Hope springs eternal for Democrats in the pages of the New York Times. Thursday’s lead story by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin provided Democratic predictions for winning the House in the November elections: “Clarity in Election Fog: Fall Holds Peril for G.O.P.” The reporters made hay over GOP struggles, and again exploited criminal charges faced by Rep. Chris Collins to make a pro-Democratic prediction.
...in a sign that they are already preparing for substantial losses, Republican officials are contemplating political triage, weighing which districts may be beyond hope and determining where money can be saved.
Among the seats that Republicans see slipping out of reach are those held by Representatives Rod Blum of Iowa and Jason Lewis of Minnesota, along with more than half a dozen open seats currently held by Republicans in New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
And after tracking the Ohio election late into the night, bleary-eyed Republicans awoke on Wednesday to the news that Representative Chris Collins of New York, who holds a solid-red district near Buffalo, was facing criminal charges related to financial dealings.
The news may imperil Mr. Collins’s seat, in a development the party can ill afford. More broadly, the specter of one of Mr. Trump’s earliest and most vocal supporters being arrested on insider trading charges may hand Democrats an opportunity to tar the Republican majority as corrupt.
When the paper wasn’t propping up Democrats in the news pages, it was tearing down Republican incumbents. Michael Tackett went for the female angle in attacking Virginia Republican congressman Dave Brat in Friday’s “Republican, Elected as an Insurgent, Faces an Uprising Led by Women.” The text box: “A conservative bulwark for the G.O.P. is singled out by Democrats.”
The Liberal Women of Chesterfield County did not exist when Representative Dave Brat, propelled by Tea Party-infused energy, shocked the Republican establishment in 2014 and defeated the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, in a primary triumph here that presaged even greater political upheaval two years later.
Now they’re all up in his grill.
Mr. Brat stunned Mr. Cantor, building an army of grass-roots supporters on the ground that was aided in the air by conservative commentators like Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin. Then he made waves of another kind last year, complaining to Republican supporters about women, their health care protests, and their dogged presence in his face.
“The women are in my grill no matter where I go,” he moaned, adding, “They come up -- ‘When is your next town hall?’ And believe me, it’s not to give positive input.”
Liberal women held those off-the-cuff comments against Rep. Brat, and so do their allies at the Times.
But the Times discarded the feminist angle in time to support a moderate Democrat against a Trump-supporting incumbent in New York, Rep. Claudia Kenney, whom the paper mocked as a joke. Reporter Lisa Foderaro’s piece was headlined, “To Turn a Red District Blue, Democrats Pin Their Hopes on a Bit of Purple – Skewing Right to Contend With ‘Trump Before Trump.”
[Progressive groups] upstate believe [Anthony Brindisi] is the kind of moderate Democrat who can unseat the Republican congresswoman, Claudia Tenney, an unabashed supporter of President Trump whose fiery rhetoric has become both a lightning rod local and a late-night television punch line nationally.
On Thursday, reporter Astead Hernon reported on a Michigan victory by Rashida Tlaib, who will likely become the first Muslim woman elected to Congress. The text box: “A Muslim woman with roots in Palestine wins a primary.”
“Palestine”?
Hernon used the story to smear America as hostile to Arabs, or something: “....those who stayed until the early morning saw a special sight: a room of largely Arab-American immigrants emotionally celebrating an American democracy that has, in their view, been hostile to their existence and identity.”
