by Frank Holmes, reporter
Political predictions are a dime a dozen.
It’s no big deal when some Beltway pundit or super PAC leader insists that one party or the other will sweep the upcoming elections and flip states that belong to the other party.
But a few election calls are worth their weight in gold—like when a Democrat says, “Get ready for Republican control of both houses of Congress in 2023.”
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That’s exactly what traditional Democrats are saying about this November’s midterms—and they say Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.
That analysis came just five days ago in an article written by Ty Strong, the head of a Democratic political action committee called Moderate PAC, in the Wall Street Journal.
The name of the article is “The Progressive Plot to Turn Arizona Red.” He said the Democratic Party’s far left-wing socialist Squad — embodied by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. — is about to pull the entire party down, one congressional seat at a time… beginning with toss-up states that voted Democrat the last time.
And that isn’t even the worst problem, he wrote: The worst problem is coming from the top down, from inept leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
For years, a civil war has been roaring underneath the surface of the Democratic Party between old-line liberals like Schumer — who is already pretty far to the left himself — and extremist “progressives” like AOC and her followers, who have no problem admitting they are “democratic socialists” when they get the chance.
Schumer felt the heat from the Left, so he scheduled a series of votes on Joe Biden’s big ticket items: abolishing the filibuster and having politicians in Washington seize control of all 50 states’ elections. Those bills are so radical that even some Democrats couldn’t vote for them, especially Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.
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Those senators are in the crosshairs of the “progressives,” who want to launch a primary against them. In states that aren’t sure they want a Democrat, the Squad wants to force them to vote for a loopy leftist.
AOC and her clique say Sen. Sinema should get a primary fight from left-wing Congressman Ruben Gallego, who will be closer to AOC’s wavelength.
“I mean, if it came down to someone like Ruben Gallego and Kyrsten Sinema, I think that would be the easiest decision I would ever have to make. There is no comparison,” she said.
“I don’t believe she’s really given a compelling case as to why she should be renominated as the Democratic nominee for United States Senate in Arizona,” AOC said. In AOC’s words, Sinema has “proven herself an obstacle to the right to vote in the United States,” because she wouldn’t abolish the filibuster, a pillar of the Senate for more than a century.
“I believe that, you know, she is not doing what voters in Arizona sent her to do,” the New Yorker said. And evidently, AOC put big money where her big mouth is.
Ty Strong writes that Gallego has been meeting with big-dollar New York donors who want to pay for his Arizona Senate primary—where even if he wins, he loses.
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“The results of an early December poll of 800 Arizona voters by the Moderate PAC show that Mr. Gallego would win such a primary by 12 percentage points,” he wrote. “Ms. Sinema leads in a head-to-head contest with a generic Republican by 6 points, 35% to 29%,” but Gallego would “struggle”—that is, he’d lose.
Meanwhile, Schumer has painted the state’s other Democrat U.S. senator, Mark Kelly, into a corner… and Kelly is facing a tough year as it is.
Schumer pushed a far-Left agenda, and Mark Kelly decided to rubberstamp it. Now, he’s in trouble with voters. After many talks and an enormous amount of pressure from people like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Kelly decided to sign onto AOC’s agenda and vote for abolishing the filibuster.
“Now, thanks to Mr. Schumer, Mr. Kelly has been forced to go on record as voting for an agenda that holds little appeal to moderate Arizona voters,” Strong wrote.
Kelly ran as a moderate. He’s popular as a former astronaut, and his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, received a serious wound from an assassination attempt. He had the goodwill of the state on his side, before Schumer forced him to talk like Ilhan Omar.
“Progressive purity tests have put both of Arizona’s Democratic senators in terrible strategic positions ahead of their next elections,” Strong wrote, with respect to this year’s midterm elections.
Ocasio-Cortez says none of this is her fault. “I can’t really point to any real substantive or serious or intellectually rigorous argument as to anything that the Progressive wing has done — aside from supporting President Biden, oftentimes more than the moderate wing of the party has — in a way that can lead to sinking poll numbers,” she said on MSNBC, as if her constant talk of defunding the police, erasing our border, and establishing a Green New Deal where the government cuts checks to people who are “unwilling to work” didn’t turn off anyone over the last few years.
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But Ty Strong looks at the numbers—and at the purple swing states—and he knows better. He just saw someone a Democrat who should have been a shoo-in to win the governor’s race in Virginia lose to Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin. He saw a race in deep-blue New Jersey go all the way down to the wire.
Arizona, which has been Republican most of its history, may just vote Republican in 2022 and 2024.
If so, you can thank the progressive plotters.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative who talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”