RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/boom_another_special_election

Special elections can be tricky to gauge the general election from.

But when all of the results of them go just one way, it’s pretty obvious the other party is in trouble.

Latest news: Three Virginia Democrats in a reliably blue city have just gotten the boot. A local reporter called it ‘stunning beyond belief.’

The Daily Caller reports:

Three Democratic members of the Staunton, Virginia, city council were ousted by Republicans on Tuesday despite receiving more votes than they did four years ago.

Republican candidates Mark Robertson, Amy Darby, and Steve Claffey all joined incumbent Andrea Oakes in a four-seat GOP sweep, WHSV reported. The three incoming council members replaced Democratic incumbents Erik Curren, Ophie Kier, and James Harrington all almost doubled their vote totals from 2016, yet still lost.

And it wasn’t just that city where Democrats lost out, there was also this:

Nearby Wayesboro also put two conservatives, Lana Williams and Bruce Allen, on their city council to “give conservatives a working majority,” Graham reported.

The Caller noted that even the Democrats’ huge turnout machine was no match for the high enthusiasm rate of the Republican voters. Why was that? Well, because Virginia has seen some fearsome abuse from its Democratic rulers — gun control legislation that makes no sense in Virginia’s hinterlands, and then the coronavirus lockdown, which was a death sentence on small business.

Yet it also follows from a string of GOP special election pickups, some with lockdown on the table, some without. In deep blue Connecticut last March, two seats were flipped to Republicans in a state legislature election, one by a candidate with a difficult-to-sell last name (“Bizzarro”)

https://pjmedia.com/election/jeff-reynolds/2020/05/21/oregon-movie-star-and-terrorist-stopping-hero-snags-gop-nomination-for-congress-n414011

In the primary election this Tuesday in Oregon, a noteworthy candidate snagged the GOP nomination for Congress. Alek Skarlatos won the most votes in the history of the Republican primary election in the Fourth District, running away with the nomination and setting himself up as a real threat to ultra-liberal Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who has held the seat for about a century (give or take).

Skarlatos shot to unexpected fame in August 2015 while on the Thalys train from Brussels to Paris. He and two of his buddies, Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler, stopped a Moroccan terrorist who tried to take out as many travelers as possible with an AK 47, pistol, box cutter, and a jar of gasoline.

The details of how they suppressed the terrorist and the lives they saved garnered them the Knights of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian honor. Clint Eastwood later decided to cast Skarlatos, Stone, and Sadler as themselves in the movie retelling of their story, The 15:17 to Paris.

It may take a movie star/veteran/terrorist hunter to take out DeFazio, who has held the seat for 17 terms. Prior to that, he worked as an aide to the previous representative, and has never held a private sector job. The liberal from Eugene via Massachusetts co-sponsored Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. President Obama considered him as a nominee for Secretary of Transportation, before settling on Ray LaHood.

This guy is the ultimate DC barnacle.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-friendly-anti-aoc-democrat-poised-win-new-york-house-seat-some-help-pandemic-1504143

New York’s 15th congressional district, with Yankee Stadium at its heart, is home to some of the country’s poorest and most diverse people, an Obama oasis bordering AOC’s neighborhood—and yet it is on the verge of electing a Trump-loving Democrat for its open seat in the House.

That Democrat is Reverend Ruben Diaz Sr., a flamboyant, cowboy hat-wearing New York City councilman who immediately distinguished his views when he announced his run in 2019, saying “I am the opposite of AOC in the South Bronx.”

And that has national Democrats, opponents and progressives like Planned Parenthood and LGBT groups in a panic because the 77-year-old minister has a history of making inflammatory statements about homosexuals and strongly opposes abortion because of his religious beliefs.

“He would instantly become Donald Trump’s favorite New York congressman,” strategist Eric Koch of anti-Diaz super PAC Bronx United told Newsweek, adding that Diaz Sr. would be an unreliable Democratic vote in the House caucus.

To complicate matters, he has a son, Ruben Diaz Jr., who is his namesake and a Bronx borough president many call the most popular politician in the borough. Diaz Jr. is regularly asked to comment on his father’s actions, as he did disapprovingly when Diaz Sr. invited Senator Ted Cruz to visit the Bronx, but the consensus is that his son is a political plus for the reverend.

Republican Tom Tiffany, a Wisconsin state senator endorsed by President Trump, easily won a special congressional election Tuesday in the state’s heavily conservative, rural 7th Congressional District.

Meanwhile, with less than half the vote in, Trump has already doubled his 2016 total in the Nebraska presidential primary, also underway Tuesday. That led GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to tout what she called surging “enthusiasm” for the president’s reelection.

Republican and combat pilot veteran Mike Garcia wins big! Mike Garcia, who won the endorsement of President Trump, flipped California’s 25th Congressional District after Representative Katie Hill, a Democrat, resigned last year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/ben-sasse-defeats-gop-primary-challenger-by-50-points/

The freshman senator from Nebraska cruised to victory despite his sometimes-uneasy relationships with both President Trump’s supporters and opponents.

Incumbent freshman Ben Sasse coasted to victory in Tuesday’s Nebraska GOP Senate primary with 75 percent of the vote.

Sasse had faced a challenge from Matt Innis, a businessman who argued he’d been insufficiently supportive of President Trump in the Senate. Sasse angered some Trump loyalists because he cast his presidential ballot for Mike Pence in November 2016 and has been more willing to criticize Trump than many of his GOP colleagues on a wide range of matters, from the president’s character and the Ukraine scandal to trade policy.

At the same time, Sasse’s record over the last few years has left some staunch Trump critics disappointed. He voted to uphold the president’s declaration of a national emergency to divert funding toward the construction of a border wall in March 2016, and he came to the conclusion that the president’s behavior in the Ukraine scandal was bad but didn’t merit removal from office. His criticism of the president also became quieter last year as he geared up for the primary, a development that helped earn him Trump’s endorsement and scorn from Michigan congressman Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party over his opposition to Trump:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/07/dems_in_top_senate_races_duck_queries_on_biden_allegations.html

Sen. Susan Collins, one of the few remaining centrists in Congress, has suffered plenty of slings and arrows for her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2018. Just hours after casting it, the four-term Maine Republican said she knew it would put a target on her back in her 2020 reelection campaign.

That was an understatement. Democrats have vowed to make Collins pay for the vote, and Republicans are equally adamant in supporting her. Tens of millions of dollars in outside money are pouring into the race from both sides, threatening to upend the more restrained, less partisan politics of the state. 

The Women’s March, the group that organized the worldwide protest against President Trump’s inauguration, set the tone shortly after the Kavanaugh vote. The group labeled Collins a “rape apologist” for her pivotal vote in favor of the nominee despite the 36-year-old sexual assault allegations against him.

Allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, are clouding that argument, and not just for Collins’ likely opponent, Sara Gideon. The “believe all women” battle cry used to assail Kavanaugh and his supporters has placed other Democratic Senate challengers, and incumbents, in the uncomfortable position of defending Biden in an election that will determine not just the occupant of the White House but control of the upper chamber. Republicans’ razor-thin majority could be surrendered with the loss of a single seat should Democrats win the presidency, putting not just Collins in the spotlight but a handful of other imperiled GOP incumbents as well.

Collins and the five other female senators who supported Kavanaugh were dubbed “gender traitors” by a New York Times opinion writer for their votes to confirm him. Collins is now in the fight of her political life, one of most targeted Senate Republicans in the country. Gideon, Maine’s House speaker, has made the confirmation vote a central part of her campaign, saying she was partly motivated to run because of it.