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Demings calls for investigation into police response to Texas school shooting

Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) said on Sunday that she wants an investigation into local and federal authorities’ initial response to the shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. 

During an appearance on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Demings told moderator Margaret Brennan that since the Columbine massacre at Littleton, Colo. in 1999, law enforcement officers have been trained to respond to and defuse an active shooter situation.

The Florida Democrat called for a investigation into the response by Texas law enforcement, the details of which changed dramatically over the course of last week where officials acknowledged police did not confront the shooter for more than an hour after the rampage began.

“Well, what we must demand is a thorough and complete investigation,” Demings told Brennan.

“We all know post Columbine, there is no time to waste that the officers on that scene are expected to go into those situations we trained on it and your land, the police department and every sworn member including the chief of police went through the active shooter training,” Demings added. “So obviously, that did not happen.”

Demings also said more questions than answers remain about the police response to the shooting.

“We have to make sure that it is as clear and as accurate as possible. So there’s a lot of work to do there,” Demings said. “We have certainly more questions than answers and I know that we’re gonna get to the bottom of it.”

Nineteen schoolchildren and two teachers were killed and 17 other people were injured on Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas when a gunman opened fire inside of a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School. The massacre in Texas happened a week after the mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., which killed 10 people. Both of the shooters, who were 18 years old, obtained their weapons legally.

Demings also called on the Senate to pass a background check and red laws in response to the shootings.

“I believe that those are two pieces of legislation that have overwhelming public support. We can get it done if the Senate has the political will to do it,” Demings told Brennan.

Source: TEST FEED1

Democrats need more than just money for key statehouse races

With the Supreme Court on the precipice of overturning Roe v. Wade, many have rightly noted that state legislatures will now become the main battleground for protecting abortion rights in America. Record donations in the 48 hours following the leak of SCOTUS’ draft opinion show that Democrats may finally be taking state legislative races seriously.

Since Forward Majority’s inception, we’ve been raising the alarm on the critical importance of state legislative power — and the anemic fundraising in key races. This remains true, and good candidates with well-funded campaigns are an essential baseline to win the most valuable seats that lie in the path to flipping state legislative chambers.  

However, recent experience makes clear that money, even in unprecedented sums, is not sufficient in winning the most important, tipping point statehouse races. Democrats recruit great candidates and win the money game — yet are unable to flip key seats that lie in the path to Democratic majorities in battleground states.

Two statehouse races in Texas and Arizona taught us this lesson back in 2020. Although Akilah Bacy spent twice as much as her opponent in the race for a Texas House district in the Houston area, which was carried by Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, she lost by 2 points. AJ Kurdoglu faced a similar fate in Maricopa County, Ariz., losing by 2 points in a race for the Arizona Senate, even though he also outspent his opponent by 2:1 in a Biden-won district.  

And, in Virginia in 2021, the seven Democratic incumbents in the House of Delegates who lost their seats when Republicans took control of the chamber, all had a commanding money advantage over their opponents – several by more than 5:1. These are just a few examples of the Democrats’ chronic down-ballot lag in majority-making districts. 

This challenge existed in 2020, a relatively strong year for Democrats, and an even bigger challenge should be expected in the tougher midterm environment Democrats find themselves in this year.

In order to address these gaps and build real power down-ballot, Democrats not only need to invest money but also adopt new, innovative strategies. 

For example, voter registration is a tool that Democrats have never systematically deployed at scale in the state legislative battleground. We’ve identified millions of unregistered likely Democratic voters who live in key state legislative battleground districts — primarily suburbs and exurbs in the Sunbelt and Midwest — that are often out of reach for traditional nonpartisan voter registration efforts. 

Voter registration has been a critical tool and made a tremendous contribution to civic participation among underrepresented groups. However, so much of this infrastructure focuses on outreach in target-rich urban areas — think college campuses and big cities — where programs can most efficiently and cost-effectively find prospective voters to register.

This approach makes perfect sense for statewide races, where the goal is simply to grow the electorate across the state regardless of district lines. And it is incentivized by the fact that voter registration efforts are overwhelmingly nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) funded and focus heavily on minimizing cost per registrant. 

But these dynamics create a voter registration deficit in the most important battleground turf — neglecting core geographies that lie squarely on the path to Democratic majorities in state legislatures.  

The consequences of this oversight are significant. In 2020, Republican statehouse majorities across six crucial states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Arizona — were decided by less than 100,000 votes — combined. In Arizona, a state that has been a poster child for Republican voter suppression and election subversion efforts, the balance of power in the state House came down to a mere 3,000 votes. 

Importantly, while it is more time-consuming and costly, registering these likely Democratic voters in untapped suburban and exurban geographies would add value up and down the ballot, as their votes matter not only in state legislative races but in key statewide races as well — including U.S. Senate, governor, and secretary of State. Voter registration is also one of the best tools to create long-term change in the fundamentals of the electorate — registering more Democrats in competitive districts alters the political terrain for years to come. 

Democrats can no longer afford to ignore voters in key state legislative battlegrounds — especially when some of the most nefarious attacks on reproductive rights are, and will be, coming from Republican-dominated state legislatures. In addition to throwing funds into these races, Democrats need to start employing targeted, data-driven voter registration efforts in order to meet these voters where they are. If we want to win these races, it’s time Democrats start seriously investing — and leveraging every untapped opportunity.

Vicky Hausman is co-founder and co-CEO of Forward Majority, an organization dedicated to accelerating Democratic state legislative power.

Source: TEST FEED1

GOP pitches hardening schools as Uvalde security failures emerge

Republicans and gun rights advocates are calling for measures to boost school security in response to this week’s massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a rebuttal to those seeking to restrict firearm purchases and possession.  

But the calls to toughen security come as Texas officials and media reports revealed that some of the security measures Republicans are calling for were already in place at the Uvalde elementary school — and failed.  

“When 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes. We secured the cockpits,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), a staunch gun advocate who owned a restaurant where servers open-carried firearms, said on Fox News Thursday when talking about school security. 

At the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual conference on Friday, former President Trump ran through a number of the top GOP suggestions to “finally harden our schools and protect our children.”  

The proposals included a single point of entry, strong exterior fencing, metal detectors, locked doors and armed security on-site. 

“What we need now is a top to bottom, security overhaul at schools all across our country,” Trump said. 

At the same meeting, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) pointed to a grant program proposal in a measure that Democrats blocked in 2013. Another bill of his would allow grant funding to be used on school security measures like bullet-resistant doors and windows, school safety officers and security technology. 

“Had Uvalde gotten a grant to upgrade the school security, they might have made changes that could have stopped the shooter and killed him at the single point of entrance with our law enforcement there on the ground before he hurt any of these innocent kids and teachers,” Cruz said. 

Uvalde did get a grant, though, two years before the massacre.  

According to the Texas Tribune, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District in January 2020 received a $69,000 grant from a state program aimed at boosting physical security in schools, though it is unclear how the money was spent. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) earlier in the week touted the 2019 state law that authorized the school security and safety grants, intended to fund projects like reducing school entrances or providing school security.  

According to an Uvalde school district security measures plan posted online, first reported NBC News, perimeter fencing at Robb Elementary was “designed to limit and/or restrict access to individuals without a need to be on the campus.”  

Federal programs aimed at boosting school security are also already in place. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Fox Business Thursday brought up the Student, Teachers, and Officers Preventing (STOP) School Violence Act, which was signed into law in March 2018.  

More than $125 million in grants to schools were announced by the Department of Justice under the program last year. McCarthy also suggested that “billions” of dollars of COVID-19 funding for schools should be allowed to be used for boosting school security. 

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Wednesday sought unanimous consent to pass his bill that would codify and preserve a federal “clearinghouse” of school safety best practices.  

The resource, found at SchoolSafety.gov, was also in place before Tuesday’s shooting – created by the Homeland Security, Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services Departments after the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Johnson’s bill is named after Luke Hoyer and Alex Schachter, who were killed in the Parkland shooting. 

“All this bill does now is codify it to make sure this clearinghouse stands the test of time, that it will always be there to provide the best practices on school safety,” Johnson said on the Senate floor. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blocked the bill’s passage, saying that senators may consider it as an amendment to a domestic terrorism prevention bill if Republicans allowed it to move forward. (Republicans on Thursday blocked that bill from advancing.) 

“Hardening schools would have done nothing to prevent this shooting. In fact, there were guards and police officers already at the school yesterday when the shooter showed up,” Schumer said. 

Schumer’s information was based on inaccurate early reports from Texas officials, though there was a school resource officer assigned to the school. 

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said Friday that the school resource officer assigned to the school was not on campus at the time the shooter showed up. When he returned to campus to respond to a 911 call, he drove past the shooter, who was crouched behind a vehicle. 

The shooter in Uvalde bought two assault-style weapons just after his 18th birthday. He brought 48 magazines with him, accounting for 1,687 rounds of ammunition.  

McCraw said it is believed that the shooter walked through a door propped open by a teacher.   

The NRA put the focus on school safety in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting in Newton, Conn., that took place in 2012. The incident left 20 children and six adults dead.  

In a 2019 legal filing, an advertising firm that used to work with the NRA accused the group of using the school safety initiative as little more than a fundraising gimmick. The NRA disputed the claim, and the parties later settled the related lawsuit. 

A decade later, calls to boost school security remain. 

“We need to protect our schools, because our children deserve at least, and in fact, more protection than our banks, stadiums and government buildings,” NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said at the group’s convention in Houston, Texas, on Friday. He also called for funding for school security resource officers. 

There is some disagreement in the GOP about what kind of security measures should be in place and encouraged by the federal government. 

“The killer entered here the same way the killer entered in Santa Fe: Through a back door, an unlocked back door,” Cruz told reporters in Texas on Wednesday, referencing the May 2018 shooting at a high school outside of Texas that left 10 dead. He suggested “not having unlocked doors to classroom[s], having one door that goes in and out of the school, having armed police officers at that one door.” 

But Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), a former law enforcement officer who was a member of a SWAT team, said some GOP suggestions about school security like calling for heavy fencing, are going too far. 

“We don’t want our kids to go into school in a prison,” Higgins told The Hill. “A school should be an environment that encourages free thought and creativity. Look what happened to our kids. You know – the psychological studies are coming out now, what happened to our kids wearing masks for a year and a half.” 

Higgins reintroduced two bills that center on school safety on Thursday. His School Resource Officer Assessment Act, which previously passed the House in 2018, directs the Attorney General and Education Secretary to gather data on the number of school resource officers across the country. And Higgins’s School Watch and Tactics (SWAT) Act would direct the Attorney General and Education Secretary to develop best practices for school resource officers and develop best practices for their education. 

A larger challenge, Higgins said, is developing cohesive plans across layers of law enforcement to respond to the shooting.  

“Your school resource officers across the country very rarely have the skill set to be a SWAT cop. Very rarely. That’s just reality,” Higgins said.  

On Friday, McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that law enforcement did not adequately respond to the active shooter situation.  

A police commander in Uvalde made the “wrong decision” when he waited more than an hour to breach the classrooms that the shooter entered. Emergency calls from children revealed that students were alive and trapped in the adjoining classrooms with the shooter begging for help. 

The commander did not engage the shooter sooner, McCraw said, because he believed the shooter was barricaded and that no more children were at risk. 

Source: TEST FEED1

California archbishops abandon their flock — to play culture politics

California may be the bluest state in the nation, but it now finds itself home to two of the most powerful and disruptive voices on the right.

Those disruptors are a pair of conservative Catholic archbishops from distinctly liberal San Francisco and Los Angeles: Salvatore Cordileone and Jose Gomez. They may be out-of-step with the people in their pews, but that hasn’t prevented them from making headlines by diving into politics and the culture wars.

The latest disturbance came when San Francisco’s Cordileone banned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) from receiving communion because of her pro-choice stance on abortion. In his announcement, the archbishop accused Pelosi of perpetrating “a grave evil” and placing her own soul in “danger.”

Pelosi responded this past week, telling MSNBC she respects all views on the subject, “but I don’t respect us foisting it onto others.”

The action against Pelosi follows a months-long attempt led by Los Angeles Archbishop Gomez to prevent President Biden from receiving communion over the same abortion issue. Gomez is head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB); he’s allied himself with the group’s right-wing and its view of Biden’s pro-choice position.

In fact, on Inauguration Day 2021 — two weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — Gomez published a letter that insisted “Catholic bishops are not partisan players” but claimed the new president would “advance moral evils… in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage and gender.”

The Vatican strongly advised against any move to deny communion. Gomez eventually backed down but didn’t soften his tactics. Later that year, he gave a speech in Madrid attacking “an elite leadership class” in the West that coerces citizens to rely on “woke” movements over established religion.

All of this is a shift in how the Catholic Church in California has typically dealt with contentious issues. Church leaders here have spoken out before, but were careful to appear inclusive and rarely opposed specific politicians. While the bishops supported a ballot initiative in 2008 that would ban gay marriage in the state, they also fought against a 1994 proposition that was seen as anti-immigrant.

As with so much else in the current culture wars, that style of caution and balance has been tossed out — and that plainly puts these archbishops at odds with the congregants they supposedly lead. (Note: I am a practicing Catholic.)

Research from 2015 shows that the 11 million Catholics in California, like many Americans everywhere, are split down the middle when it comes to abortion rights. On other issues, they lean decidedly left: 44 percent of California Catholics say they count on “common sense” to guide their decisions in life; only 32 percent told researchers they depend on religion, and 73 percent say homosexuals should be accepted for who they are — 61 percent support gay marriage.

But in San Francisco that same year, Cordileone caused a fierce outcry when he informed local Catholic high schools that they could not challenge church teachings that homosexuality was “contrary to natural law” and that contraception was “intrinsically evil.”

At the same time, the two archbishops rarely emphasize progressive Catholic social justice issues that would likely draw strong support from church-goers in Los Angeles and San Francisco — such as opposition to the death penalty.

Both Cordileone and Gomez were appointed to their positions by then-Pope Benedict, who was more conservative than his successor, Pope Francis. The current pontiff has said he’s never denied communion to anyone, and cautioned bishops that wading into politics always turns into “a problem.”

In an editorial, the San Francisco Examiner called on Francis to fire Cordileone, asserting that “the City of St. Francis deserves an archbishop true to our values and your teachings.” The pope does have that power, but it is used only rarely among those in the upper echelons of church authority.

This is a difficult time for many California Catholics. Just as much as anyone else here, they follow the state’s well-known non-judgemental outlook. The most famous evangelicals to come out of California include decidedly upbeat and positive pastors like Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” and the late Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral, who wrote a best seller called “Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do.”

Clearly, the Catholic Church has never claimed to be a democratic institution. The congregation doesn’t choose its pastor or bishop. The church doesn’t survey constituents to figure out where people stand on spiritual and moral issues. For Catholics, that can be part of the appeal — a strength stretching back more than 2,000 years.

But, if bishops and archbishops are going to start acting like party politicians, then maybe they should go all the way. Poll the people in the pews. Try to create responsive proposals and programs around the results. Campaign door-to-door. And then put it all up for a vote.

That probably wouldn’t work out well for them, not in this state. But, as Pelosi and Biden might say: Welcome to politics.

Joe Ferullo is an award-winning media executive, producer and journalist and former executive vice president of programming for CBS Television Distribution. He was a news executive for NBC, a writer-producer for “Dateline NBC” and worked for ABC News. Follow him on Twitter @ironworker1.

Source: TEST FEED1

Thousands of holiday weekend flights cancelled

More flights were canceled on Sunday, following thousands of other air travel cancellations and delays at the start of the busy Memorial Day weekend.

About 1,065 flights were canceled on Sunday, with 283 of those cancellations in the U.S., according to flight-tracking website Flight Aware. More than 7,000 other flights were delayed, including 1,109 in the U.S.

On Saturday, more than 1,500 flights were canceled, which followed the cancelation of more than 2,300 flights on Friday.

Delta Airlines canceled 148 flights on Sunday, or about 5 percent of its flights for the day. The airline told The Associated Press on Saturday that bad weather and air traffic control issues were the primary reasons for the delays and cancelations, adding that it planned to reduce services by about 100 daily departures from July 1 to Aug. 7.

This summer is expected to be a busy travel season as Americans prepare to enjoy the lifting of restrictions and an easing of cases from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The costs of airfares, car rentals and Airbnb bookings are all surging this holiday weekend.

Source: TEST FEED1

Uvalde county commissioner says he wants FBI investigation into Texas school shooting response

Ronnie Garza, a county commissioner in Uvalde, Texas, said on Sunday he would welcome an FBI investigation Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

When asked by moderator Margaret Brennan on CBS’ “Face the Nation” if security failures led to Tuesday’s massacre, Garza said he supported a letter sent by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who represents San Antonio, to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking the agency to launch an independent probe to clear up inconsistent depictions of law enforcement actions.

Local police have faced scrutiny for their handling of the shooting and inconsistent accounts about law enforcement’s actions.

“I welcome that investigation,” Garza said. “I think we need to learn more. As tragic as this may seem, we need to learn from this, and parents deserve answers.”

Garza said “multiple factors,” including a lack of security and training, may have contributed to the toll of Tuesday’s shooting. After authorities had previously said a law enforcement officer confronted the gunman before he entered the school, officials have since indicated the shooter entered the building unobstructed. 

“Perhaps he was at another campus when the shooting started,” Garza said when asked about the whereabouts of the school resource officer.

But Garza cautioned that although he supported the investigative efforts, the Uvalde community still needed to mourn the immense loss facing the town of roughly 15,000 people.

“It’s easy to point fingers right now, it’s easy to play the blame game, but our community I think needs to focus on healing right now,” he said.

Source: TEST FEED1

Excluding Taiwan from the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is a mistake

On Monday, President Biden officially launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). The administration likes to say that IPEF is not a “traditional free trade agreement.” It isn’t, if by “traditional” you mean that it opens markets with enforceable binding commitments. What, then, is IPEF? The answer largely rests on whether the U.S. continues to exclude Taiwan from joining.

First, the background. IPEF debuted with 13 members, including the U.S., Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Other countries are free to join later. The deal has four “key pillars:” (1) trade; (2) supply chains; (3) clean energy, decarbonization and infrastructure; and (4) tax and anti-corruption.

IPEF will be a la carte, meaning that members get to pick and choose which pillars to sign up for. India, for example, is reportedly uninterested in the trade pillar. That’s really saying something, because IPE will not include legally enforceable market access commitments. This is where things get interesting.

A White House presser says “the fact that this is not a traditional free trade agreement is a feature of the IPEF not a bug.” There’s no talk about how IPEF reaches farther and deeper than the World Trade Organization (WTO), or even how it stacks up against the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The Biden administration isn’t interested in these measuring sticks. They’re too “traditionalist.”

A slew of business groups, and many in Congress, think Biden has it wrong. They’re calling on the administration to get behind enforceable market access commitments. The National Milk Producers and U.S. Dairy Export Council, for example, insist that bindings are the only way to “level the playing field” with competitors that have “successfully negotiated agreements across the region.” Not a few members of the House and Senate agree.

Why no enforceable market access commitments? One theory is that this makes it possible for Biden to pass IPEF by executive order. Some in Congress disagree. But it also presents him with a problem: namely, how to incentivize countries to join IPEF without the prospect of “WTO plus” market access to the U.S.?

The answer, for now, seems to be to exclude Taiwan, which makes it easier for countries worried about offending Beijing to join. This is a mistake.

To see why, let’s take a step back. If India doesn’t join the trade pillar, each and every one of America’s IPEF partners belongs either to CPTPP or the Regional and Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). China has applied to the former and leads the latter. This means that, in terms of trade flows, IPEF, with no enforceable market access commitments, can hardly be expected to isolate China. In fact, given CPTPP and RCEP, IPEF it at risk of being dismissed as more noise than signal.

If IPEF isn’t going to be built on “WTO plus” provisions, there’s only one way to overcome this signal-to-noise ratio problem: invite Taiwan to join. My preference would be for IPEF to do both, but let’s focus on Taiwan.

Like China, Taiwan has applied to join CPTPP. Malaysia and Vietnam are not going to quit CPTPP or RCEP if Taiwan is in IPEF. Let’s stop talking about IPEF in a vacuum. The queues to join CPTPP and RCEP are long and growing. IPEF isn’t going to change that. To get attention in a region that has CPTPP and RCEP, IPEF, which doesn’t compare on binding commitments, really has only one card to play: Let Taiwan in.

Marc L. Busch is the Karl F. Landegger Professor of International Business Diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Follow him on Twitter @marclbusch.

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Gun control activist slams 'pandering' to extremist conservatives, liberals

The president for gun control activist group Stand With Parkland criticized the U.S. for “pandering to folks on the far right and folks on the far left” as he pushed for tighter gun control laws on Sunday after a deadly mass shooting in Texas last week left 19 children and two teachers dead.

Tony Montalto, whose group formed after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that America needs to “have a look at ourselves” in the wake of the Texas tragedy.

“And what we really need is to stop the pandering to the folks on the far right and the folks on the far left,” Montalto told moderator Chuck Todd in a roundtable discussion. “Where is Congress acting on this?”

An 18-year-old gunman bought an AR-15-style rifle days before he opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, spurring renewed cries for tighter gun control laws.

Montalto on Sunday said people who use semiautomatic rifles and other high-powered firearms should “imagine what they do to the bodies of children in schools.”

During the roundtable discussion, former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also weighed in on the gun control reform fight, calling gun violence a “horrible problem” that is “complex” to solve, citing violent crime and gun homicides as another issue besides mass shootings.

“Part of it starts with us owning who we are as Americans,” Rawlings-Blake said. “I think sometimes we need to find mirrors that work in our country, because too many people look in the mirror and think they see someone who values life.

“But if you say you value life and you let these babies die and do nothing and you can — your mirror’s broken,” the former mayor added.

The police response to the Texas shooting has also been criticized after it was reported officers waited outside for around an hour while the gunman rampaged inside the elementary school.

The former DeKalb County, Ga., police chief, Cedric Alexander, said the officers violated training and protocol when they failed to respond swiftly.

“You go inside that building, you follow that gunfire. The whole intention here is to move that gunfire away from those innocent victims who are innocent and defenseless,” Alexander said. “There is no other option. There is nothing else to talk about.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Better candidates may not be enough for Democrats to retain the Senate

The contest this year for control of the evenly divided Senate comes down to “candidates,” where the Democrats have an advantage, versus “the climate,” which may prove lethal for them. 

As the fall field takes shape in a half dozen Senate races that will determine the majority next year, Democrats have stronger candidates, or the Republican standard bearer is more flawed. However, with raging inflation, high gas prices and President Biden’s low approval numbers — and given the historical pattern of midterm setbacks for the party that controls the White House — better candidates may not much matter.

Republicans seem almost certain to take back the House, where the Democrats hold an edge of only five seats. The GOP advantages in gerrymandered redistricting alone makes up that difference.  

There are four Democratic-held Senate seats under challenge.

New Hampshire’s Sen. Maggie Hassan got a break when popular Gov. Chris Sununu decided not to run.

Nevada’s Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto faces a tough challenge from Republican Attorney General Adam Laxalt.

Georgia’s Raphael Warnock, the pastor at Martin Luther King’s church, has proven an effective Senator and fund-raiser; his opponent, former Georgia football great Herschel Walker has been embroiled in personal controversies, shows little grasp of issues and has been caught in lies. The race still is close. 

Arizona’s Mark Kelly also has made a mark and is a prolific fund-raiser. None of his possible Republican opponents — the GOP primary is Aug. 2 — would be confused with the iconic late Sen. John McCain. One, in an Easter ad, depicted himself as a savior; another raised the possibility of banning contraceptives, and the current Attorney General, pandering to Trump, continues to peddle the disproven charge of voter fraud in 2020.

If Democrats lose one or two of these seats, Democrats will need to win a couple Republican-held seats.

One Republican incumbent in deep trouble is Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, whose poll numbers are terrible. The question is can Democrats nominate a more appealing challenger on Aug. 9? 

Two states that went for Trump — Ohio and North Carolina — have strong Democratic candidates: Rep. Tim Ryan in the Buckeye state and former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley in North Carolina. In Ohio, the GOP nominee, J.D. Vance flipped from a Trump critic to Trump cheerleader; on Ukraine, he charged that Biden sought a conflict with Vladimir Putin because the Russian didn’t “believe in transgender rights.” In North Carolina, Republican candidate Rep. Ted Budd, a gun shop owner, has embraced Republican Senate campaign chair Rick Scott’s economic plan, which would boost taxes on some lower- and middle-class Americans and sunset Social Security and Medicare every five years.

The Democratic edge in candidates in these two states could be offset by conditions and the advantage the GOP usually enjoys in these states in off-year elections.

Pennsylvania is in such chaos any forecast is impossible. Two Republicans — celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz and hedge fund executive David McCormick — virtually tied in the primary and now face a contentious recount; legal squabbles could stretch out for weeks, even months. In 1964 a similar situation on the Democratic side lasted until late August; in a year in which President Lyndon Johnson won the state in a landslide, Republicans barely carried the Senate seat.

The maverick Democrat, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, won a huge primary victory; however, he suffered a stroke four days before the election, and the campaign has not been transparent about his condition.

The slim Democratic hopes for retaining the House majority vanished with the latest redistricting. A Democratic gerrymandering in New York was thrown out by the state courts, while a Republican gerrymandering slipped by in Ohio, in part due to a legal blunder by Democrats.

The upshot, including few other states, says David Wasserman of the Cook Report and the expert on Congressional elections, is “a swing of seven or eight seats” for the GOP. Wasserman now predicts a GOP gain of 20 to 35 House seats in November.

One striking illustration is in Ohio. In Toledo, Republicans gerrymandered Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s district from one that Biden carried by 19 points to one that Trump won. Kaptur now faces a serious challenge from Jason Majewski, who attended the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, painted a huge picture of Donald Trump on his front yard and embraces the nutty QAnon conspiracy theories.

The bottom line for Democrats: If by October, inflation declines to 5 percent or less (about the same as the growth rate in wages) and Biden’s job approval moves above the low 40s (possible only if other Democrats start talking about what he has accomplished rather than what he hasn’t done) they have a shot — with better candidates — to hold the Senate.

There is no margin for error.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.

Source: TEST FEED1