Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota is among those who support the use of TikTok…reports Asian Lite News
More than two dozen Democratic members of Congress, including Reps. Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, Robert Garcia of California, and Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, are active on TikTok, using the platform to engage with constituents and reach younger audiences.
However, as pressure against TikTok mounts in Washington due to security concerns, some of their colleagues are urging them to stop using the social media platform. Despite the pushback, many of these lawmakers defend their presence on TikTok, arguing that they have a responsibility to connect with Americans where they are, and with over 150 million users on the app, TikTok is a valuable tool for reaching younger audiences.
Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota is among those who support the use of TikTok, stating that while he is aware of the security implications and sensitive to the ban, there is currently no better and faster way to engage with young people in the United States than through the platform.
Yet the lawmakers active on TikTok remain a distinct minority, Associated Press reported.
Most in Congress are in favor of limiting the app, forcing a sale to remove connections to China, or even banning it outright.
The U.S. armed forces and more than half of U.S. states have already banned the app from official devices, as has the federal government. Similar bans have been imposed in Denmark, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand, as well as the European Union, AP reported.
Ron DeSantis, the favourite of the media, has handed over the First Mover advantage to Haley, writes Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat
Every member of the Republican or Democratic Party who is aware of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis knows that he wants to be the GoP nominee in next year’s Presidential elections. As yet, however, DeSantis has yet not accumulated the courage to announce the obvious. The ambitious Republican hopeful is waiting for what many believe to be a sure bet, which is that Donald Trump can be expected to blow up his chances with some indiscretion.
The former President has in his usual manner careened over the past months, flouting both common sense as well as common decency, such as by sitting down to supper with a White Supremacist together with a Black Holocaust Denier. Given his ignorance or uncaring attitude about what is politically incorrect and even toxic (as are Racial Supremacy and Holocaust Denial), the reaction even from within his adopted party to his cosy dinner with two fringe elements must have surprised him. But Donald Trump has spent a lifetime doing such things, and he is not going to change.
What is different is the extent of the fall in the backing that he has within the Republican Party in his craving for a second term in the White House. Given that she is the first Governor of South Carolina (and a Republican at that) to have removed the Confederate flag from the precincts of the state capitol, Nikki Haley is also among the overwhelming majority of US citizens who are unafraid to acknowledge the evil that was perpetrated by the Nazis during the 1941-45 mass murder of millions entirely on account of their Jewish faith.
At the same time, while having resigned as Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley has been careful to not cross swords with former President Trump. Indeed, there may exist a chance that she chooses Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s son, as her running mate, something that may convince Donald Trump to let go of his effort as securing the Republican nomination (and losing to a Democratic candidate, provided that individual is not Joe Biden). The younger Trump has shown himself to be a feisty kickboxer in the political arena, and has a way of energizing the Trump base in a way no other surrogate can.
Despite his age and other handicaps, the former President of the US appeals to the cowboy and gunslinger instincts of enough members of the Republican Party to make the Democrats dream come true by securing his party’s nomination. The most likely antidote to that could be the candidacy for the Vice-Presidency of his son, who is young enough to still be considered youthful even were he to wait out even four presidential terms without seeking to step into the job his father won in 2016.
In the way that has happened to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, nativists within the Republican party may balk at choosing an individual who not only makes no secret of her Indian roots, and who is a woman as well. It must be remembered that the clueless Liz Truss was chosen over Sunak by the Conservative Party faithful, almost certainly because it was too much for most of them to have a non-white family live in 10 Downing Street. Not the Conservative Party base (which still hankers after Boris Johnson) but party MPs chose Sunak over Truss, to their credit.
Despite efforts by his ebullient predecessor to fan unrest and criticism of the UK Prime Minister within the Conservative Party, Sunak has soldiered on. Of course, it has helped neither Britain nor him that the Labour Party has mobilised its cadres to make the UK a country where strikes by essential workers have become a commonplace occurrence. The Labour leaders want a situation that is chaotic to a level that would lead to an economic catastrophe by next year.
Should that take place, the UK’s present success in maintaining its lead over the rest of Europe in its financial industry may be lost, and with that, the country’s best hope for an early recovery from woes that have been majorly caused by the hypersonic manner in which Boris Johnson (then Prime Minister) joined hands with President Biden to craft a strategy that was designed by them to kneecap Russia. Instead, the backfire from the Biden-Johnson led moves against Putin’s Russia has damaged oedinary lives not just in Europe but across the world.
United States President Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, the US Permanent Representative to the UN in January 2017 at the White House. (File photo: White House/IANS)
In creating what the Biden-Johnson duo believed would be a one-way street for Russia, they have succeeded in preventing any visible escape from the auto-da-fé that Ukraine has to its cost become. There is no mercy shown by the Zelensky regime to any Ukrainian citizen who dares to point out that the only way to stop the war with Russia is to concede the territories lost to the Russian side since 2014.
That year marked the overthrow of the previous regime in Kiev by a band of Russophobes groomed for the task by the US, Britain and Germany, something that Angela Merkel with refreshing honesty had no qualms about admitting last year. Whatever his private views about the Biden-Johnson escalatory tactics being followed by NATO in Ukraine, Prime Minister Sunak has been forced to join other Atlanticist leaders and worship at the shrine of the Kiev regime.
By the time the US Presidential elections take place, it is certain that the Ukraine war will be an albatross on the neck of President Biden, and will define his legacy more than the transformational social welfare programs that he is working to implement. Biden is going the way President Johnson did in Vietnam, of making himself unelectable through the prosecution of an increasingly unpopular war on Russia at a time when China is by far the principal adversary of the US.
With her attacks on the adventurism of Xi Jinping and on the terror machine fashioned by Wahhabi extremists, Nikki Haley has long been a target of the Sino-Wahhabi lobby. She will have to overcome the invectives hurled against her by this lobby, besides the worst instincts of the nativist wing of her party. Despite such handicaps, Haley is articulate and attractive as a candidate.
Ron DeSantis, the favourite of the media, has handed over the First Mover advantage to Haley, and that may not be the only thing that he loses out on, now that the former Ambassador to the UN has come forward and declared her candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination in a country where skin colour and ethnicity matter far less than was the case in the 1950s.
If the Democrats enjoying majority in the outgoing House don’t do it immediately, they can never after Republicans take over the House in January 2023, a report by T.N. Ashok
The Democrats face a serious dilemma on whether or not to publish former US President Donald Trump’s tax records through the Congress, as the Supreme Court has denied Trump’s appeal against it, and if the Democrats enjoying majority in the outgoing House don’t do it immediately, they can never after Republicans take over the House in January 2023.
The unusual situation has arisen with the Supreme Court’s decision recently to deny the motion by Trump’s legal team to block public disclosure of Trump’s tax records citing executive privilege of a former President. As the apex court cleared the way, the Democrats had already lost the majority in the House of Representatives where Republicans hold 222 seats against 213 seats of the Democrats — pre-midterms it was 220 vs 212 seats as the matter was pursued.
Public disclosure of Trump’s tax records follows relentless investigation by the office of the Attorney General Letitia James and her predecessor Cyrus Vance, who has sued Trump for $250 million in punitive charges plus recovery of unpaid taxes over a period of 10 years when Trump Business systematically evaded taxes, inflating property values to obtain loans fraudulently from banks (Deutsche bank) and advantaging loopholes in tax laws to pay little or no taxes at all while showing a different value of properties in the tax books.
CNN, often described by Trump as Clinton News Network, for its liberal bias, in its report quoting experts said experts have travelled down this road several times before.
Attorney General Letitia James
“Many times. Remember 2016, during Trump’s first presidential run, when the man himself told us that we would see his returns “as soon as the audit was over”? The audit never seemed to end, and an audit would not prohibit him from releasing the returns in any event.”
The former Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, who first subpoenaed Trump’s tax returns from the accountant Mazars in 2019, and actually got them years — and multiple legal cases — later.
The Trump tax returns case is now a battle with the Democratic-controlled Congress which will change to Republican hands in January 2023.
Since 2019, the Democrats House Committee on Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal relentlessly tried to to get Trump’s returns under a statute which empowers him to obtain just that.
“No judge — not even Trevor N. McFadden, the lower court-Trump appointee, who delayed the matter and gratuitously suggested that Congress could, but should not, publish the returns — has ever disagreed,” the CNN reported.
As Congressman Bill Pascrell said, “Trump’s legal team just about managed to delay and drag the matter for 1,329 days since the committee sought the former President’s tax returns, nearly as long as the American Civil War.”
The matter has now come to fruition with the Supreme Court — without opinion or dissent — has summarily rejected Trump’s request to block the release of his tax returns.
Congress should have either got the returns by now or is in the process of getting it, reports say. The Democratic majority in the House now is legally entitled to publish Trump’s returns. But the Democrats are not the Republicans and are not used to taking hasty decisions. The Democrats are hoping against hope to avoid hasty and vindictive probes from the incoming Republican House, the CNN report said.
U.S. President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn before departing from the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on Oct. 22, 2018.(Xinhua/Ting Shen/IANS)
The New York Times has been vigorously pursuing Trump’s tax information through journalistic means and published a detailed analysis of 20 years’ worth of the former President’s returns, showing that he paid little or no taxes in most years.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s contention is that Trump Business engaged in clear and obvious tax fraud, paying its Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg in untaxed, unreported forms, such as through private school tuition payments for his grandchildren.
The Attorney General has argued that there was a pattern to the tax fraud as it was consistent with decades of Trump family’s aggressive tax avoidance. The Trump Organisation has rejected claims by the Attorney General’s office of Letitia James, a Democrat, as being part of a “witch hunt” by the Democrats.
Weissleberg has confessed to tax frauds in the Trump Business without implicating Trump. He has promised to testify in the case — it remains to be seen if he will implicate Trump and his grown-up children accused of tax fraud.
If the Democrats don’t move against Trump now by publishing his tax returns obtained under the legal process of a Supreme Court ruling, then it’s a major opportunity lost, say political observers.
The entire drama of Trump’s tax fraud actually calls for wide ranging reforms to plug loopholes in the taxation system, taxation experts say. The House Ways and Means Committee has relied heavily on its roles to monitor the executive branch’s administration of the tax laws and on its legislative responsibilities.
The debate is now about what new laws are needed to avoid the Trumpian tax saga. The moral question for the American citizen is, is there something wrong with the tax administration system that a billionaire President can pay no taxes. However, high the post, even if it be President, the American citizen would agree that they should be held accountable.
Tax returns of all Presidents and Vice-Presidents are subject to annual audits under a law passed in 1977 by the Congress.
Did an audit of Trump’s tax returns reveal anything? Was Team Trump pressed to defend all of their tax positions? Were adjustments made? Why or why not? What, planning –alleged fraud in the Weissenberg case — not been checked over the decades? Why did it take the Manhattan District Attorney to find what the IRS did not? These are questions Congress should ask, The CNN said, reflecting largely what it felt was the public perception on the matter.
Washington Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- Combo photo shows U.S. Democrat Joe Biden (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump attending their respective events on different occasions. (Xinhua/IANS)
The win clinches Democratic control in the Senate as Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the tie-breaking vote if the upper chamber is evenly split 50-50…reports Asian Lite News
President Joe Biden’s Democrats retained control of the US Senate on Saturday, a remarkable midterms election result that defied predictions of a Republican win over both houses of Congress.
Midterms traditionally deliver a rejection of the party in power, and with inflation surging and Biden’s popularity in the doldrums, Republicans had been expecting to ride a mighty “red wave” and capture the Senate and the House of Representatives.
But the wave never got much beyond a ripple and on Saturday US networks called the key Senate race in Nevada for Democrat incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, giving the party the 50 seats it needs for an effective majority.
The win clinches Democratic control in the Senate as Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the tie-breaking vote if the upper chamber is evenly split 50-50.
One Senate race remains up in the air — a runoff in Georgia set for December.
The two parties had been neck-and-neck at 49 seats each after Democrat Mark Kelly was projected to win a tight Senate race in Arizona on Friday evening.
The result in the House of Representatives is also hanging in the balance, and while Republicans are slightly favored to take control, it would be with a far smaller majority than they had envisaged going into Tuesday’s election.
Call for unity
In Arizona, Kelly called for unity in a victory speech on Saturday. “After a long election, it can be tempting to remain focused on the things that divide us,” he said.
“But we’ve seen the consequences that come when leaders refuse to accept the truth and focus more on conspiracies of the past than solving the challenges that we face today.”
The former astronaut beat out challenger Blake Masters, who has not yet conceded defeat and was backed by Donald Trump.
The former president was omnipresent on the campaign trail and the Republicans’ poor national performance was a damaging political blow.
Trump’s response to the Arizona result was to double down on unfounded claims of ballot rigging, posting on his Truth Social platform that the Democrat’s victory was a “scam” and the result of “voter fraud.”
Trump is set to declare his 2024 White House bid on Tuesday — an announcement he had planned as a triumphant follow-on to an expected crushing election victory by the party he still dominates.
U.S. President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn before departing from the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on Oct. 22, 2018.(Xinhua/Ting Shen/IANS)
The underwhelming outcome has prompted a bout of internal finger-pointing, with targets including Trump, the party leaders, and the campaign messaging.
US media on Saturday cited a letter circulated by three Republican senators calling for the postponement of party leadership elections currently scheduled for the middle of next week.
“We are all disappointed that a Red Wave failed to materialize, and there are multiple reasons it did not,” the letter said.
“We need to have serious discussions within our conference as to why and what we can do to improve our chances in 2024,” it added.
Some suggest Trump’s early entry into the presidential race is designed to fend off possible criminal charges arising from multiple investigations into the final weeks of his presidency as well as his business affairs.
On Friday, Trump’s lawyers challenged a subpoena from the Congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.
The subpoena sought to have Trump questioned under oath next week but the lawyers filed a lawsuit arguing he enjoyed “absolute immunity” as a former president from being compelled to testify before Congress.
The subpoena is “invalid, unlawful, and unenforceable,” the lawsuit said.
Democratic control of the Senate ensures a smoother process for Biden’s Cabinet appointments and judicial picks, including those for potential Supreme Court openings. The party will also keep control over committees and have the power to conduct investigations or oversight of the Biden administration, and will be able to reject legislation sent over by the House if the GOP wins that chamber.
In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Biden said of the election results: “I feel good. I’m looking forward to the next couple of years.”
He said winning a 51st seat from the Georgia runoff would be important and allow Democrats to boost their standing on Senate committees.
“It’s just simply better,” Biden said. “The bigger the number, the better.”
If Democrats manage to pull off a win in the House, it would mean full control of Congress for Democrats — and another chance to advance Biden priorities, which he has said include codifying abortion rights. The party still lacks the 60 votes in the Senate needed to move many kinds of major legislative changes.
Biden, who called to congratulate Cortez Masto, said he was still hopeful that Democrats could hold the House.
“It’s a stretch,” he acknowledged. “Everything has to fall our way.”
The Senate fight had hinged on a handful of deeply contested seats. Both parties spent tens of millions of dollars in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, the top battlegrounds where Democrats had hoped that Republicans’ decision to nominate untested candidates — many backed by former President Donald Trump — would help them defy national headwinds.
Democrats scored a big win in Pennsylvania, where Lt. Gov. John Fetterman defeated celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was endorsed by Trump, to pick up a seat currently held by a Republican. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly won reelection by about 5 percentage points.
A closely divided swing state, Nevada is one of the most racially diverse in the nation, a working-class state whose residents have been especially hard-hit by inflation and other economic turmoil. Roughly three-fourths of Nevada voters said the country is headed in the wrong direction, and about half called the economy the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of 2,100 of the state’s voters.
Democrats contend Republican victories could profoundly and adversely reshape the country, eliminating abortion rights nationwide and unleashing broad threats to the very future of American democracy…reports Asian Lite News
Coast to coast, candidates and big-name backers made final appeals to voters Monday in the last hours of a fraught midterm election season, with Republicans excited about the prospect of winning back Congress and President Joe Biden insisting his party would “surprise the living devil out of a lot of people.”
Democrats contend Republican victories could profoundly and adversely reshape the country, eliminating abortion rights nationwide and unleashing broad threats to the very future of American democracy. Republicans say the public is tired of Biden policies amid high inflation and concerns about crime.
“We know in our bones that our democracy is at risk,” Biden said during an evening rally in Maryland, where Democrats have one of their best opportunities to reclaim a Republican-held governor’s seat. “I want you know, we’ll meet this moment.”
Arriving back at the White House a short time later, Biden was franker, saying: “I think we’ll win the Senate. I think the House is tougher.” Asked what the reality of governing will be like, he responded, ”More difficult.”
The Maryland event followed Biden’s late-campaign strategy of sticking largely to his party’s strongholds rather than stumping in more competitive territory, where control of Congress may ultimately be decided. Biden won Maryland with more than 65% of the vote in 2020 and appeared with Wes Moore, the 44-year-old Rhodes Scholar who could become the state’s first Black governor.
The president said at an earlier virtual event, “Imagine what we can do in a second term if we maintain control.”
Most political prognosticators don’t think the Democrats will — and predict that Tuesday’s results will have a major impact on the next two years of Biden’s presidency, shaping policy on everything from government spending to military support for Ukraine.
In the first national election since the violent Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, the Democrats have tried to focus key races on fundamental questions about the nation’s political values.
The man at the center of most Jan. 6 debate, former President Donald Trump, was in Ohio for his final rally of the 2022 campaign — and already thinking about his own future in 2024. He had teased that he might formally launch a third presidential run at Monday night’s rally with Senate candidate JD Vance — which Trump concluded by promising a “big announcement” next week at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Trump’s backing of Vance in Ohio this year was crucial in helping the author and venture capitalist — and onetime Trump critic — secure the GOP’s nomination for a Senate seat. He’s now facing Democrat Tim Ryan.
“When I think about tomorrow, it is to ensure the American dream survives into the next generation,” Vance declared to thousands of cheering supporters, some sporting Trump 2024 hats and T-shirts, at Dayton International Airport.
While the GOP likes its chances of flipping the House, control of the Senate could come down to a handful of crucial races. Those include Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, where Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman was locked in a close race against Republican celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz.
“This is one of the most important races in America,” Fetterman told a crowd of about 100 Monday outside a union hall near a steel plate mill in Coatesville, about 40 miles west of Philadelphia. “Dr. Oz has spent over $27 million of his own money. But this seat isn’t for sale.”
At a nighttime rally at a suburban Philadelphia estate, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley introduced Oz to a crowd of about 1,500.
“There’s too many extreme positions in Washington, too much out there pulling us away from where the real answers lie,” Oz said. “I will bring balance to Washington. But John Fetterman? He’ll bring more extreme.”
Fetterman’s campaign noted that, in the final days, Oz has campaigned with Trump, at a wedding venue that refuses same-sex marriages and at a fitness center whose owner organized buses for Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington.
In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who was in a nail-bitter with Republican Herschel Walker, tried to cast himself as pragmatic — capable of succeeding in Washington even if the GOP has more power. Warnock promised Monday to “do whatever I need to do and work with whomever I need to work with in order to get good things done.”
Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly also tried to strike a moderate tone. He praised the state’s late Republican senator, John McCain, while noting that he didn’t ask Biden to campaign with him but would “welcome the president to come here at any point.”
Kelly’s Republican rival, Blake Masters, called the senator “just a rubber stamp vote for Joe Biden’s failed agenda.”
“You look at what Biden and Mark Kelly are doing. It’s like, are they that incompetent, or are they trying to destroy the country?” Masters said. “I think it’s both.”
Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter has roiled the social media world, used that platform Monday to endorse the GOP, writing, “I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.”
President Barack Obama had a word for it when it happened to him in 2010: “Shellacking” – a report by Yashwant Raj
The party in control of the White House is historically known to lose the US congressional midterm elections in the incumbent President”s first term.
President Barack Obama had a word for it when it happened to him in 2010: “Shellacking”.
The Democrats, with their man Joe Biden in the White House, are widely expected to lose the House of Representatives thus. The Senate, which is evenly split at present, could either way; both parties need to improve their tally by just one to take absolute control of the body.
Democrats currently control the White House, the House of Representatives (220 to 212, with three vacancies) and the Senate (50-50 and Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaker vote).
The White House is not on the ballot for the November 8 midterm elections. But all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are, as well as 35 of the Senate’s 100. Also in contention are Governorships and legislatures of 36 of America’s 50 states.
US President Joe Biden during a campaign rally in Florida with Charlie Crist, who is running for Governor and Val Demings, running for Senate.(Photo: Twitter@TheDemocrats)
“Midterms are usually a referendum on the sitting President,” said Doug Schwartz, Director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, whose election findings and forecast are followed closely in political circles. “Having said that, we have noticed that voters are distinguishing between incumbent Democratic Senators and the Democratic President.”
President Biden has been polling badly, and remains unpopular. His approval rating for October was 40 per cent – down from 44 per cent in August, which has been the highest he has reached, according to Gallup polls. Former President Donald Trump was at 42 per cent and Obama was 45 per cent at this time, in October of the second year of their first terms, 2018 and 2010 respectively.
Here is what happened in the 2010 midterm. Republicans wrested control of the House of Representatives from Democrats picking up 63 extra seats. The magnitude of their victory – and the Democrats’ defeat conversely – was summed up by Obama as a “shellacking”.
Trump fared better, but only marginally. In the 2018 midterm election, Democratic won back the House of Representatives with 41 more seats.
Dr. Jill Biden, First Lady of the United States, casts early vote for Midterm elections. (Photo: Twitter@TheDemocrats)
Biden and Democrats were in the shellacking-territory till some months ago, according to pollsters, buffeted by out-of-control inflation, which was exacerbated by oil prices surge due to the Ukraine war, and failure to deliver on his poll promises mainly because of differences amongst Democrats themselves. His approval ratings sank to 38 per cent in July.
Then came a string of legislative victories, headlined by the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act, which cut prescription drugs costs, extended healthcare and marked the most aggressive action taken on climate change ever. And it raised taxes levied on those making more than $400,000 a year.
“Today offers proof that the soul of America is vibrant, the future of America is bright and the promise of America is real,” Biden said at an event to celebrate the Act a month after.
Biden’s popularity went up to 44 per cent in August.
Democratic party’s fortunes saw an uptick at the same time because of a completely unrelated development: the Supreme Court’s ruling ending abortion as a constitutional right of 40 years. Even Republicans – some, not all – were appalled. Kansas, a solidly Republican state, voted to protect abortion, defeating a measure that could have restricted or outlawed it.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama (Photo Instagram)
Democrats now had a national issue, and suddenly it seemed they were ready to beat the precedent of the ruling party losing the midterms. “Pollsters started seeing conditions improving for Democrats, making races more competitive,” Schwartz said, adding, “the abortion issue became a key factor in some special elections favouring Democrats”.
And that proved to be a short lived bump. FiveThirtyEight, a well-regarded poll aggregator and forecaster noted that Republicans have since “regained much of the advantage they had before” the ruling. And now, the Republican party has roughly a 4-5 chance of winning the House.
The bulk of the 36 states going to polls are expected to re-elect the incumbent Governor or the nominee of the party currently in power. But there are exceptions. Some states could flip. Maryland and Massachusetts are likely to pass from Republican to Democrat Governors, and Republicans could pick up Nevada, Wisconsin, and Oregon.
The most watched gubernatorial races include Governor Ron DeSantis’s run for a second term in Florida. He is widely seen as preparing for a White House run for 2024 and a defeat now will be suicidal. The other interesting contest is in Georgia, a solidly Republican state that voted to Biden in 2020 – incumbent Brian Kemp is running for a second term. His challenger is Democrat Stacey Abrams and, to an extent, former President Donald Trump who has openly called for his defeat for refusing to help him overturn the Georgia vote in the 2020 presidential election.
With Trump out of office and President Joe Biden’s job approval sliding in the polls, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated former Governor Terry Mcauliffe in the elections on Tuesday….writes Arul Louis
Sounding an alarm for the Democratic Party, a Republican has been elected Governor of Virginia, a state where President Joe Biden had defeated his predecessor Donald Trump last year, and the party’s leads were trimmed in many of the key elections around the US.
With Trump out of office and President Joe Biden’s job approval sliding in the polls, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated former Governor Terry Mcauliffe in the elections on Tuesday.
In a surprise in New Jersey, Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli was ahead of Governor Phil Murphy with a razor-thin lead of under 1 per cent with results incomplete as of 2.30 a.m. on Wednesday in the state.
The postal ballots may ultimately give Murphy a victory, but the closeness of the race shows a steep erosion of Democratic Party support because Biden had a 16 per cent lead over Trump in the state last year.
The results could be seen as an omen for next year’s mid-term elections to Congress where the Democrats hold a thin majority and have both parties rethink strategies.
The election results were a blow to the left wing of the Democratic Party which has emerged as the face of the party through its vociferous advocacy of cutting back budgets for police and of racially and socially polarising education agendas.
Indian-origin House of Representatives member Pramila Jayapal leads the Democratic Party faction in Congress as the Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Republicans went after the Democratic Party by highlighting the left’s agenda. And even within the Democratic Party, some like Eric Adams who won the New York mayoral race distanced himself from the progressives.
An African-American former police captain Eric Adams defeated his Republican adversary only by taking a hardline against crime and taking a moderate stand on education issues and rebuffing the progressives in his party.
But in the incomplete results, the Democratic candidate’s lead was down to 37 per cent from the 53 per cent that Biden had over Trump.
In Minneapolis, the national epicentre of protests against police brutality last year, voters defeated a referendum proposal to abolish the police department and replace it with a “public safety department” which was backed by the leftist leaders of the Democratic Party like Ilhan Omar.
Learning from the results of last year’s presidential election Youngkin and Ciattarelli kept Trump at bay because his polarising politics turns off centrist voters and did not hold rallies with him.
The Democrats’ attempts to tie them to Trump did not seem to work with the voters.
Biden, who campaigned for McAuliffe, called Youngkin an “acolyte of Donald Trump” and McAuliffe himself falsely claimed that Trump was in Virginia campaigning with Youngkin.
Biden sent his wife to campaign for Murphy and former President Barack Obama also campaigned for him.
Now Biden’s job approval is down to 43 per cent in RealClear Politics aggregation of national polls.
His standing in the party has also weakened with the Marist Poll reporting that 44 per cent of Democrats and independents sympathetic to the party don’t want Biden to run in the 2024 election and only 36 per cent back a re-election bid.
Biden hasn’t been able to get his multi-trillion dollar programmes for fighting climate change, expanding social and health programmes, rebuilding the infrastructure and revitalising the economy after the Covid-19 pandemic because of the conflicts within his party between the left and the right.
The chaotic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan that led to the Taliban returning to power has also dented his popularity.
The other factor that hit the Democrats, especially in Virginia which Biden had carried with a 10 per cent lead, is the social and educational agenda of the party.
The party policy that in schools transgender students should be allowed to use the bathrooms of the gender they choose regardless of their biological sex came to haunt the party on the eve of the election.
A boy wearing a skirt sodomised a girl in a Virginia school’s girls’ bathroom. He was transferred to another school where he sexually assaulted another girl.
When the father of the first victim protested at a school board meeting, he was arrested and prosecuted by the local prosecutor who is a Democrat.
Parents have also protested sexually explicit books like one describing men having sex with animals prescribed at schools and a racially polarising school curriculum based on an academic idea called “critical race theory”.
McAuliffe’s response was that parents shouldn’t have a say in what their children learn.
USA
And there is concern about crime everywhere, while the progressives have been calling for abolishing police departments or cutting them down during a year of protests against police brutality and the killing of African Americans.
US recorded the biggest increase in murders last year with a 29 per cent jump from the previous year reaching 27,570 cases, an increase of 4,901, reversing a falling trend.
Youngkin, who engineered the upset in Virginia, is a 54-year-old businessman who was the CEO of a private equity and financial services multinational, the Carlyle Group.
He had a racially diverse team running with him: an African American woman, Winsome Sears, for lieutenant governor, and a Latino, Jason Miyares, for attorney general.
McAuliffe was the governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2017, but a state law that prohibits anyone from serving two terms consecutively kept him out of the last election.
For the Democratic Party’s leftists, a ray of hope appeared in Boston where their mayoral candidate Michel Wu won.
Republicans and Democrats won one seat each in the by-elections in Ohio for the House of Representatives.
