GOP Despair
Senate GOP candidates might not be doing as well as everyone thought: “The new round of October polling from the Senate Leadership Fund shows all but one Republican candidate running behind Donald Trump in battleground states,” per an internal memo reported on by Politico. There are currently open seats in Michigan, Maryland, and Arizona, plus the West Virginia (where Republican Jim Justice is up against Democrat Glenn Elliott) and Montana (where Republican Tim Sheehy is up against Democratic Sen. Jon Tester) races look quite good for them.
“But other pickup opportunities, namely Maryland and Michigan, are moving in the wrong direction,” notes Politico. “And Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of the two incumbents running in a state Trump won in 2020, looks surprisingly strong in Ohio.”
It still looks like Republicans will manage to win control of the chamber, but it’s a question of by what margins. In fact, they even have a few problems with incumbents: The memo specifically warns that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is in trouble, up by only one point in the most recent poll (compared with three points in mid-September), with his opponent Colin Allred outspending him since August.
FEMA-hater arrested: “FEMA warned last week that a deluge of mis- and disinformation surrounding Hurricane Helene had hampered federal response efforts,” reports Axios. On Saturday, 44-year-old William Jacob Parsons of Bostic, North Carolina, armed with both a rifle and a handgun, was arrested and charged. Parsons had allegedly made comments “about possibly harming FEMA employees working after the disaster of Hurricane Helene in the Lake Lure and Chimney Rock area,” according to the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office.
Initial reports had claimed a militia was involved, but law enforcement later amended this to say Parsons was acting alone.
This comes on the heels of an awful lot of media-class bellyaching about how online misinformation and disinformation has resulted in FEMA workers fearing for their lives. It is absolutely possible that there has been a slight uptick in this, and that there are a few crazies—mostly acting alone—who are targeting government workers. But it is itself needless fearmongering to act like there’s some vast epidemic of violence directed at FEMA employees.
Case in point: “As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts,” wrote Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic last week, who called it “more than just a misinformation crisis” and lamenting the fact that “angry, embittered citizens have been harassing government officials in North Carolina, as well as FEMA employees.” Warzel says that an extremism research group has found that “‘falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government,’ including ‘calls to send militias to face down FEMA.'”
Any violent threat is concerning, but part of the reason why the above arrest is notable is precisely because there have been so few of them, contra Warzel’s implication that there’s some kind of mass movement against FEMA employees.
Scenes from New York: I legitimately find this to be so helpful.
A map for all the East Coasters visiting LA pic.twitter.com/aSL8g1ungx
— Tyler Bindi (@TripleNetTyler) October 14, 2024
QUICK HITS
- “Harris isn’t ‘vague’ or ‘careful’ or disinclined to ‘delineate her stance.’ She’s wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth,” writes Charles C.W. Cooke at National R
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