Did The Trump & Traitor Greene MAGA Rally In Michigan Make Things Even Worse For GOP Candidates?

Early Voting In Michigan Began Thursday

Last night, Trump’s opening act for the 5,000 MAGAts at the Macomb County Community College Sports and Expo Center in Warren, Michigan was, as usual, Marjorie Traitor Greene. The first QAnon sociopath elected to Congress, Greene told the audience that “I’m not going to mince words with you all Democrats want Republicans dead. They've already started the killings… Joe Biden has declared every freedom-loving American an enemy of the state. We will take back our country from the communists who have stolen it and want us to disappear. We will expose the unelected bureaucrats, the real enemies within, who have abused their power and have declared political warfare on the greatest president this country has ever had.”

The crowd appropriately aroused, the grievance-spewing Trump came out and further inflamed the MAGAts by whining about his "persecution" by the Democrats. Paul Egan and Todd Spangler reported last night that he described “Democrats as ‘cruel and vindictive left-wing tyrants’ and called them ‘sinister’ and ‘venomous.’ [He] called on his followers to elect a slate of Republicans he has endorsed to office on Nov. 8, warning that a failure to do so could have dire results. ‘These are dangerous people who are willing to burn every American institution to the ground.’”

All of his statewide crackpot MAGA candidates— gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon, Attorney General nominee Matt DePerno and Secretary of State nominee Kristina Karamo— are losing badly according to all the polls.

Trump focused on himself and legal matters he faces, from an FBI probe into documents, some believed to be classified, found in his Florida estate to investigations in New York, where the state attorney general is looking into his businesses' financial practices, and in Georgia, where his efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election are being scrutinized.

"Let's talk about the persecution of Donald Trump and the Republican Party," he said near the start of his speech. And for well over an hour, he did.

Saying the actions taken against him were politically motivated as a way to keep him from running for office again in 2024, he made claims that some investigations were fueled by enemies, including people who worked for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee he beat in 2016, though he offered no firm evidence for such claims.

"I think they’d like to see me in prison," he said. "You know why, because they’re sick— they’re sick individuals."

But he also said that the efforts to hurt him were actually helping him and his Make America Great Again effort, which he called "by far the greatest political movement in the history of our country."

"They are making us much stronger and much more unified," he said.

At several points during the speech, the former president repeated claims that the 2020 election in several key states, including Michigan, had been fraudulently won by Biden, despite the fact that no widespread problems or corruption was ever uncovered, no court ever upheld the claims and a Republican-led state Senate committee largely debunked the president's arguments.

He maintained it was "a rigged and stolen election" and some of his endorsed candidates— including Dixon, DePerno and Karamo— continued to echo many of those same claims. Biden won Michigan by more than 154,000 votes in 2020.

"I don't believe we'll ever have a fair election again," Trump said.

Meanwhile, he criticized Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who sparred with Trump at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 amid her own stay-home orders, as "radical" and "one of the most sinister governors in America." He said that during her tenure, Michigan has suffered the "worst crime wave" in its history but offered no data to support that. Generally speaking, while crime increased across the U.S. during the pandemic, it has not reached levels from the early 1990s.

"Michigan, you need to dump this wild-eyed extremist Gretchen Whitmer and put Tudor Dixon in the governor's office," he said.

The former president also railed against electric vehicles— with Michigan's automakers planning to bring dozens of models to market in the coming years— as something which would "kill the Michigan auto industry forever."

The most recent poll from the Detroit Free Press shows Whitmer leading the Trumpist candidate 55% to 39%. Whitmer’s favorability rating is 52% as opposed to 24% for Dixon. The favorability ratings for Trump’s Attorney General candidate Matt DePerno is 6% and it is 5% for Kristina Karamo, the kook he’s pushing for Secretary of State. All of Trump’s statewide candidates in Michigan are losing by double digits. Will the MAGA candidates hurt Republicans down-ballot? It sure seems that way in western Michigan where an open red seat is about to flip blue in a battle between John Gibbs, a deranged MAGA lunatic, and Hillary Scholten, a less than worthless Blue Dog hack:

And in the two other heavily contested congressional races, both Democrats— Elissa Slotkin and Dan Kildee-- are also ahead in what could have been very tough races for the Democrats. The Republicans thought they could win the new 8th district, for example, which now has an R+1 partisan lean. Instead, Dan Kildee appears safer by the day against MAGA RepublicanPaul Junge.

Same story in MI-07, which has an even more daunting R+4 lean but where weak New Dem incumbent Elissa Slotkin has strengthened her lead over Republican Tom Barrett:

Early voting in Michigan began Thursday and it appears that the more Tudor has run around the state with Trump Jr, the lower her standing in the polls has sunk. Yesterday, the NY Times reported that “Dixon’s stand on abortion in particular— in a state where voters tend to favor abortion rights and that in November will weigh a ballot measure to enshrine the right to abortion in the state Constitution— is a big reason that some Republicans are worried about her chances. They also fear that underperformance at the top of the ballot could cause the GOP to lose control of the State Legislature. Michigan’s Republican Party has been in a state of turmoil for months. The party’s primary was defined by fierce infighting between its establishment and Trump factions. Its two front-runners for governor were disqualified for turning in petitions with thousands of forged signatures. Another candidate was charged with four misdemeanors related to the Capitol riot.”

Dixon managed to rally her fractious party behind her in the race’s final weeks. But even after winning the primary, she remained a relatively little-known political outsider. It did not help that at the G.O.P. state convention later in August, Republicans officially endorsed two preachers of 2020 election falsehoods for top state offices: Matthew DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state.

The bruising battles, as well as the lack of financial networks and campaign experience among leading Republican candidates, have made for what Richard Czuba, an independent pollster in Lansing, Mich., called “the worst ticket I have seen from any party in the last 40 years.”

“It is great to run as an outside, especially when you run against an incumbent,” Czuba said. “But there are two sides of that outsider coin. On the one hand, you can run as the outsider against the establishment. On the flip side, you don’t know how to do this— and that is what is showing.”