Primary Season: When One Door Closes, Another One Opens

And that’s a wrap.  Primary season came to a close Thursday night when Cynthia Nixon did not end up capturing the Democratic Nomination for Governor in New York State.  Nixon ended up capturing slightly more than a third of the Democratic Primary vote, slightly more than Incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 primary opponent, Zephyr Teachout.  New York City Councilman Jumaane Williams came much closer to ousting Incumbent Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul thanks to a strong showing in Brooklyn and Manhattan.  Hochul can attribute her victory to a strong performance in Upstate New York and the three remaining New York City boroughs.  As primary season came to a close, Teachout, a Fordham University Law Professor, ended up losing her third bid for political office.  Teachout ran for New York State Attorney General this year two years after running to represent New York’s 19^th Congressional District (which she lost to now-Congressman John Faso) and four years after losing to Cuomo in the Democratic Primary for governor.  Apparently, that video she made promising to prosecute ICE just couldn’t help her over the finish line.    

With primary season in the rearview mirror, the focus now turns to the general election.  Pundits will obsess over President Trump’s national approval ratings and the national generic ballots asking people which party they would like to see control Congress but in the United States of America, we do not have national elections.  While candidates will attempt to nationalize the election by focusing on national issues specifically involving President Trump, ultimately the voters of each state and Congressional district will decide which candidates they would like representing them in Congress and in their respective state capitals.  While President Trump’s national approval rating does not look that good, he enjoys much higher approval ratings in the some of the states that actually have Senate elections this year; especially in West Virginia, where he boasts a 64 percent approval rating according to Morning Consult.  The President also has approval ratings of 50 percent or higher in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and North Dakota; and a plurality of Floridians approve of his job performance.  President Trump won all six of those states in the 2016 Presidential Election; five of them by double digits.  All six states have Democratic incumbents running for re-election.  President Trump has already held campaign rallies for many of them.  The President’s above-water approval ratings in Tennessee and Texas may also help pull Republican Senate candidates over the finish line as they seek to ward off well-funded Democratic challengers.  President Trump finds himself slightly underwater in Nevada and Arizona, which Democrats view as their best pickup opportunities.   

While primary season has officially come to an end, for some, it has only just begun.  Several general election races in California will effectively have more in common with primary elections than general elections since California’s top-two primary system means that all candidates running in the primary run on the same ticket, regardless of party.  The candidates with the two highest percentages of the vote in the primary, regardless of party, face off in the general election.  In many races in California this year, either two Democrats or two Republicans will face off against each other in the general election.  The Senate race will consist of a match between liberal Democrat Dianne Feinstein and even more liberal Democrat Kevin de Leon.  De Leon has secured the endorsement of the California Democratic Party. 

That may explain Senator Feinstein’s last-ditch effort to derail the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court by announcing that she had informed the FBI of a decades-old anonymous sexual assault claim against Kavanaugh outlined in a letter.  Feinstein first learned of this dirt on Kavanaugh from his high school days back in July, when Representative Anna Eshoo gave her the letter.  Taking a page out of NBC’s playbook, Feinstein strategically sat on the information Keep in mind that the left waited until after Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings concluded before they hauled out Anita Hill to make sexual harassment allegations against him.  The New Yorker reported that Kavanaugh’s accuser claims that Kavanaugh held her down and tried to force himself on her at a party; eventually letting her leave. This desperate attempt has much in common with the left’s damning revelations about 2012 Presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a “bully” during his high school years. Senator Harry Reid also falsely accused Romney of not paying his taxes during a speech on the Senate floor.  When confronted after the fact about his false claim, Reid smugly responded “Well, Romney didn’t win, did he?”  The left hopes that this newfound allegation, which 65 women who knew Kavanaugh during his high school years in addition to Kavanaugh himself “categorically deny,” will cause Kavanaugh’s dreams of serving on the Supreme Court to crash and burn.  After all, the court of public opinion, anchored by the mainstream media, tends to find all of those accused of sexual misconduct guilty regardless of the evidence.   

Speaking of Kavanaugh, his confirmation hearings serve as an effective reminder that when it comes to primaries and elections, when one door closes, another one opens.  Even though the 2018 general election has not even happened yet, buzz about the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries has already begun.  Two of the Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have established themselves as 2020 Presidential contenders.  According to Ann Coulter, they both competed for “most hysterical woman at the Kavanaugh hearings.”

Cory Booker had his infamous “Spartacus” moment where he dared Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn to expel him from the Senate for violating Senate rules by releasing confidential documents related to Kavanaugh’s time in the George W. Bush White House.  As it turns out, Booker had already received the green light to release the documents. And the documents he released actually showed that Kavanaugh felt suspicious about the use of racial profiling in the wake of 9/11; if Booker had the goal of painting him as a racist, he definitely fell flat.  

Harris, on the other hand, took some of Kavanaugh’s arguments out of context as he explained the argument of the group Priests for Life, the plaintiffs in a 2013 court case dealing with their opposition to paying for “abortion-inducing drugs.”  Harris circulated a video of Kavanaugh’s statement accompanied by a tweet describing “Kavanaugh’s words” as “a dog whistle for going after birth control.”  Even The Washington Post, which would likely endorse Harris should she become the Democrats’ Presidential nominee in 2020, took issue with her approach, giving her four pinocchios and stating that “Harris’s decision to snip those crucial words from her first post on the video is certainly troubling.”  Politifact also weighed in: “In Harris’ tweet, Kavanaugh appears to define contraception as abortion-inducing.  But the video failed to include a crucial qualifier: ‘They said.’  In fact, he was citing the definition of the religious group Priests for Life. He was not expressing his personal view.” 

In an attempt to portray herself as 100 percent supportive of what Katie Pavlich refers to as “Femi-Marxism,” Harris also asked a ridiculous question “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”  The premise of Harris’s question rests on the idea that abortion laws give the government power to “make decisions” about the female body.  Harris’s questioning echoes a similar idiotic statement made by Illinois Congressional candidate Sean Casten, who compared abortion to a routine medical procedure such as “gallbladder surgery.”  Sadly, many liberals have fallen for this sadly perverse way of thinking, which may explain why they want American taxpayers to foot the bill for this “harmless” medical procedure. To answer Harris’s question, the government has the power to make decisions about both the male and female bodies; look no further than indecent exposure laws, which basically say that males and females must cover up certain parts of their bodies when in public. 

Harris and Booker have by no means limited their theatrics to the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings.  Harris and Booker both joined the Senate Judiciary Committee at the beginning of this calendar year to replace the equally melodramatic Al Franken; whose Presidential ambitions came to an end following the release of a photo showing him grabbing a sleeping woman’s breasts in a frat-boy pose, much to the chagrin of Bill Maher.  Harris has attempted to woo the resistance both inside and outside the United States Senate.  During an appearance on “The Ellen De Generes Show,” host Ellen De Generes asked Harris if she had to choose between getting stuck in an elevator with President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who would she choose.  Harris asked “does one of us have to come out alive?”

Going back to the results of the New York statewide primary, the final pre-election day primary of 2018, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s victory over Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic Primary solidifies his standing as a 2020 Presidential contender.  He blew some kisses to the #Resistance during his debate with Nixon, where he referred to ICE as “thugs.”  Should the presence of third-party candidates on the ballot split the left-of-center vote, allowing the Republican candidate to emerge victorious with a mere plurality of the vote, that may mark the end of the Cuomo 2020 Presidential campaign.

In addition to the obvious 2020 Presidential candidates consisting of politicians at the state and national level, a candidate who hopes to emerge as the dark horse in the nation’s 59^th quadrennial Presidential election recently made an appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”  Publicity-hungry attorney Michael Avenatti has made hundreds of appearances on left-wing cable news outlets promoting the case of his client, porn star Stormy Daniels, as he attempts to bring down the President of the United States for allegedly paying her hush money to keep quiet about an affair. He has already traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote in the Democratic Party Presidential primaries.  Should he end up as the Democratic nominee in 2020, the 2020 Presidential Election between President Trump and the so-called “Creepy Porn Lawyer” may go down as the nastiest in American history.

Politics has much in common with New York City, “it never sleeps.”  To those sad about the 2018 election season coming to a close, remember what Karen Carpenter once sang: “We’ve Only Just Begun.”