During Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror in the UK, she and her allies condescendingly referred to those who opposed her hardline polices as ‘wets’. One of the features that so endears Donald Trump to his most ardent supporters is that he sticks to his guns and appears to them to never back down, i.e., that he is not a ‘wet’. This is because he simply denies that he has ever changed his mind or reversed himself on anything, whatever the facts are.
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The Republican party seems all over the place over what to do about their Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore. Leaders in the party have said that if the allegations are true, Moore should step aside. This is significant in that they are allowing for the possibility that the allegations may be true. I would have expected them to close ranks and decry the story as fake news and a fiendish Democratic plot aided by the fake news liberal media. Part of the reason may be that the avalanche of sex abuse revelations by prominent people has suddenly shifted the center of gravity of the discussions, so that women’s charges that they were abused are no longer summarily dismissed.
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Some reasons have been advanced by other residents of the gated community for the attack on US senator Rand Paul by his neighbor Rene Boucher. Though both Boucher’s lawyer and Paul’s spokespersons have said that the cause was not political but a ‘trivial’ dispute , it may have had an underlying political cause arising from Paul’s adherence to libertarian philosophy, especially when it comes to property rights.
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After Tuesday’s losses, some political commentators are wondering if Donald Trump is finally losing support among his base. Michael Kruse recently visited the town of coal and steel town of Johnstown, PA, a year after he and Trump visited it at a campaign stop where Trump promised to bring back the coal and steel industries. Kruse says that even though Trump has not delivered on any of the promises that he made to them in his campaign stop, the people he spoke to last year still back him, mainly because Trump attacks the people that they hate, and they take at face value Trump’s “insistent declarations of success no matter the reality” and his inveterate blame-shifting.
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A xenophobic flyer was distributed during school board elections in the town of Edison, New Jersey. Under the header “Make Edison Great Again”, it pictured ethnic Chinese and an ethnic Indian candidates with their photos having the stamp “DEPORT” on them followed by the statement “Stop Jerry Shi and Falguni Patel From taking over our School Board”

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Zaid Jilani and Ryan Grim looked at election results across the nation and say that there were many good things that happened and so my own somewhat downbeat assessment based largely on results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Ohio may have been a little off.
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Democrats are crowing over yesterday’s elections where they won the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, portraying them as repudiations of Donald Trump and all that he represents. While the results were good for Democrats, they should not be oversold. What is true is that it would have been devastating if they had lost either race and so at least they avoided that. After all, the outgoing Virginia governor is a Democrat and Hillary Clinton won the state last year. New Jersey is a reliably Democratic state and how the obnoxious Chris Christie won two terms is the anomaly. It may have been because his predecessor in that office Jon Corzine was an unpopular Goldman Sachs CEO who somehow managed to avoid going to jail for shady business practices at his firm MF Global after losing his re-election bid in 2009, something that wealthy, well-connected bankers seem to be able to do easily.
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