So how good are the professional prognosticators at guessing how races will turn out? Early in the home stretch, these are the races the Cook Report picked as the tossup districts. Several were tossups— basically the 5 that ended by fractional margins— and several weren’t anywhere near tossups, particularly the 14 where more than 5 points separated the winner and the loser.
AK-AL- Mary Peltola (D) was reelected by 10 points
AZ-01- David Schweikert (R) was reelected by less than a point
CA-13- John Duarte (R) beat Adam Gray by less than a point
CA-22- David Valadao (R) was reelected by 3 points
CA-27- Mike Garcia (R) was reelected by 6.4 points
CO-08- Yadira Caraveo (D) beat Barbara Kirkmeyer by less than a point
IL-17- Eric Sorensen beat Esther Joy King by 3.6 points
IN-01- Frank Mrvan (D) was reelected by 5.6 points
KS-03- Sharice Davids (D) was reelected by 12.1 points
ME-02- Jared Golden (D) was reelected by 6.2 points
MI-07- Elissa Slotkin (D) was reelected by 5.4 points
MN-02- Angie Craig (D) was reelected by 5.3 points
NE-02-Don Bacon (R) was reelected by 2.6 points
NV-01- Dina Titus (D) was reelected by 5.6 points
NV-03- Susie Lee (D) was reelected by 4 points
NH-01- Chris Pappas (D) was reelected by 8.2 points
NM-02- Yvette Herrell (R) was defeated by Gabe Vasquez by less than a point
NY-19- Marc Molinaro (R) beat Josh Riley by 2.2 points
NY-22- Brandon Williams (R) beat Francis Conole by less than a point
OH-01- Steve Chabot (R) was defeated by Greg Landsman by 5.6 points
OH-12- Emelia Sykes (D) defeated Madison Gesiotto Gilbert by 5.4 points
OR-05- Lori Chavez DeRemer (R) beat Jamie McLeod-Skinner by 2 points
OR-06- Andrea Salinas (D) defeated Mike Erickson by 2.5 points
PA-07- Susan Wild (D) was reelected by 2 points
PA-08- Matt Cartwright (D) was reelected by 2.4 points
PA-17- Chris DeLuzio (D) beat Jeremy Shaffer by 6.8 points
RI-02- Seth Magaziner (D) beat Allan Fung by 3.7 points
TX-34- Vicente Gonzalez (D) beat Mayra Flores by 8.5 points
VA-02- Jen Kiggans (R) beat Elaine Luria (D) by 3.4 points
WA-08- Kim Schrier (D) was reelected by 6.8 points
And totally missed were some of the cliffhanger races of the year— like CO-03, where QAnon freak Lauren Boebert only survived by 0.06 points, the closest race of the cycle, and WA-03 where Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez narrowly flipped a safe Republican seat and NY-17, and where Republican Mike Lawler narrowly defeated corrupt conservative Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney in a safe blue district.
So… these prognosticators and pundits— and this is by no means about Cook— have to be taken with a grain of salt. My worry has always been that they set the table of expectations first for the media and then for teh parties and finally for the general public. And the worst of those is the way they are all setting up Ron DeSantis to win the Republican nomination and the White House for 2024. Believe me, Trump is bad and DeSantis is worse. And don’t just take it from me. On Thursday, Paul Krugman devoted his column to it, Will 2024 Be A Vaccine Election? “[A]nyone imagining DeSantis as a more sensible, saner figure than Trump— a right-wing populist without the reality-denying paranoia— is delusional,” he wrote. “DeSantis hasn’t gone down all the same rabbit holes as Trump, but he has gone down some of his own, and his descent has been just as deep. Above all, DeSantis is increasingly making himself the face of vaccine conspiracy theories, which have turned a medical miracle into a source of bitter partisan division and have contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths.” It doesn’t just distinguish DeSantis from Biden; it also distinguishes him— to a lesser degree— from Trump.
Krugman wanted his readers to be aware that “Between May 2021, when two-dose vaccinations first became widespread, and September 2022 the least-vaccinated 10 percent of counties suffered a death rate more than three times as high as the most-vaccinated… There’s a startlingly close relationship between the share of a county’s voters who supported Trump in 2020 and the percentage of that county’s residents who haven’t received their shots— and the percentage who have died from Covid. You can, by the way, see the same patterns at the level of whole states. For example, although New York was hit hard in the first months of the pandemic (before we knew how the coronavirus spread or what precautions to take), since May 2021 more than twice as many people have died of Covid in Florida than in New York. Even taking Florida’s slightly larger and much older population into account, that’s thousands of excess deaths in the Sunshine State.”
Krugman reported that on Tuesday DeSantis announced “that he was forming a state committee to counter federal health policy recommendations— and asking for a grand jury investigation into unspecified ‘crimes and misdemeanors’ related to coronavirus vaccines. OK, I doubt that anyone believes that DeSantis knows or cares about the scientific evidence here. What he’s doing instead is catering to a Republican base that equates listening to experts, on public health or anything else, with ‘wokeness,’ and demonizes anyone saying things it doesn’t want to hear.”
Now, will DeSantis’ attempt position himself as the leader of the anti-vax movement and give at least tacit approval to conspiracy theories actually endear him to the Republican base? Again, I don’t know. Even if it does, I suspect that it will hurt him in the general election if he does become the nominee: Vaccine paranoia and Fauci hatred are still niche positions in the electorate at large.
Nut anyone who imagines that replacing Trump with Desantis as the GOP’s leader would signal a party on its way to becoming sane again is in for a rude shock.
Mr. Toomey with a bird's-eye view of desantis. fail to understand his warning at your peril.
donkey isn't just incapable of facing the threat of desantis and nazis. they REFUSE to face all threats. pussies are like that.
donkey has one and only one interest -- money from corporate and billionaire owners. they have lost many winnable elections; lost many winnable chamber majorities; lost winnable presidencies... all because the money said to flush their own candidates because they were too "progressive".
But they've also refused to do "merrick garland" about treason, insurrection, fraud and murder when they would rather run campaigns against someone they thought they could beat (mistakenly, it turns out, more often than not: nixon, reagan, hw, cheney/w…
The 2 scariest words in the English language today are: "President DeSantis." I hated Jebby when he was gov, and Rick Scott was no prize, but DeSantis is an order of magnitude worse.
DeSantis is the first gov I can think of since Huey Long to take on a major corporate power in his state. Unlike Long, who took on Standard Oil to raise tax $ to build desperately needed infrastructure in LA, DeSantis took on Disney for opposing his "anti-wokeness" campaign. He's taking on PhRMA now on vaccines. He's a highly anomalous Gooper who apparently relishes openly confronting corporate power (in highly limited circumstances). He clearly enjoys exercising power for its own sake.
What's scariest of all is that…
krugman stating the obvious. but he undersells it. desantis isn't just worse. he's an order of magnitude worse.
where nobody really knows what trump believes (except in his own exceptionalism), trump pandered to the worst of the worst in order to be worshipped and to take their money.
desantis is probably a true believer. and he's smarter. and he's far more effective in affecting pure evil. and he has the next 2 years to compile an impressive nazi CV with which to impress america's worst of the worst.
but what you really should be scared about is that desantis has already put arbitrary strictures on free speech and truth in education and kidnapped migrants and moved them across state lines…