Via the Free Beacon, you know the national outlook in November is grim when this dial tone is running neck and neck with a Republican in Kansas.
The last public poll published there was somewhat encouraging, putting GOPer Roger Marshall at 50 percent with a seven-point lead. But the internal polling that’s leaked lately has been ominous. A pro-Marshall Super PAC has him up just four points at 43/39 with lots and lots of undecideds and third-party voters up for grabs. A Democratic internal poll has Marshall trailing Barbara Bollier by two points, 45/43. That’s two separate surveys showing a Republican candidate sitting at 43 percent in a red state a month out from an election. And it’s not for lack of financial support: McConnell’s operation is shoveling $7.2 million at Marshall this month. The race is close enough, though, that one Democratic Super PAC is willing to match him. They’re putting $7.5 million in.
I wonder if the hard feelings from Marshall’s bitter primary victory over populist favorite Kris Kobach are hurting him now. Maybe Kobach fans are refusing to answer the bell for the establishment favorite after McConnell’s team went nuclear on their guy this past summer.
Either way, the Senate outlook is … not great:
Imagine if Schumer ends up with the votes to nuke the filibuster or pack the Supreme Court because Kansas opted to elect someone who missed the news over the past 20 years that the Patriot Act doesn’t have to do with tariffs.
This isn’t even the most embarrassing scoop about a Democratic candidate today. Remember smilin’ Cal Cunningham from North Carolina, who was caught a few days ago sexting with a woman who’s not his wife? He was doing more than sexting, it appears:
In a series of interviews late Monday as well as in the text messages, Guzman Todd described two in-person encounters with Cunningham, one in March in Los Angeles that she said did not include intimate contact and a second in July in North Carolina, where she said they were intimate.
In the text messages to her friend, Guzman Todd told her she was intimate with Cunningham in his home, which she later characterized as “weird.”
In another exchange, Guzman Todd indicated that she was frustrated by the limited attention that he showed her.
“I’m just going to send to his opponent his naked photos,” Guzman Todd wrote. “That will teach him.”
“He knows (that I) can tank his campaign,” she reportedly said in another text message to her friend. Congrats to Cunningham, who’s been selling himself to North Carolina voters with a pitch about character, on having the good judgment to embark on an affair right in the middle of a tight Senate race and to provide enough digital evidence to his jilted ex that she might be able to blackmail him with revenge porn.
Whether that ends up costing him his chance at Thom Tillis’s seat or whether voters shrug and say “at least he’s not anti-stimulus and anti-anti-COVID” remains to be seen. Exit quotation from Susan Collins, another Republican on the brink of being replaced in the Senate by a rando: “Waiting until after the election to reach an agreement on the next COVID-19 relief package is a huge mistake.”
