On the menu today: If, as not just the polls but the behavior of Republican candidates suggest, the voters in this year’s midterm elections are on the verge of sending a lot of Democrats to Washington, they will not be sending sensible moderate types. They will instead be sending a freak show, a circus, a motley crew of extremists and outliers who were carried along by a dyspeptic national mood, not a genuine public enthusiasm for their agenda. The Democratic candidates shrugging off their old statements and positions as “Woke 1.0” are the same people they’ve always been, ready and willing to enact “Woke 2.0” at the first opportunity. Read on.
Kooks on the Left
Democrats are running a Senate candidate in Michigan who doesn’t like cars, and a gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin who doesn’t like beer gardens.
Addressing an audience in 2016, non-practicing doctor Abdul El-Sayed warned, “Cars are the modern-day cigarette.”
Oh, it’s just one comment, from a decade ago. Surely, he hasn’t more recently endorsed Bernie Sanders and called for “build[ing] public transit so you don’t even need a car.” Or boasted that one bus can take 16 cars off the road.
And then there are his comments from an episode of his podcast, from 2024:
Cars, they got issues. . . . All that driving we do contributes to climate change. Look, I drive a plug-in hybrid, but I know while I’m on the gas side, which is most of my commute, I’m burning fossil fuels into our atmosphere, and it sucks.
Hey, are cars a big deal in the state of Michigan? The core automotive industry, upstream suppliers and downstream sales and service, are only, what, 730,000 jobs in the state, right?
(A detail in the latest New York Times/Siena poll: Fifty-four percent of Michigan’s likely voters have never heard of Hasan Piker. The obnoxious, incendiary Twitch streamer is currently declaring, “I will throw you in prison. I want Chinese style communism to happen inside of the Democratic party right now. I want to do cultural revolution [stuff].” We are sometimes told that Piker is the voice of America’s hard-left youth, but in that survey of Michiganders, 60 percent of likely voters from age 18 to 29 have never heard of him, while the demographic most familiar with him is voters 65 and older.)
Then there’s Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, back in 2021: “Revenues often come from activities that those with discretionary funding can afford like golf, the marina, and beer gardens. These activities are traditionally and predominantly supported by white users. This racial inequity is born from a history of systemic racism & injustice.”
It’s not as if people in Wisconsin like to drink beer, right? They only consume 36 gallons of beer per year per Wisconsinite over age 21. Beer is only responsible for 70,000 jobs and $13 billion in economic output in the Badger State — no big deal!
Elsewhere in the Midwest, incumbent Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted is trailing former Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his reelection bid to Bernie Moreno in 2024. Brown had been in elected office since 1974. Regularly rated one of the most liberal senators in the chamber during his three terms, Brown forgot to pay his property taxes at least seven times. Over the decades, Brown kept getting described as “rumpled” or “disheveled” by the national press; you know that if he had been a Republican, he would have been described as a slob.
One quarter of Ohio likely voters erroneously believe that Brown is the incumbent senator.
Elsewhere in the Senate races, Democrats must now grapple with what happens if their candidates win their Senate races in Alaska and Maine, and the two new senators get stuck in an elevator together.
Meet Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Alaska:
But behind the scenes, her political operation has been marked by tumult, a pattern that stretches back to her time in Congress. Former aides describe angry and profane outbursts, sometimes directed at aides and sometimes expressed about others who had displeased her. In one instance, she shoved an aide, according to a former staff member who was present and two others who were told about it at the time. Another conflict led to a surprising staff shake-up on the eve of the primary election last month.
Four former staff members said they directly heard her use the word “faggot” over the years, in some cases about her own staff members, an allegation the campaign denied. She also used the word “retarded,” according to former aides and text messages viewed by The New York Times.
Her demands could be unusual, such as requiring aides to feed live crickets to her family’s pet chameleon, Meatball.
Ms. Peltola’s displays of anger, the extent of which has not been previously reported, have been spilling out into the high-stakes race. This account is based on interviews with nine former staff members, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation and to preserve their professional reputations, as well as dozens of contemporaneous text messages and photos.
Now, Peltola assured us she believes “LGBTQ+ Alaskans are valued neighbors, loved ones, and members of our communities, and they deserve to be protected to the fullest extent of the law.” In fact, Peltola supported an “identity-focused health clinic” in Anchorage that provided hormones and puberty blockers for those seeking to alter their gender.
But if a Republican candidate had a habit of using the other f-word, we would never hear the end of it. Apparently, if you’re a Democrat, you can use that word as much as you like. I would say all we’re hearing from the gay rights organizations is crickets, but we’re not even hearing that. Perhaps Peltola made them feed the crickets to Meatball.
Now, refamiliarize yourself with Troy Jackson:
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Troy Jackson’s longtime partner told an officer he “pushed her around” after Jackson broke down a door and punched a man at a Fort Kent home in 1988, according to a police report obtained exclusively by the Bangor Daily News.
That longtime partner, Lana Pelletier, is his second cousin.
Republican candidates for office in 2026 can complain about a lot, but they cannot complain that the Democratic Party has nominated a slew of sterling candidates, a crop of whirling dervishes of raw political charisma, without flaws, scandals, extreme positions, gaffes, or political liabilities. If GOP Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton can’t gain any traction against a walking caricature of insufferable woke progressivism like James Talarico, in a state where Republicans have not lost a statewide race in a generation, that’s on him.
As of the end of August, President Trump’s MAGA Inc. had $415.8 million in cash on hand. Republicans have a ton of money, and deeply flawed opponents. You would think a political party would know how to improve its position at a time like this.
ADDENDUM: Longtime political writer Joe Klein, warning Democrats not to get too confident based upon current polling numbers: “There is still more than a month until the election. That month is called October. Crazy things have been known to happen in October. Surprises.”
I’m rather skeptical that anything will happen between now and November 3 that will dramatically change the mood of the country, and I’m really skeptical that anything will happen that will make Americans want to reelect Republicans. As discussed yesterday, look at what Republican candidates are doing.
Either way, October surprises mean less in an era where early voting has gone mainstream. As of this writing, more than 117,000 Virginians have already cast ballots, and tonight we’re starting week three of the NFL season.
Early voting totals increase like a hockey stick. Back in 2022, by October 14, more than a million Americans had already cast ballots. By October 18, that sum was 2.7 million; by October 25, it was more than 9 million. By October 30, the total number of early votes cast was more than 20 million. Election Day in 2022 was November 8. By then, 44 million Americans had voted early — almost 40 percent of the 112 million total ballots cast.
If Trump or the Republicans have an “October surprise” up their sleeves, they’re going to want it a lot closer to October 1 than Halloween.