“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” famously came the command at the Battle of Bunker Hill, a turning point in America’s Revolutionary War.
“Don’t start spending your campaign money in earnest until after Labor Day,” could be the political corollary of that illustrious order.
While presidential campaigns start earlier and earlier in the American political system, it is still a good bet that most voters won’t really be paying attention to the midterm elections until after Labor Day.
National Democrats are almost giddy at their electoral prospects as August grinds to a close. Republicans are only narrowly ahead in the generic polls, the wide enthusiasm gap is closing, according to a new NBC survey (of all registered voters, I might add), and in specific Senate races, some of the GOP’s more inexperienced campaigns seem to be struggling to gain traction.
Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has forgotten more about political campaigns than I will ever know, has tamped down expectations about the much-predicted red wave.
Despite McConnell’s pessimism, I remain optimistic about the GOP’s chances, for two reasons.
First, I don’t really think we really know the true state of many of these campaigns, because many of these races really haven’t started in earnest.
Second, the Democrats have several “glass jaw” candidates who don’t reflect the desires of the majority of voters, who want a check on the extremism of Joe Biden’s White House.
Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman is a case in point.
I know that many in the intelligentsia are having a field day with Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz and his shopping-for-crudité adventure. And, let’s face it, there are plenty of better ways to show how expensive most household items have become over the breadth of the Biden administration.
But Fetterman is a complete fraud. Despite his “man of the people” appearance, Fetterman is a scion of an extremely wealthy family. He is no more working class than George Soros or Larry Fink. Fetterman attacks Oz for being wealthy, hitting him because he owns investment properties, but he never owns up to the fact that he was able to survive on a low-paying mayoral job because his parents supported him financially until his 40s.
Indeed, Fetterman is every parent’s worst nightmare, a man/boy who dresses like a slob, spouts leftist policies, and can’t get off their payroll until he hits middle age.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) is another glass-jaw candidate. While he might be appealing on his own, despite his far-left views, Warnock’s Achilles’ heel is his association with Joe Biden, whose disapproval ratings hover around 60 percent.
Warnock has been lucky because the media has relentlessly focused on the negatives of his opponent, the legendary running back Herschel Walker.
Walker has some liabilities as a first-time candidate, but he has done a decent job of owning up to those vulnerabilities. Once the football season starts in earnest, I expect the Walker campaign to hit the political field hard, putting the Warnock agenda on the defensive and making issues like crime (which is out of control in Atlanta), inflation and illegal immigration the centerpiece of the campaign.
In Ohio, where J.D. Vance is only now turning his attention to the general election after a bruising and expensive primary campaign, things are already looking tough for Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan.
Ryan is an appealing guy who is trying his best to look like a moderate Republican, but voting with Biden 95 percent of the time is a sure tell that the Democrat candidate is no Liz Cheney.
This is just a few of the glass-jaw candidates that the Democrats are fielding for this November’s elections. These campaigns haven’t seen the whites of the voter’s eyes yet. My guess is that Republicans are going to do a lot better than the most folks inside the Beltway believe.
Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).