We’d like to believe that the November 6 elections and the rest of that damnably cold month are still far off, but a chilly rain has been falling on both the just and unjust around here for the past few days, all the local lawns are sprouting yard signs for some candidate or another for some office or another, and that damnable calendar tells us that the reckoning is now less than a month away.
At this point we’ll not venture any predictions about how it all might turn out, except that it probably won’t turn out the way we’d prefer. Our best guess is that the Democrats will win a bunch of races and the Republicans will win a slightly smaller yet effectively similar amount, and that it will wind up with at least a two-year political stalemate, which is about the best we can hope for these days.
Given the undeniably rosy gains in the gross domestic product and unemployment and stock market and other economic indices the Republicans should be cruising to an electoral landslide by now, but given how very horrible the Republicans are about pretty much everything else in the news cycle the Democrats should be faring more than the mere single digit lead in the generic polling they’re clinging to these days. We don’t much trust President Donald Trump’s cocksureness that he’s going to sucker the rest of the world into the same sort of sweet deal that he won from talk show host Merv Griffiin to buy the now-razed Taj Mahal casino-and-strip-club, but we’re also pretty cocksure that the unabashed socialism of far too many Democrats these days would be even more catastrophic, so we’ll hold out hope that our remarkably resilient free market economy is left to continue moving up and down and yet generally upward.
As for the rest of it, the Democrats seem to enjoy the advantage at the moment. For now the big story is still the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice, which has the base of the Republican party enthused, but it’s also got the fairer sexes of the Democratic party thoroughly enraged, and we guess our many Democratic women friends’ rage will outlast our many male Republican friends’ exultation about a Supreme Court Justice whose name they’ll probably forget in less than a month’s time. The Republicans have reportedly resorted to a campaign theme that the Democrats represent “mob rule” that would ruin a good man’s reputation with one scarlet woman’s allegation of sexual misbehavior, but women account for about half the vote around here, and we’re pretty sure that there are more women among our friends who have have victims of sexual behavior than there are men of our acquaintance who have ben falsely accused of sexual misbehavior.
Even here in reliably Republican Kansas the Republicans seem to have their hands full. The rural First District and our own-urban-Wichita-and-surrounding country Fourth District seem safe enough for the Grand Old Party, but up in the Second and Third districts that bisect the Kansas City metropolitan area’s affluent white suburbs and hard-luck black ghettos the Democrats are polling so well that the Republicans are withdrawing national ad money. The Democratic candidate for governor is well within all the polling’s margin of error, too, for a variety of peculiarly Kansas reasons too complicated to explain here, and for a variety of other peculiarly complicated Kansas reasons we’d wager some small amount on her chances of ultimately winning.
It’s close enough that Trump himself flew into Kansas over the past weekend to headline another of is sold-out rallies on behalf of gubernatorial candidate and long-time political ally Kris Kobach and the rest of the loyal Republican ticket. He fired up the sell-out crowd with talk about how all the Senate Democrats had signed up with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s “Open Borders Bill,” which does not exist, and derided Democratic nominee Laura Kelly as a gun-grabbing “far-left” candidate, which she is not.
For whatever reason the Republicans seem to be having trouble winning both minority women voters and the better-educated sorts of white women voters around the country ever since Trump became president, and here in Kansas there are enough of them to maybe swing an election or two or three. All politics is local, though, so we have no idea how it will play out in your precincts, but around here and for right now the best we’re hoping for a political stalemate that allows the rest of the country and its attended free markets to thrive for the time being.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 