Today is the first official day of the 2006 midterm election season. Where do we stand?
The latest Fox News Channel/Opinion Dynamics poll (.pdf) (conducted Aug. 29-30) found that Republicans face an uphill battle in this November’s Congressional elections.
Democrats
and Independents overwhelmingly disapprove of the way Congress has
acted. Republicans are essentially split — 43% approve, 40%
disapprove, and 17% unsure.But that doesn’t mean that voters
are certain to vote for Democratic Congressional candidates — the lone
silver lining for Republicans hoping to retain control of the House and
Senate.The poll asked:
Thinking ahead to this
November’s elections, if the congressional election were held today,
would you vote for the Democratic candidate in your district or the
Republican candidate in your district?
Democrats overwhelmingly favored Democrats and Republicans overwhelming favored Republicans — hardly a surprise.But
among Independents, the numbers could be spun any number of ways. By a
40%-16% margin, Independents say they’d vote for Democrats. That’s the
good news. The bad news is that 44% of Independent voters are undecided.As a result, Democrats have a 48%-32% advantage among all voters answering this question — but 21% of all voters remain undecided.
There are 63 days left before the people go to the polls. But Congress is only scheduled to meet for nineteen of them. The Republicans have reportedly abandoned any plans to pass immigration reform, feeling that their party is too divided and the debate is too risky to deal with it right now. Instead, they are going to be running purely on fear, and on being stronger when it comes to abdicating Congressional authority and oversight in the War on Terrorism.
…Republicans in the House and Senate say they will focus on Pentagon and domestic security spending bills, port security legislation and measures that would authorize the administration’s terror surveillance program and create military tribunals to try terror suspects.
“We Republicans believe that we have no choice in the war against terror and the only way to do it is to continue to take them head-on whether it is in Iraq or elsewhere,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader.
Nothing on health care, education, or energy. Just protecting our ports, legalizing warrantless wiretapping, and creating extrajudicial courts for terrorism “suspects”. How very libertarian of the Republicans. Here’s how it looks when a fascist first starts out:
“They’ll wave the white flag in the war on terror,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said Sunday of the Democrats on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”
Later on there are reeducation camps.
We have a lot of work to do in the next 66 days. We need to Get Out the Vote. We need to combat the GOP-led campaign of fear. It will be two-minute hate all the time from the Hannities, the O’Briens O’Reillys, and the Limbaughs. I do not expect that our lawful Muslim citizens are going to find the experience too pleasant. Vacation time is over. It’s time to get to work.