Pollsters: Don’t Bet on a Blue Wave
“Midterms tend to be a referendum on the sitting president, and Trump is generally unpopular” — yet “the chances for a blue wave may not be as strong as assumed,” explain Douglas Schoen & Carly Cooperman at The Hill. For the 2018 midterms, the Cook Political Report “identified 75 competitive races”; this year, it sees “only 18 races” as “toss-ups.” Yes, “Democratic voters are considerably more excited to vote” and Dems hold a “12-point lead among those ‘extremely enthusiastic’ about voting” — but “Democrats’ party favorability sits at just 33 percent, 9 points lower than Republicans’ and 10 points lower than Trump’s favorability.” Bottom line: “Republicans are fighting an uphill battle to retain control of the House,” but their situation “is not nearly as shaky as it was at this point in 2018.”
From the right: Zionism Driven Undergound
In today’s America, “a great many Zionists don’t know they’re Zionists,” marvels Commentary’s Seth Mandel, because “bloated interpretations of Zionism are more often than not the result of anti-Zionist projection.” Jews “are a minority,” which means that “anti-Zionists have a built-in advantage in shaping narratives” and have falsely defined Zionism as “claiming exclusive Jewish rights to the West Bank and/or Gaza, endorsing inequality between Jews and Palestinians,” etc., as opposed to simple support of “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.” In this atmosphere, many other American “Jews know they’re Zionists but don’t want to say so.” Anti-Zionists “set the terms of the debate in America’s educational institutions” and “have succeeded in pushing the truth underground.”
Culture critic: ‘Melania’ Exposes Media Bias
For “an example of the disconnect between legacy media and the country at large, look no further” than at the new documentary “Melania,” which follows the first lady in the days before the 2025 inauguration, instructs USA Today’s Ingrid Jacques. “The critics HATE it, giving it a lousy score of just 10%,” but “Americans heading to the theater” have “given it a score of 99%” — the largest discrepancy on record. Its first weekend “smashed expectations, earning at least $7 million” — the “best opening for a documentary in more than a decade.” If the critics want “to glean something, it should be that marketing to conservatives,” and 77 million Trump voters, “can pay off.”
Conservative: Frivolous Politics, Fragile Fisc
Britain’s “bad reputation” for “hounding its leaders” out of office in “petulant fashion” is spooking global markets, warns The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, as investors perceive the UK as diving into “every rabbit hole of the culture war.” Right now, Labour’s left wing is eager to dump PM Keir Starmer to “clear the way for more spending on runaway benefits” — the fear of which has already “pushed up the borrowing cost” of British debt. The political right now “egging on this disgrace” out of “frivolous pleasure” will only empower a “variant of Labour” that “cannot be trusted with anything.” A “nation gets the political class that it deserves,” so Britain should ask itself how it became so “impatient, suggestible and unserious.”
Libertarian: Why Child Care Is Unaffordable
Mayor Mamdani claims that government-run child care will be “cheaper and better than the marketplace,” but “researchers say the big barrier in New York to affordable care for kids is costly overregulation,” explains Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. The child-care-cost problem progressives hope to address “is one of their own creation.” Indeed, “New York is the second-worst state in the country for burdensome regulations,” and generally, “child care is more expensive in heavily regulated states, and paying for it consumes a greater share of the average family’s income.” Yet instead of “pursuing regulatory reform,” Mamdani and Gov. Hochul’s solution is inserting “government subsidies and programs into a situation where rules and regulations have made private providers unaffordable to many families.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
