion of broad-based support from the common people, not to mention violating campaign finance law.

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2024 Heels Up! Veepstakes

If the polls are even close to being accurate, the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is going to be determined by the results in just six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These are often referred to as the "swing" states. North Carolina isn't on that list, but probably should be; folks on the right like to pretend it's a 1000% mortal lock for the GOP, but it's not. It just leans slightly in the direction of Republicans at the presidential level in recent years.

2024 presidential election map; swing states in purple

If the Democrat candidate, whoever it turns out to be, wins every state that Democrats normally win, he/she/it will receive 226 electoral votes (EV) from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine*, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

If Donald Trump wins every state that Republicans normally win, he will receive 235 electoral votes from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska*, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

[* Maine and Nebraska are the only states where electoral votes are not winner-take-all; they award them by congressional district, and the statewide winner gets the other two votes. Because of this, Trump is expected to easily gain one of Maine's four electoral votes, and the Democrat is narrowly expected to take one of Nebraska's five EV.]

The magic number is 270 EV; that's the number a candidate needs to obtain in order to be elected president.

The six swing states combine for 77 EV:

• Arizona (11)
• Georgia (16)
• Michigan (15)
• Nevada (6)
• Pennsylvania (19)
• Wisconsin (10)

2020 presidential election results in PA

Pennsylvania has been reliably Democrat presidentially from 1992 to the present with the exception of 2016 when overconfident Democrats just barely failed to manufacture enough votes in the Philadelphia ghetto to deprive Donald Trump from eking out a statewide win by 0.7%. Trump would have won the presidency even without PA's 20 electoral votes that year, but Democrats still rued their mistake and vowed it would not happen again in 2020. It didn't.

Pennsylvania election results
2020	Joe Biden (D)	3,461,221	49.9%	Donald Trump* (R)	3,379,055	48.7%
2016	Donald Trump (R)	2,970,733	48.2%	Hillary Clinton (D)	2,926,441	47.5%
2012	Barack Obama* (D)	2,990,274	52.0%	Mitt Romney (R)	2,680,434	46.6%
2008	Barack Obama (D)	3,276,363	54.5%	John McCain (R)	2,655,885	44.2%
2004	John Kerry (D)	2,938,095	50.9%	George W. Bush* (R)	2,793,847	48.4%
2000	Albert Gore, Jr. (D)	2,485,967	50.6%	George W. Bush (R)	2,281,127	46.4%
1996	Bill Clinton* (D)	2,215,819	49.2%	Robert Dole (R)	1,801,169	40.0%
1992	Bill Clinton (D)	2,239,164	45.1%	George Bush* (R)	1,791,841	36.1%

2024 scenarios: If Trump wins all of the states which Republicans usually win these days, he needs only Georgia and Pennsylvania among the six swing states and the result is a 270-268 win.

Trump 270, Democrat 268

If Trump loses PA, then he still loses even if he takes both Arizona and Nevada along with Georgia (268-270).

Democrat 270, Trump 268 (and now that one Nebraska electoral vote looks huge)

Wisconsin likely isn't going to Trump (current illusions aside), what with the Wisconsin Democrat Supreme Court recently issuing a ruling which trashes the election integrity measures passed by the state legislature, and practically mandates Democrat vote fraud. Correspondingly, any delusionals who are dreaming about a GOP Senate pickup in WI can wake up now and face reality unless some 1994-ish tidal wave hits in November.

Politically speaking, Michigan is PA's poorer, more liberal Rust Belt little sister. If Trump can't take PA, he surely isn't winning Michigan. Maybe lightning strikes again as it did in 2016 and he takes both. Like Wisconsin, Michigan has also recently taken measures to thwart election integrity.

To summarize: if the Democrat candidate wins both Michigan and Wisconsin -- as is still probable, though we all wish it wasn't -- and all non-swing states go as expected, there is no scenario under which Trump can win without Pennsylvania.

Even with Joe Biden's obvious mental and physical degradation, swing state polls remain exceedingly close although most of them slightly favor Trump as of this time, but within the margin of error. On July 6, Bloomberg released polls for the seven obvious swing states (NC included) and Trump was ahead in five of those, though the pollster cheerily noted that Biden was closing the gap. This is likely to be as close to reality as we have seen so far, with Trump losing Michigan and Wisconsin. They say he remains slightly ahead in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. One day later the Emerson pollsters had Trump sweeping all six of the swingers (NC wasn't polled).

If 2024 somehow mimics 1984 or 1972 then we will see fluke outcomes in states that shouldn't even be on the radar right now (e.g. Virginia). But even with as much disarray as President Alzheimer and his party seem to be in at the moment, expecting anything along the lines of a rout is foolish.

If you're trying to forecast the 2024 outcome, don't forget to factor in the following:

1. Biden is looking less and less likely to be the nominee.
   
   
2. Mitt Romney's inflammatory (yet quite accurate) comment from 2012 is still operative, undoubtedly at an even higher level than his now-outdated 47% figure. In case you've forgotten what that comment was:
   "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the [Democrat] no matter what. . . who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."
   
   
3. The mass invasion of new welfare recipients streaming across the Mexican border -- who are infiltrating numerous states and not merely Texas or other border states. And all they have to do to earn their "paychecks" is vote Democrat.

2000 presidential election results

In 2000, Dubya won several states which are no longer normally winnable for the GOP in a presidential election -- Colorado and Virginia being the biggest of those. In 2000 CO and VA, plus Nevada and New Hampshire, added 29 electoral votes to the GOP total, more than offsetting the absence of PA's 23 EV. Bush of course also won as expected in Arizona and Georgia, which were solid Republican properties at that time but are now rightfully considered swing states. Bush did lose Iowa which is now considered true-blue (proper color usage). Bush won by a total of 5 EV that year, 271 to 266.

2004 presidential election results

In 2004 Bush repeated his victories in VA + CO and picked up Iowa and New Mexico but dropped New Hampshire. The outcome in the electoral college wasn't nearly as close as it had been four years earlier. The final score was: Bush 286, Lurch 251. The major Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin once again were not needed.

In 2024, barring a landslide of wishful thinking, Trump is not likely to win states like Virginia (unless Glenn Youngkin is on the ticket as VP, and maybe not even then) and is highly unlikely to win places such as Colorado or New Mexico. He must hold North Carolina and take a couple of the biggest swing states. Pennsylvania is the top prize among the swingers.

Without neglecting the other tossup states, Trump's campaign would do well to stay laser-focused on PA from now through November -- with hard-hitting advertising, as many rallies as possible and -- most importantly -- doing whatever can be done to ensure election integrity in order to avoid a repeat of the highly questionable 2020 results here.