Opinion

Postcards from the permanent campaign: What the midterms look like in 6 states

Not this time. The final run-up to the midterm elections that spotlights Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, vying against former Florida governor Charlie Crist, a Democrat, smacks of a fait accompli. So does the other marquee race, Sen. Marco Rubio, a Bible-quoting Republican against challenger Rep. Val Demings, a tough-talking former Orlando police chief.

For Democrats — who make up fewer Florida registered voters than Republicans do — any positive vibes come veiled by anticipatory grief. At least in South Florida, few Democrats are talking about the election, and if they do, it’s quietly, as though the Grim Reaper might overhear.

A recent event for Democratic activists in Jacksonville — Crist showed but Demings didn’t — attracted just 50 to 60 people. You could practically hear the air rushing out of the tires.

In the past two weeks, various surveys show DeSantis and Rubio pulling ahead, into the double digits, depending on the poll. “It’s over. And it’s going to be ugly,” Evan Ross, a longtime Democratic consultant, told Politico. He was talking about the governor’s race, but it could have applied to most any big race.

In my neighborhood, a Miami-Dade town of not quite 24,000 residents, people seem much more interested in the local races for mayor and council.

Republicans act as though they know the deal is sealed. Since 2020, Florida has become even more enthralled with the MAGA movement. It’s the byproduct of a confluence of factors: an energized and organized Republican Party, an aggressive and culture-wars-embracing governor, the arrival of many new Floridians — often from Republican-friendly states — and lopsided redistricting. Steep inflation under Democratic rule in Washington hasn’t helped.

National Democrats and donors scarcely played ball here. Seeming to sense an unwinnable fight, they basically steered their money and focus elsewhere. And the state Democratic Party’s effort and record remain lackluster.

DeSantis’s massive financial advantage has allowed him to spend more than $50 million on TV ads, compared with Crist’s paltry $5.5 million. The governor has taken credit for saving Florida from economic ruin during the pandemic and protecting schools from liberal intrusions. Crist and other Democrats countered with ads on abortion rights and unaffordable housing-insurance rates as well as the cost of living generally.

One open question is whether Miami-Dade, a longtime Democratic stronghold and the state’s most populous county, flips Republican. With more Cuban Americans galloping toward DeSantis, a Republican governor might win the county for the first time since 2002, when Jeb Bush was reelected.

That’s why President Biden and former president Donald Trump are campaigning here in the final days. Biden arrived on Tuesday, hoping to energize Democrats at a rally with Demings and Crist. But on Nov. 6, Trump will hold a rally for Rubio (and not, notably, for DeSantis, his potential future rival).

Two days later, we will know who won. Earlier than usual, most likely.

David Von Drehle: Let’s go to work

DE SOTO, Kan. — You might say that House members come in four types: the ones who want to be famous and will say anything to get on TV; the ones who want to climb the political ladder; the ones disillusioned by their limited power; and the vanishingly small number who actually enjoy the work of representing their constituents.

Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) could fit easily in Group 1. Every TV producer from morning to late night would love to book a Native American lesbian former mixed-martial-arts fighter who holds a seat in Congress from a purple island in the Midwest’s red sea. But Davids shuns the spotlight, styling herself a “nerd” who likes figuring out Washington so she can pull levers for her district.

She low-key listens to constituents regardless of party, asking what they need and speaking candidly about what she can and can’t get done. “There’s a hierarchy in D.C.,” she says, and as a two-term member she’s not the first to hear what’s going on. “Assume we know nothing.”

But she’ll try. She’ll try to get a mobile police command center for Olathe, and she’ll try to get the two-lane highway in Louisburg widened to four, and she’ll try to find money for local Chambers of Commerce to make payroll through the pandemic.

On a recent morning in De Soto, Davids was trying to help local leaders get ready for the biggest thing to hit town in decades. De Soto once bustled, thanks to a huge World War II munitions factory. But the plant has been closed and neglected forever — “nothing but rusty old fences and gates and rotting buildings,” city administrator Mike Brungardt told Davids.

The site needs a federal cleanup, pronto, because Japanese electronics giant Panasonic chose De Soto for a $4 billion battery factory to make power cells for electric cars. Besides the cleanup, De Soto needs wider roads, more schools, new housing, better sewers — “and we don’t have the money,” Brungardt said.

Yard signs for Davids’s opponent, software executive Amanda L. Adkins, attest to the fact that De Soto leans Republican. No problem. Davids salts her answers with mentions of her bipartisan work with Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and nods gratefully when local Chamber of Commerce director Sara Ritter praises her advocacy for small businesses.

Davids reacted calmly when Republicans in the state legislature carved a Democratic enclave out of her district, which includes much of the Kansas-side suburbs of Kansas City and replaced it with new rural precincts — she worked her way onto the Agriculture Committee. “I think our farm bureaus appreciate that I am taking the work seriously,” she said in an interview.

A New York Times-Siena College poll released Oct. 27 found Davids comfortably ahead, 55 to 41, in her rematch with Adkins. Might some of that margin be a residue of the landslide vote in August to protect abortion access in Kansas?

“I do think the political climate is a bit different since Roe was overturned,” Davids allowed — but then, a lot of things are different. The pandemic has eased, thanks to vaccines, she said, and many voters are turned off by the right’s election conspiracy theories.

Too partisan? Without missing a beat, Davids added a shout-out for the Kansas secretary of state, a Republican. With him in charge, the election will be splendid, she is confident.

Dana Milbank: The little Trump that couldn’t

MANHEIM, Pa. — It was a fitting coda to a fraudulent candidacy.

Doug Mastriano tried to overthrow the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania and was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and as Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial nominee this year he colored his campaign with Christian nationalism and antisemitism.

So it was appropriate that he brought in as his closer Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who did three years in prison for tax fraud and other felonies — then later, after receiving a pardon from President Donald Trump, became the self-described “chief investigator” for Trump’s “big lie” claims of election fraud.

“People can say all day long ‘there was no voter and election fraud.’ That’s BS and I know it!” the ex-con told about 400 cheering Mastriano die-hards Saturday at an indoor sports complex aptly named Spooky Nook. Kerik added, “The only way the Democrats are going to win this time is cheating.”

The whole election spectacle in this swing state has been grotesque this year. The crucial open-seat Senate race is close, as was originally expected, but for different reasons: Republican Mehmet Oz, a TV doctor/huckster, was weak on the campaign trail, and Democrat John Fetterman suffered a severe stroke.

But there is apparent good news. The voters of the commonwealth appear to be set to reject in large numbers the vulgar Mastriano, with his conspiracy theories and coterie of hate. Even in the Trump era, there is still such a thing as going too far.

Waiting in line with the modest Mastriano crowd here in rural Lancaster County, I heard a man nearby laughing about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home that left her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a fractured skull. He wore a cap announcing “Make America a S---hole With Democrats” and a T-shirt proclaiming “Protect the LGBFJB Community” (Let’s Go Brandon, F--- Joe Biden). Immediately behind me, two women speculated that the Pelosi attack was a hoax — “another diversion” — staged by the left.

Warm-up act Kerik, in a law-and-order lecture from the ex-con, led the crowd in expressing contempt for Philadelphia (“Who wants to visit, work, live or go to a school in a war zone?”) while finding a way to blame crime on Jewish billionaire George Soros.

Mastriano’s aimless ramble kept circling back to crime, critical race theory, transgender people, “disgusting graphic porn in our elementary schools,” the media, and girls afraid of finding a “pervert” in the bathroom. He said his opponent, Josh Shapiro, “can’t define a woman.”

A guy in the crowd called out: “He worked with Levine too long” — Rachel Levine, the trans former Pennsylvania health secretary now in the Biden administration.

“I love this crowd,” Mastriano replied. “We’re among our friends and allies.” He said he’s “going to buy a wig one of these days. I might look slightly better than Levine.”

He rounded that out by mocking Shapiro’s height and the effects of the stroke on “incoherent” Fetterman, making fun of the name of an African country (“shake your Djibouti”), and praising Lancaster County for outlawing election drop boxes.

The crowd answered with a standing ovation.

Karen Attiah: Everything’s bigger here, except the Democrats’ chances

DALLAS — In a lot of ways, it’s a pretty good time to be in Dallas. The Cowboys have been winning most of their games (so far, yay), and the city is one of the fastest-growing in the country. People are moving here from all over the country. We made it through the summer without a power-grid meltdown.

That said, a lot of Very Bad Politics have gone down in my state — abortion bans, migrant trafficking stunts and the further deregulation of guns. And in the governor’s race, while Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke is quite known nationally and has raised a lot of money, his campaign appears very unlikely to unseat the GOP incumbent, Greg Abbott.

For a long time, people have wondered whether the influx of people moving to cities in Texas would help alter the electoral map — whether people from blue states could come and try to change things here. It’s not uncommon to see bumper stickers with the words “Don’t California My Texas.”

Texas is still rapidly diversifying and immigrants are opening small businesses. I see much of that in all aspects of my life here in Dallas, from my gym — owned by immigrants from the Philippines — to the new African grocery store where my mom goes to shop. The media for years has made a lot of Texas’s demographic changes, and Democrats keep hoping that these changes would loosen the grip of the GOP over the state’s politics. Hispanic Americans are projected to soon outnumber Whites as the demographic majority in the state. However, many of the Hispanics that I know here are evangelicals. They lean conservative — which is something the national media constantly overlooks. Abbott knows this. He has been running ads in Spanish for quite a long time; Republican candidates often have ties with local megachurches.

What I think people on the left also miss is this: Just because there are more immigrants and non-Whites in Texas, it does not mean those groups have acquired the generational wealth (yet) to pour massive amounts of money into races and shape the culture wars — like wealthy White groups have. I wish we would talk about the political spending power of demographic groups to the same extent that we talk about their voting rates.

That’s one thing that conservatives get: Money is power. While Dallas itself is solidly Democratic, wealthy families and businesses in surrounding conservative suburbs have been fueling the state’s rightward lurch. There are traditional Texas Republicans who have been so disgusted with the current mutation of the Texas GOP that they will vote Democratic. Still, until the left gets serious about sustainably outspending conservatives here, a purple Texas seems like a pipe dream.

Gary Abernathy: A Democratic upset?

CINCINNATI — A left-leaning friend of mine in Ohio can’t stomach former president Donald Trump or the attitudes and political philosophies of Trumpist-style Republicans in general. He nevertheless has a soft spot for J.D. Vance, the best-selling author and Republican candidate for Senate who parrots Trump and has the ex-president’s endorsement.

Why? Primarily because they’re both from Middletown, Ohio, and both have family ties connecting them to Eastern Kentucky. He’s been following Vance’s life trajectory for several years. “I think I have a decent understanding of him,” my friend said.

Likewise, Vance’s opponent, Tim Ryan, has been making himself relatable to Ohioans — including Republicans — who otherwise don’t share the Democratic brand of politics Ryan typically represents. “I voted with Trump on trade,” Ryan proclaims in one frequently aired ad.

Such is the personal nature of Ohio politics — the Vance example being one that organically emanates from a random personal connection, the Ryan case more reflective of a calculated campaign effort by the Trumbull County Democrat to appeal to Trump supporters. Which candidate is more effective at convincing voters that he’s “just like us” could swing the race.

While traveling in recent days, I spoke with Republicans from northern, central and southern Ohio, most of whom acknowledged that Ryan has run the smarter campaign and agreed that if the victory went to the candidate who worked hardest, Ryan has killed it.

“I don’t think I can vote for him, but he’s going to be a strong candidate for statewide office in the future,” one Republican told me. That left me thinking that if a dyed-in-the-wool Republican like that was even considering a Ryan vote, other “soft” Republicans and right-leaning independents who are more persuadable might push Ryan across the finish line.

Yet Vance has done effective campaigning of his own, pushing back on accusations that positions he holds are racist by noting that his wife is Indian American and they have three biracial children. Vance routinely hammers away at Ryan’s claims of independence, citing Ryan’s 100 percent voting record with President Biden. Republicans with whom I’ve spoken think Vance has recently upped his energy level on the campaign trail, and national Republicans have focused more spending in Ohio to offset Ryan’s fundraising edge.

A recent Spectrum News-Siena College poll showed that while Vance had somewhat narrowed an earlier gap, Ryan still enjoyed a 45-40 edge among independents.

The landscape favors Vance, but Ryan’s campaign appeared to be designed with an understanding of that advantage, with early spending and activity mounting a big first-half lead intended to withstand a furious fourth-quarter rally. Ryan is watching anxiously as the clock ticks down.

David Byler: The view from (political) nowhere

LOS ANGELES — Hello from sunny Los Angeles, where there is no national midterm election!

I’m not joking. In my part of the city, I haven’t seen anything about national politics. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Alex Padilla, incumbent Democrats, will win their races easily, and I’m not far enough into the burbs to see a competitive House race. There are no Republican vs. Democrat fights because there are no viable Republicans here.

There are Democrat vs. Democrat fights, though.

I’ve seen yard signs for the mayoral race — where Rep. Karen Bass, the establishment Democrat, is running against tough-on-crime real estate mogul political outsider (sound familiar?) Rick Caruso. When I go for a run, I often see signs for a city council race between longtime incumbent Mitch O’Farrell and progressive challenger Hugo Soto-Martinez. They have clashed on police funding and homelessness. Kenneth Mejia, a city controller candidate, sells signs that feature his corgi in a Sherlock Holmes hat.

Canvassers do come to my house regularly. They’re always looking for my wife, who is a much more reliable voter than I am. The canvassers usually want to talk about California’s ballot initiatives. There are tons of them stuffed into the ballot every cycle. This year, voters will make direct decisions about abortion, sports betting, tax increases for millionaires and more.

I don’t have cable TV, so I don’t see many political ads. But there is a giant mail ballot with my name on it, on the hutch, staring me down as I write about elections in other states. And at least a few times per week, we get glossy mailers from local candidates. The word “DEMOCRAT” always appears in big, bold letters. The smaller words tell you if the candidate is a neoliberal shill or an ultrawealthy socialist.