RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/second-republican-debate-biggest-winner-biggest-loser

Expectations are everything in life, and they certainly were key to the outcome of the second Republican debate held at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

The winner of the evening was Gov. Ron DeSantis, for whom expectations were low. The audience was reminded of his achievements and why the Florida governor is running second in the GOP primary polls. 

Nikki Haley, from whom much was expected, failed to live up to her performance in the first debate, but held her own. 

Vivek Ramaswamy was not as annoying as in the first debate, but he has yet to show he is ready to be president. 

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was more combative, as expected, but probably did not move the needle on his chances.

As for everybody else – with respect, it is time for Mike Pence, Chris Christie (seriously), and Doug Burgum to drop out of the race. Fewer contestants would mean less fighting for air time and less bickering; that would be a relief.

DeSantis had a great deal at stake coming into the second GOP debate. His polls have been slipping, he has made some mistakes in his campaign and he is widely viewed as unable to connect with voters.  

Helped by low expectations, DeSantis had a good night. He may not bounce in the polls, but he should have stopped the bleeding.  He trained his fire on Joe Biden, blaming the president (rightly) for too much government spending and for inflation; he also criticized former President Donald Trump, who again declined to participate in the GOP forum. 

Throughout the evening DeSantis pointed to his accomplishments in Florida – in education, the state is ranked number one, and Florida is also enjoying a 50-year low in crime, for instance. 

The worst job in America on Wednesday was trying to moderate the second Republican debate. With seven candidates on stage struggling for airtime, moderators Dana Perino, Stuart Varney and Ilia Calderón did a creditable job under impossible conditions. They asked the right questions, but couldn’t stop the candidates from talking over each other, or returning to previous questions which they wanted to answer but hadn’t been asked. The moderators’ job was like being the referee with seven boxers in the ring. 

None of the fighters won, and none failed. They all put forward their best arguments in the sliver of time they had for each question. Unfortunately for voters trying to decide among them, that sliver wasn’t enough to say more than canned slogans. There were simply too many voices on stage to give each of them more time. With most polling in single digits, they knew this might be their last chance to make their case before being tossed out of the ring.  

Even the strongest candidates didn’t have time to flesh out important positions on major policy questions, to say much more than “I did it right in my home state” and “Joe Biden, bad.” 

The stringent time limits helped the most vapid among them, Vivek Ramaswamy, who could toss out unworkable ideas like confetti, knowing other candidates wouldn’t have time to expose their emptiness and the moderators wouldn’t have time to press for details. He’s slick enough to convince some voters and outrageous enough to convince others. But he shouldn’t be on the same stage as serious candidates with a genuine understanding of difficult policy issues and the background to actually implement solutions. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-presidential-debate-reagan-library-donald-trump-ac835016?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Republican Presidential candidates not named Donald Trump squared off for the second time on Wednesday, and they put on a good show that gave voters an insight into how they think and what they believe. But their main oversight continues to be that with rare exceptions they are giving Mr. Trump a pass.

The candidates are all fighting to become the alternative to Mr. Trump, who is leading in the polls by 30 or more points over his nearest challenger. They are looking to stand out from the pack, and that means promoting their records and making a contrast with the others on the stage. The debate over Ukraine was especially sharp and revealing, and we’ll have more to say about that in coming days.

But all of them also court irrelevance if they can’t cut into Mr. Trump’s commanding lead. And no one is going to become a credible alternative fighting about curtains at the United Nations. Sooner or later the candidates have to persuade voters that they would be better as the Republican nominee than Mr. Trump, with a better chance of winning and then governing for four years more effectively than the chaotic former President.

Yet there was precious little contrast with Mr. Trump on stage Wednesday night at the Reagan presidential library. The main exceptions were Chris Christie and Ron DeSantis, who hit Mr. Trump for not showing up to debate. Mr. Christie was effective on the point that Mr. Trump’s absence shows disrespect for voters, while Mr. DeSantis scored by noting that the former President doesn’t want to appear and have to defend his recent comments criticizing the Florida Governor for signing the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/27/28-of-americans-not-confident-that-2024-vote-will-be-fair-and-accurate-ii-tipp-poll/

Will the 2024 election be fair, or marred by systematic cheating? Based on how Americans feel about recent elections and the coming presidential contest, most are confident the election will be fair. But there’s a huge political gap on the issue between Democrats on one side, and Republicans and independents on the other, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

First, the good news: 65% of the 1,223 registered voters queried in the national online I&I/TIPP Poll, which was taken from Aug. 30-Sept. 1, called themselves either “very confident” (42%) or “somewhat confident” (23%) that the 2024 election “will be conducted fairly and accurately.”

The bad news: 28% of Americans expressed being either “not very confident” (17%) or “not at all confident” (11%). So more than a quarter of the electorate harbors doubts about the legitimacy of the coming presidential election. The poll has a 2.9 percentage-point margin of error.

Further muddying the picture, the major parties and political affiliations appear far apart when it comes to questions of election fairness.

Among Democrats, 89% believe the 2024 elections will be fair and above board. That compares to just 42% of Republicans and 58% of independents. Conversely, a mere 7% of Democrats thought the elections would have fairness issues, compared to 51% of Republicans and 32% of independents.

By party, the responses have a margin of error of +/-4.1 percentage points for Democrats, +/-4.4 percentage points for Republicans, and +/-5.9 percentage points for independents.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-desperate-new-beginning-2024-election-voter-sentiment-polls-gop-primary-biden-trump-3fde70cd?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

We don’t need polls to tell us that confidence in our political institutions is at a low ebb, but they do help clarify what Americans are feeling.

In a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 10% of Americans reported that thinking about U.S. politics made them feel hopeful, and 4% were excited. By contrast, 55% said they were angry, and 65% were exhausted.

This isn’t the first poll to note a pervasive sense of exhaustion, and I suspect it won’t be the last. Americans are tired of partisan quarrels that rarely reach a resolution. Issues like immigration reform linger for decades, and the Supreme Court has brought new ones such as abortion back into the arena.

Joe Biden was elected, in part, to calm this turbulence. Historians will debate whether he could have done so had he pursued a different agenda, but clearly his administration hasn’t reduced division, whether over economics, culture or foreign policy.

Americans blame both parties about equally for this situation. According to Pew, 60% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, and 61% have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party.

A recent CBSpoll found that 54% of respondents regard the Republican Party as “extreme,” one of the favorite epithets of Democrats describing the GOP. But the same percentage also regards the Democrats as extreme, and only minorities think that either political party is “reasonable.”

Tulsi Gabbard is a former representative for the state of Hawaii. She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020–and faced strong backlash from the liberal establishment. Recently, she announced her departure from the Democratic Party. She has not announced a new party affiliation.

Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard

The political prosecution of Trump is an obvious attempt by Biden/Dem elite to drain Trump’s attention and resources. Their actions expose their utter contempt for democracy and the rule of law—and makes laughable all of their verbiage about “protecting democracies around the world.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-is-desantis-tanking

WHY IS DESANTIS TANKING? A new poll Wednesday from the University of New Hampshire shook up the world of political obsessives who watch each twist and turn in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. No, there was no change at the top — former President Donald Trump is still in the lead in New Hampshire, 26 points ahead of the nearest competitor. The news was that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), for a long time Trump’s chief rival, has slipped to fifth place in New Hampshire, the second state to vote in the GOP primary contest.

Fifth place! How did that happen? How did DeSantis come to trail not only Trump, with 39% of the vote, but, in order, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, with 13%; former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, with 12%; and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, with 11%? DeSantis’s 10% of the vote in New Hampshire puts him at what might be called the bottom of the second tier. The first tier, of course, is Trump all by himself. The second tier is the group from Ramaswamy to DeSantis. After that, the third tier is Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), with 6%, former Vice President Mike Pence, with 2%, and Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) and former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, with 1% each.

The first thing to consider is whether the new Granite State poll is an outlier. The answer is, it appears not. There haven’t been many polls in New Hampshire — just one so far this month, two in August, and three in July — but DeSantis has been bobbing around between 8% and 11% since the summer. Before that, in polls going back to January, he was significantly higher. What appears to be happening in the new poll is that DeSantis is stuck in the 10% range, while others, especially Ramaswamy and Haley, and even Christie a little bit, have risen and narrowly overtaken him.

So what is going on? “The biggest problem I see for DeSantis is that the cultural campaign he has been waging simply doesn’t resonate with New Hampshire Republicans,” said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which conducts the Granite State Poll. “I am still surprised he’s pushing anti-woke rhetoric in New Hampshire. He also peaked too early and became a target of Trump, which prevented him from peeling off some Trump supporters.”

A veteran New Hampshire Republican political operative offers more. “DeSantis has zero on-the-ground presence,” he said. “His national flailings, drama, and message windmilling have scared off folks with little hope of attracting new folks. The Reagan Library debate has to be his breakout moment or…” He let the sentence trail off after that.

One of the good things about starting the Republican primaries with Iowa, then New Hampshire, and then South Carolina is that the three states are very different. There are different kinds of GOP voters in each, which means a candidate must know how to appeal to different kinds of GOP voters, which is, of course, a prerequisite for winning the nomination and being elected president.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-deal-with-the-devil-clyburn-biden-harris-trump-election-age-a27453b8?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Readers of this column know that I give historic significance to February 2020, when Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden in the South Carolina presidential primary. It’s worth a review because that decision now haunts a Democratic Party said to be haunted by Mr. Biden’s “age.”

The existential threat to the Democratic establishment as the 2020 presidential primaries unfolded was Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. Coming off a big win in the Nevada caucuses, Sen. Sanders headed to South Carolina with a leading delegate count of 45—and momentum. The Democrats’ No. 2 vote-getter then wasn’t Joe Biden. It was, incredible to recall, Pete Buttigieg, holding 26 delegates after the voting in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Mr. Biden was third, with 15 delegates after a poor showing in Nevada. Trailing was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a progressive who lacked Bernie’s mysterious charisma.

The Clyburn endorsement, which sent a signal to the state’s black voters, boosted Mr. Biden to a 48.6% win in South Carolina. Bernie was second with 19.8%. Abetted by the moderate voters who were Rep. Clyburn’s target audience, Mr. Biden eked out a win in November. Nearly four years later, the party establishment that sent Mr. Biden toward the presidency is talking about sending him packing. A CNN poll says Nikki Haley would beat Mr. Biden today by 6 points, and the incumbent president is tied statistically with all the other non-Trump GOP candidates.

Let’s understand what happened back in South Carolina. One of literature’s great allegories is the story of Dr. Faustus, who in return for receiving great powers from the devil, agreed to let Mephistopheles come for his soul sometime in the future. By throwing the party behind Mr. Biden, Rep. Clyburn and the Democrats made a conscious Faustian bargain.

The conceit now, or euphemism, in every conversation or poll is that Mr. Biden is “too old.” As in the 25th Amendment’s capacity concerns. But the Biden inner circle knew in February 2020 that the former vice president was already on the brink of being “too old.” Thus the Delaware-basement campaign. But by committing to Mr. Biden, the Democrats got possession of the powers of the presidency for four years. They also got a passive president who held open the door for the largest outpouring of spending and regulation in generations.

Now that fellow on the other side of Faustian bargains has shown up to tell the Democrats their payment is due. After giving them four years of extraordinary power, he’s taking back Joe Biden. What lies ahead for the Biden-less party could be a hard slog.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/19/voter-registration-charities-a-massive-overlooked-scandal/

“Nonprofit voter registration” doesn’t sound interesting. Yet nonprofit voter registration, or the use of tax-exempt charitable organizations to conduct and fund voter registration drives, is one of the most important and underreported political scandals of our time.

Nonprofit voter registration, and the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities that usually accompany it, have become the heart of a billion-dollar industry in America. According to Candid’s Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy database, since 2011 nearly 60,000 grants have been made for “Voter Education, Registration, and Turnout” and “Civic Participation,” benefitting 15,000 different organizations to the tune of $5.9 billion dollars.

Most of the largest grantors and grantees in this industry are left-leaning. Despite IRS rules prohibiting 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit groups from engaging in partisan electioneering, it has long been an open secret that the purpose of their work is to register voters from favorable demographics in order to help get Democrats elected. The voter registration industry has always retreated behind the fig-leaf of “nonpartisanship” when necessary, which has protected it from serious scrutiny..

Until now, that is. My recent special report, How Charities Secretly Help Win Elections, ripped away that fig-leaf. The report reveals the untold story of a nondescript charity named the “Voter Registration Project” that was used to funnel over $100 million into a five-year voter registration scheme hatched by Clinton campaign operatives to help Democrats win elections in 2020. Using tax forms, leaked documents, and leaked emails, the report shows how the scheme aimed to register over 5 million “non-white” voters in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada; how it was developed through multiple drafts and edits into a highly sophisticated plan dubbed the Everybody Votes Campaign; and how that plan was eventually adopted by a super PAC tied to Sam Bankman-Fried that instructed billionaire donors to keep it completely secret since it was the most “cost-effective” method for “netting additional Democratic votes.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/democrats-not-eager-to-defend-harris

Questions are once again swirling around Vice President Kamala Harris.

This time, the story is about whether or not Harris is an asset to President Joe Biden and whether she’s the best choice to join his 2024 ticket.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spoke well of Harris during a recent CNN appearance but stopped short of endorsing her for ’24.

“[Biden] thinks so, and that’s what matters,” Pelosi said when asked by Anderson Cooper if Harris should be on the ticket.

Pelosi pointed to Harris’s campaign record as California’s attorney general in 2011, calling the vice president “very politically astute” for winning the election while only having 6% in the polls at one point.

But when asked again if she believed Harris was the best running mate for the president, Pelosi dodged giving an endorsement for the second time, saying the vice president generally doesn’t “do that much” but is “a source of strength, inspiration, intellectual resource, and the rest.”

While 54% of Democratic voters are satisfied with Harris as Biden’s running mate in 2024, fewer are enthusiastic, 30%, according to the latest CBS News-YouGov poll. Her approval ratings have consistently lagged Biden’s.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) followed up the next morning by discussing “the MAGA Right” when asked about Harris.

Jake Tapper then pressed again on Raskin’s opinion of Harris as Biden’s 2024 running mate.

“That’s President Biden’s choice. And I think she’s an excellent running mate for President Biden,” Raskin responded. “I don’t know what more needs to be said about that.”