Dem
53
Ties
2
GOP
45
The Republicans are in a state of advanced panic, from Donald Trump on down. They see the handwriting on the wall, and this time it wasn't signed by God, but by Robert J. Garcia (see below). There is one crazy stunt after another: $90 checks, $5,000 checks, $25 million for whistleblowers, $8 billion for farmers, and on and on. The $90 checks are real but everything else is vaporware. Trump is painting America as a hellish dystopia, like France, but 10x worse, and suggests that voting Democratic will lead to the greatest depression in all of American history, worse than 1837, 1873, 1893, or 1929.
Trump also said Democrats will "mutilate your children." At a rally in Arizona he said: "I mean, they can do whatever they want, and they do. Your son leaves as Jimmy and comes back home in 3 days as Janet, and they don't even ask you." Gee, maybe you would have preferred Jamie or Jackie. In Kansas, he said: "the Dumocrat agenda is a plan to extinguish Western civilization. They want to open the borders." In Montana, he said that Democrats will take away your guns: "You know who would love that to happen? Some of the wild animals you have up here that like eating you. They would gain a lot of weight." In Ohio, during a rally for Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), Trump said: "I started examining his body... I looked and I watched up and down, and I looked at his ass. Look at that jawline." Wow. With that recommendation, Husted sure has the straight-but-curious vote locked down now.
All this reeks of desperation. He is acting like a cornered animal with nowhere to go and fighting for its life. We have no doubt some voters will be scared witless by this nonsense, but these will be people who were already planning to vote Republican anyway.
And it is not going to get better before Nov. 3. The final NYT/Siena University poll was released yesterday. Trump's approval is 36%, his lowest ever in this poll, and his disapproval is 59%, with two-thirds of independents disapproving. Also, the generic House poll is now D+11, which, if true, will translate into dozens of new House seats for the Democrats. When Trump hears about this and realizes the trend is down, he is going to go bonkers. It's going to be quite a fireworks show on his ass-loving social media platform this weekend.
It is not only Trump who is throwing all the dirt he can find at the wall and hoping it will stick. Yesterday, we discussed the despicable ad Vivek Ramaswamy is running in Ohio in which Amy Acton's estranged mother, who did nothing to stop her husband from molesting Acton when she was 12, condemns Acton as a liar. Acton's brother confirmed the candidate's story, not the mother's. A grand jury apparently agreed and Acton's stepfather was indicted, ran away, and lived as a fugitive until he died in 2004. The ad has caused a furor because some people consider using the rape of a 12-year-old girl as political fodder not to be cool. Ramaswamy's response was to announce that he will spend $4 million running the ad. J.D. Vance told Republicans to stop whining about the ad. And remember, Republicans have traditionally considered a candidate's character more important than the candidate's policy positions. (V)