Despite the basic rule of politics â it takes 50% of the vote plus one to win â both parties have occasionally put forward nominees from the farther reaches of the right or from the extreme left. Those candidates have sometimes combined terrible public personalities and debate skills with policy positions far beyond the edges of mainstream politics.
This year Democrats are trying to sell four extremists to voters: Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Troy Jackson in Maine and James Talarico in Texas. In three of those four races, Republicans have countered with nominees from the center: Mike Rogers in Michigan, Michele Tafoya in Minnesota and the incumbent in Maine, Senator Susan Collins, who, as Chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations is the most powerful woman inside the Beltway and whose defeat would be an enormous “own goal” for Mainers.
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The Republican Senate nominee in Texas is the states own attorney general, Ken Paxton, who has run and won three times in the Lone Star State. Paxton is a flawed candidate, but he will be a reliable GOP vote in the Senate and the party has rallied to him even though there are bruised feelings from the contentious primary.
Republicans have indulged their base over the years, especially in 2010 when it put forward Christine ODonnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Ken Buck in Colorado, and in 2012 with the nominations of Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana.
All five of those Republicans lost.
This year, a week out from Election Day, it especially doesnt look good for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine. El-Sayed has a reflexive attitude of grievance and in Maine, Jackson suffers in any side-by-side comparison with Susan Collins, who is a formidable political athlete.
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Talarico has seen Paxton rise and rise in the polls and the GOP has spent millions showing Texans how far out in left field Talarico plays. Talarico weirdly vanished from the campaign trail for a dozen days and blamed the flu.
In Minnesota â the “bluest” of the four states, the epic fraud scandal has followed Flanagan’s campaign, who has been the states Lieutenant Governor since 2019. Flanagan is matched against the political “rookie of the year” in Republican moderate Michele Tafoya, a sparkling and affable centrist.
Democrats have tried to prop up their failing four fanatics by sending out Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, former Vice President Kamala Harris and have pulled former President Barack Obama off Marthas Island to throw him into the breach.
Trouble is “AOC,” “Bernie,” and “Kamala” all telegraph “whacky or worse” into the electorates consciousness, an
