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Adam Schiff Hardest Hit as Bad News for Capitol Riot-Obsessed Dems Gets Even Worse

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The writing on the wall for Democrats as far as the midterm elections are concerned has been obvious for quite some time now. But fresh polling out on both the sham ongoing Capitol riot “investigation” and also on what direction a majority of Americans feel America is headed provides further evidence that Democrats are likely to face a red tsunami in November that could perhaps reach levels not seen before in American history.

First up is a poll from CBS News/YouGov which shows that on the priorities list for the American people, “investigating” the Capitol riot ranked very low on the list. The top concerns for voters were inflation, the economy, and crime, all issues Joe Biden has been polling poorly on for months now:

Relatedly, the latest AP-NORC poll shows that an “overwhelming and growing majority” of people believe the nation is on the wrong track. That includes a whopping 78% of Democrats:

An overwhelming and growing majority of Americans say the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction, including nearly 8 in 10 Democrats, according to a new poll that finds deep pessimism about the economy plaguing President Joe Biden.

Eighty-five percent of U.S. adults say the country is on the wrong track, and 79% describe the economy as poor, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The findings suggest Biden faces fundamental challenges as he tries to motivate voters to cast ballots for Democrats in November’s midterm elections.

Inflation has consistently eclipsed the healthy 3.6% unemployment rate as a focal point for Americans, who are dealing with high gasoline and food prices. Even among Democrats, 67% call economic conditions poor.

As I’ve said before, if kitchen table voters are getting hit hard in their wallets and pocketbooks come election time, the president’s party is going to get trounced in the midterms, even if he’s performing well in other areas. It just so happens that in this case, Joe Biden isn’t performing well on any issue despite his administration’s wild spin to the contrary.

And as far as the January 6th show trials are concerned, maybe voters would view it as more of a priority had Democrats done more than just say they had the goods on former President Donald Trump. As it stands now, some 18 months or so after the Capitol riot, Adam Schiff and Company still can’t prove Trump intended to incite supporters in order to get them to breach the Capitol and/or was involved in some vast alleged conspiracy plot to subvert the democratic process or whatever.

In fact, just this week Democrats utterly embarrassed themselves by showcasing the supposed “bombshell” testimony of a “witness” who actually hadn’t witnessed anything at all, and key parts from her third-hand story are reportedly about to get debunked by Secret Service agents.

Who knew that after four years of routine “walls are closing in” nothing-burgers from rabidly partisan Democrats like Schiff who often promised big but always failed to deliver (and who continue to do so) that majorities have grown weary of that type of empty rhetoric and game-playing and are more interested in issues that impact their families and their bottom lines?

As it turns out, everyone knew – except for Capitol-riot-obsessed Democrats who are set to find out the hard way in November that their warped priorities are not in line with those of most people in America.

Related: Joe Biden Just Told Us Who He Really Is

Democrat pick for Ohio governor really wants to make armed school staff a campaign issue

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We don’t have much polling in the Ohio governor’s race, but incumbent Mike DeWine is favored to win a second term this fall given the state’s rightward trend in recent elections and the evidence that we’re headed for a red wave come November. That means Nan Whaley, the former mayor of Dayton and the current Democratic gubernatorial candidate, is going to have to do some major outreach to voters if she hopes to pull off the upset, and she seems to have settled on at least one talking point: claiming DeWine doesn’t care about kids because he signed legislation allowing them to be protected by trained and vetted armed school staff.

Several Cincinnati teachers gathered today as Democrat Nan Whaley aimed scatological fire at Republican Governor Mike DeWine, saying in the aftermath of Dayton’s Oregon District mass shooting he made things worse.

“For Mike DeWine, safety is just a campaign talking point,” Whaley said. “He doesn’t actually give a shit about whether you or your family are safe.”

That’s an insult, but it’s not an argument. It’s also putting Whaley squarely in the camp of the teachers unions, who are broadly opposed to armed school staff, while putting her in opposition to parents, students, and staff in the dozens of school districts around Ohio that had armed staff in place until the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in a case brought in part by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety that state law required any and all staff members who were armed to undergo the more than 700 hours of training it takes to become a certified peace officer in the state.

Ohio lawmakers responded to that insane decision this year by amending state law to specifically allow districts to adopt an armed school staff policy that requires at least 24 hours of initial training for staff members who volunteer and pass a background check. Note that this program is entirely voluntary; school districts aren’t required to have armed school staff, and no staffer is required to sign up to serve as a first line of defense in case of a targeted attack against a school.

Whaley complained when DeWine signed the legislation last month as well. In fact, she used the exact same line that she trotted out during her campaign stop with Cincinnati teachers on Tuesday.

“For Mike DeWine, safety is just a campaign talking point,” she said during a news conference Monday. “He doesn’t actually give a s**t whether you or your family are safe.”

Nothing says “I care” more than carefully scripted outrage, right? And yet, what is Whaley’s proposal to increase school safety, particularly in smaller or more rural districts where school resource officers aren’t an option? Whaley says the answer is increased mental health spending, but DeWine and Ohio Republicans have also approved more than $100-million in school security upgrades and additional mental health resources. Whaley’s only response is that isn’t enough money.

Sounds to me like Whaley has a lot of complaints, but she doesn’t have much to offer in the way of solutions. In fact, on her campaign website the only mention of “school safety” that I could find involves kids wearing masks.

As we enter a new phase of the COVID-19 crisis, Nan knows how important it is that kids are safely in school, so that they can get the education they deserve and their parents can get to work. That’s why she’s leading the fight to mandate masks in schools — the proven way to keep children healthy and schools open. Gov. Mike DeWine has this power — but is more worried about politics than Ohio kids.

No volunteer armed school staff, but Whaley’s fully in favor of mask mandates for students. As I said, DeWine is favored to win re-election this fall, and with his opponent holding positions like these, it’s not hard to understand why.

McConnell hopes Senate gun deal will shore up the suburban vote

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I’ve done a lot of media over the past couple of weeks talking about the Senate’s response to the mass murders in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas, and one of the questions that inevitably comes up is “what do Republicans get out of this?” The deal doesn’t include any sort of sweeteners for gun owners, after all; no removing suppressors from the National Firearms Act, no national right to carry reciprocity, nothing that any 2A organization could point to and call a win.

My answer all along has been that politics, not policy, is what’s really behind the Senate gun deal. Republican negotiators may have wanted to water down the Democratic gun control proposals (and succeeded in doing so, to be honest), but they weren’t pushing for the inclusion of any actual pro-2A amendments because that wasn’t what this deal was all about. It’s about telling voters, particularly those in the muddled middle, that they “took action” to protect students in school and to reduce mass shootings at a time when support for new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms is ramping up among the electorate. Yes, we’re looking at a red wave election, but with crime and “gun violence” now one of the top concerns of voters (albeit behind the economy and inflation), guys like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell don’t want to give voters any reason to hold their nose and vote for the Democrat on the ballot this November.

There’s one group of voters in particular that McConnell is targeting with the Senate gun deal: suburbanites.

“It is no secret that we have lost ground in suburban areas,” McConnell said. “We pretty much own rural and small town America, and I think this is a sensible solution to the problem before us, which is school safety and mental health and, yes, I hope it will be viewed favorably by voters in the suburbs we need to regain in order to hopefully be a majority next year.”

Gun owners and Second Amendment advocates are a big part of the Republican base, but we’re not only ones that the GOP is courting this fall, and McConnell has made the political calculation that the Senate gun deal will win Republicans more suburban votes than it will cost them in rural counties like my own. I’m not convinced that bet is going to pay off, but with polling outfits like Gallup reporting that “the latest support for tougher gun laws exceeds readings in the immediate aftermath of massacres in 2017 at a Las Vegas concert and in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,” I can also understand why a politician like McConnell would be concerned that blocking any action supposedly aimed at reducing mass shootings wouldn’t sit well with independent voters.. and even some Republicans.

Support for new gun laws among Republicans right now is still six points less than it was 20 years ago, but there’s been a noticeable increase since Gallup last posed the question to survey respondents in 2021. It’s that dotted line in the middle that McConnell and company are really worried about however, especially with Gallup finding that 48% of voters say “gun policy” is “extremely important” to their vote this fall.

Well, McConnell got his wish, and now Republicans can argue they listened to voters and responded to their demands, though that’s not going to stop Democrats from continuing to portray the GOP as a bunch of slackjawed mouthbreathers who care more about their guns than innocent school children.

Speaking of polls, however, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this one, because I suspect it largely mirrors what McConnell and other Senate Republicans backing the deal have been hearing from constituents and their own internal surveys.

More than two-thirds of Texas Republican voters approve of Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) job performance, according to a poll released on Thursday, despite heat he has received from former President Trump and others over his involvement in crafting bipartisan gun safety legislation.

The new Morning Consult survey, conducted June 11-20, found that 68 percent of registered Republican voters in the state approved of Cornyn’s job performance, the same percentage he received when respondents were last polled between May 14 and May 23.

A slightly higher percentage of Texas Republican voters have said they disapprove of the job Cornyn is doing, however — 17 percent give the senator a thumbs down in the latest poll, compared to 11 percent in May.

Cornyn was booed at the Texas GOP convention, but that animosity apparently isn’t shared by many of the less activist and more rank-and-file Republican voters. If Cornyn’s popularity among Texas Republicans isn’t taking a hit after leading the GOP side of the negotiations on the gun deal, McConnell can feel pretty confident that the same is true for the GOP writ large.

Is McConnell taking 2A voters for granted? Absolutely. Am I happy about it? Not at all. Just because I understand his motivations doesn’t mean I agree with them, but then, I’m a Second Amendment advocate, not a partisan politician trying to regain a majority in the Senate with what could be a pretty weak field in some races.

I look at the poll numbers above and think “man, we need to do a much better job of educating non-gun owners about the importance of the Constitution and how these gun control laws work in practice,” but most politicians aren’t nearly as interested in educating voters as they are responding to them, especially with Election Day a little more than four months away. They don’t want to tell voters why they’re wrong, they want to tell them “here’s why you should vote for us.”

For 2A voters, the Republican message is “we kept your Second Amendment rights secure”. For everyone else it’s “we took substantive action to protect our schools and our communities from mass murderers.” It remains to be seen how well those messages will be received by their intended audiences, but the motivation behind the messaging is clear enough, especially after McConnell’s remarks to CNN.

Senate nears final approval of gun deal with support of 15 Republicans

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Before the Senate cast its first procedural vote on its legislative response to the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, I predicted that the bill would ultimately get the vote of 65 senators. That procedural vote attracted 14 Republicans, so I was one off, but one additional Republican hopped on the bandwagon this afternoon as the Senate voted 65-35 to advance the legislation, setting up a vote for final passage either late Thursday or early Friday and removing any remaining suspense about the fate of the bill in Congress.

The bipartisan Senate gun bill Thursday cleared a major procedural vote 65-34, setting up a vote on final passage likely later Thursday or early Friday.

The bill, spearheaded by Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, comes in the wake of several recent mass shootings. One at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, was the major driver behind the bipartisan effort.

“This is an incredibly important day in the United States Senate. Final passage will be either later today or early tomorrow, and we will be well on our way to saving 1000s of lives in this country,” Murphy said Thursday. “30 years Congress has done nothing to try to address the epidemic of school shootings and murders and suicides in this country. And while this doesn’t do everything we need to do. This is a way that we show it’s possible to break the logjam.”

The one additional Republican vote came from Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who was absent for the first procedural vote but has been supportive of the bipartisan effort to reach an accord since the discussions began last month. The third and final vote will most likely mirror this one, and then the bill heads over to the House where Nancy Pelosi has pledged to bring it forward as quickly as possible; perhaps even as early as tomorrow.

With Democrats in control of the House, final passage is virtually assured at this point, though we could actually see less Republican support in the House than in the Senate, especially since the House GOP leadership is urging its members to oppose the legislation.

“In an effort to slowly chip away at law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights, this legislation takes the wrong approach in attempting to curb violent crimes,” Scalise said in a whip notice Wednesday.

“Since Biden’s election, Democrats have failed at every level. There’s literally only one way Republicans can lose the midterms,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said in a press conference. “That’s exactly what these 14 RINOs, Republicans in name only, have done in the Senate.”

There will likely be some House GOP support for the bill, but Fox News is told that could top out short of 20, or even short of the 13 members who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Five Republican House members voted for the much more restrictive package put together by House Democrats, and Rep. Anthony Gonzales, who represents the city of Uvalde has said that he’ll vote for the Senate bill after opposing the House measures, so there’ll be at six Republican votes in favor in the House. I think 20 is a pretty optimistic number for fans of the deal, however. My guess is that somewhere between 13 and 16 House Republicans end up signing on, with a good number of those votes coming from members who are retiring this year and aren’t up for re-election.

As for Boebert’s claim that the passage of the Senate deal is going to lead to Republicans losing the midterms, I just don’t see many Republicans staying home on Election Day to punish the GOP for agreeing to expand background checks (and impose a de facto waiting period) for gun buyers younger than 21 or for offering grants to states that establish “red flag” laws; especially with the background check provision sunsetting after 10 years and the pool of federal grant money open to states that choose not to put “red flag” laws on the books and instead want access to funds for other crisis intervention programs that don’t involve stripping people of their Second Amendment rights without due process.

Primary challenges the next time they’re up for reelection? Absolutely. But with the economy and inflation driving voter concerns far more than any other issue, I think McConnell, Cornyn, and Senate Republicans have made the political calculation that even conservatives who are ticked off about the Senate deal will hold their nose and vote for the Republicans on their ballot this fall.

Ironically, Bidenflation may be the most important thing that Joe Biden’s done to advance his gun control agenda, even though it’s going to be a major drag on Democrats’ fortunes come November. If gas were still at $2.75 a gallon and we weren’t wincing in pain every time we pay for our groceries, Republicans would probably be much more concerned about playing to their base and not giving an inch on gun rights because this would likely be a base turnout election for both parties. Right now, however, Democrats are trying to play to their base while Republicans are trying to expand their list of seats that can be flipped, and that unfortunately means that single-issue 2A voters aren’t quite as important to the GOP election strategy as we are in standard 50-50 election environment. They can’t afford to make us so mad that we decide to stay home, but clearly McConnell and company feel like they’ve got some room to play to the moderate middle before they run the risk of depressing turnout among the GOP base.

I don’t know if that strategy is really likely to pay off this year, and as I said, I think it’s going to come back and bite a lot of these senators the next time they face voters in a Republican primary, but that’s the political calculus at work at the moment, and it pretty much guarantees that Joe Biden will put pen to paper and sign the bill into law in the next few days.

Abrams wants to blame Kemp for Georgia crime

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Stacey Abrams is making another play for the Georgia governor’s mansion, and it’s not going even as well as her first attempt did. You know, the one that failed? Yeah, that one.

Anyway, 2022 doesn’t look to be a good year for Democrats. While they made gains in 2018, it’s not likely to happen this time. Crime and the economy are going to hurt come November.

Abrams, however, seems to think she can turn crime to her advantage, though.

As Republicans around the country prepare to attack Democrats with tough-on-crime programs this fall, Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams is focusing her campaign for governor on guns, hoping to make crime a liability for incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s reelection attempt.

Georgia Republicans have enacted multiple laws since 2014 loosening restrictions on who can carry a gun and where they can carry it. Abrams made tightening Georgia’s gun laws a big part of a public safety plan she released Thursday, proposing to reverse multiple laws that Georgia Republicans have enacted since 2014 loosening restrictions on who can carry a gun and where they can carry it.

…

Democrats are betting that voters are “at a breaking point,” as Georgia Democratic state Rep. Shea Roberts puts it, over Republicans’ decisions to expand access to guns.

Except, they’re likely not, nor should they be.

First, understand that crime was skyrocketing well before Georgia passed constitutional carry. Rape was up 236 percent and murder was up 43 percent in Atlanta as of February, well before any new gun laws were passed. You can’t blame laws that weren’t even in existence for that particular increase in crime.

Further, take a look around the nation for a moment. There hasn’t been a huge uptick in gun rights everywhere, but crime is soaring in just about every city in the nation.

With that in mind, it’s kind of difficult to argue that expanding gun rights is responsible for the increase in crime.

The truth of the matter is that Abrams is floundering and she’s trying desperately to grab key segments of the population. Gun control, for example, is an issue that polls better with white women than white men, but 60 percent of white Georgian women prefer Kemp over Abrams.

So, she’s grasping at straws. That hope that Georgians have reached a breaking point? That’s grasping at straws as well.

The polling makes it clear that Abrams isn’t likely to win absent some huge and massive scandal that directly implicates Kemp. Since that seems unlikely right about now, this is what she’s resorting to.

The problem is that no one is likely to buy it except for the same people who are already likely to support Abrams.

Yes, a lot of Georgians weren’t thrilled about constitutional carry, according to the polls, but they’re likely to be far less thrilled with Abrams and her radical anti-gun agenda.

So she can keep grasping at those straws if she wants. She’ll have no one to blame but herself when it backfires on her come the election time in November.