A whirlwind week

And to think: we're still about three months away from the election.

I know all 435 House members and roughly 34 Senators are up for re-election this year, but it seems to me this election is about two men. One of them isn’t on the ballot until 2024, assuming he chooses to run, and that’s not a given at this point based on the job he’s doing. Meanwhile, the other has been teasing us about pulling a Grover Cleveland since he was unceremoniously tossed out of office on his ear - perhaps not deservedly so, but the courts whiffed on the various cases until it was too late to do anything about it but have a mass, mostly peaceful protest. At least that’s what it should be called.

I think the Democrats’ strategy here is to try and smoke Donald Trump out into announcing his 2024 intentions before Labor Day so they can make this midterm election about Donald Trump, which means the news cycle will be perpetually about him and his trumped-up (no pun intended) legal issues. Not that it isn’t already, but at least the press can be honest about it. Trump 2024 may already be baked into the cake in people’s minds, though, so we’ll see.

This approach is sort of similar to the strategy that kept Gavin Newsom in office in California - while they’re talking about him as a Democrat alternative to the Biden/Harris team in 2024, it’s worth mentioning that less than a year ago there was a strong effort in California to remove him from the governor’s chair. But once Golden State Democrats set up the recall to be a referendum on Donald Trump by clearing the field of any Democrat would-be successors to Newsom should the recall vote succeed, they had a ready-made template for success in any election they could use Trump’s name in. It’s why you saw Democrat spending in GOP races in Maryland and Michigan, among other places, to bolster Trump-endorsed candidates who were considered easier to defeat in November. The risk of that strategy to Democrats is tempered if Trump is in the 2024 race.

I’m praying for the Democrats’ approach to work out like one of Wile E. Coyote’s hare-brained schemes, but that’s going to depend on how Republicans do with getting out the message of Joe Biden’s many failures despite the press static, and the deception: just because the government figures say there’s zero inflation doesn’t mean people aren’t feeling it. And while it’s nice that gas prices have dropped, they are doing so because demand is soft: people are skipping out on long vacations this year because they can’t afford them or can’t get off work from that second full-time job they had to take to tread water.

Even so, the Democrats are really, really trying to get Donald Trump to commit. Did you ever think that, in your lifetime, you would see a potential Presidential candidate and former President be served with a search warrant which seemingly doubles as a fishing expedition for a Department of Justice controlled by his political enemies? If the shoe were on the other foot, that opposition party would be rounding up the votes for impeachment, aided by the members of his party cowed by media perception of mass disapproval. But I guess that’s the state of play these days; otherwise, you’d be hearing more about the CDC suddenly deciding the CCP virus wasn’t such a big deal after all or about just how ineffective the Inflation Reduction Act will be as it does little to reduce inflation but a lot for the employment prospects of goons who could go work for the IRS now.

Here in my adopted home state of Delaware, though, this excitement has basically passed us by since 2022 happens to be our “off” year for electing a United States Senator and we only have one House race that’s - aside from a few changes among the bit players - a rematch of the 2020 race that was decided once they began counting mail-in votes, of which there were a lot. Since our perpetual candidate Scott Walker has moved to South Carolina, the GOP opposition was one barely-known aspirant who filed his FEC paperwork and put together a pretty much DIY website before vanishing about the time when the DEGOP made their party endorsement official. Nobody sought out the coveted Trump endorsement in Delaware Republican statewide races because no one had to - they were all unopposed. It’s made for a dull primary campaign.

The only bit of drama we have in this primary comes from the Democrat side, and it’s because the state’s attorney general (as the legal officer for the state) filed malfeasance charges against the auditor, who’s been busy auditing but also ended up convicted of three misdeameanor charges. The question of whether Kathy McGuiness can be removed from office may be made moot if the Democrats don’t select her to be the nominee, but if McGuiness wins then it’s going to put the Democrats in a spot of having to deal with a damaged nominee. That’s the one danger on their side since the Democrats have no other statewide primaries, either.

But you know Delaware Democrats are going to try and run against Donald Trump so it’s up to Republicans to run against Joe Biden, who’s unpopular even in his home state. They need to convince independent voters and thoughtful Democrats that, despite the numbers that will likely be desperately burnished to make Joe Biden’s pathetic record look better, their big-government solutions won’t work for Delaware. We’re spending a lot of money to enrich special interests - and I’m sure somewhere the Big Guy is getting his 10 percent cut - but their version of trickle-down economics where the rich get richer and the poor and middle-class get nothing but the bills needs to be replaced.

And to think we have another 12 weeks of this insanity. Yikes.