Despite the basic rule of politics — it takes 50% of the vote plus one to win — both parties have occasionally put forward nominees from the farther reaches of the right or from the extreme left. Those candidates have sometimes combined terrible public personalities and debate skills with policy positions far beyond the edges of mainstream politics.
This year Democrats are trying to sell four extremists to voters: Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Troy Jackson in Maine and James Talarico in Texas. In three of those four races, Republicans have countered with nominees from the center: Mike Rogers in Michigan, Michele Tafoya in Minnesota and the incumbent in Maine, Senator Susan Collins, who, as Chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations is the most powerful woman inside the Beltway and whose defeat would be an enormous “own goal” for Mainers.
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The Republican Senate nominee in Texas is the state’s own attorney general, Ken Paxton, who has run and won three times in the Lone Star State. Paxton is a flawed candidate, but he will be a reliable GOP vote in the Senate and the party has rallied to him even though there are bruised feelings from the contentious primary.
Republicans have indulged their base over the years, especially in 2010 when it put forward Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Ken Buck in Colorado, and in 2012 with the nominations of Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana.
All five of those Republicans lost.
This year, a week out from Election Day, it especially doesn’t look good for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine. El-Sayed has a reflexive attitude of grievance and in Maine, Jackson suffers in any side-by-side comparison with Susan Collins, who is a formidable political athlete.
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Talarico has seen Paxton rise and rise in the polls and the GOP has spent millions showing Texans how far out in left field Talarico plays. Talarico weirdly vanished from the campaign trail for a dozen days and blamed the flu.
In Minnesota — the “bluest” of the four states, the epic fraud scandal has followed Flanagan’s campaign, who has been the state’s Lieutenant Governor since 2019. Flanagan is matched against the political “rookie of the year” in Republican moderate Michele Tafoya, a sparkling and affable centrist.
Democrats have tried to prop up their failing four fanatics by sending out Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, former Vice President Kamala Harris and have pulled former President Barack Obama off Martha’s Island to throw him into the breach.
Trouble is “AOC,” “Bernie,” and “Kamala” all telegraph “whacky or worse” into the electorate’s consciousness, and the former president’s schtick was old in 2014 when he helped provoke a red wave with Republicans netting nine Senate seats and a baker’s dozen House seats.
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El-Sayed’s campaign seems to be in free-fall as the candidate first turned argumentative, then angry, in appearances culminating last week with his interview with Fox News’ own Bret Baier. El-Sayed’s hostile and rude treatment of Baier — the quintessential gentleman of the news business — was instantly understood by anyone who saw it as an attempt to hide his record by loudly talking over Baier’s questions and deflecting to non-issues unrelated to Baier’s straightforward and brief questions. That interview may have done the candidate the most damage of the cycle as it came after Rogers had just blistered El-Sayed in their final debate.
El-Sayed’s many attempts in many settings to cover up the details of his “Medicare for All” tax-spend-and-ration health care boondoggle with semantics and word puzzles left viewers wondering on what topic could they actually trust El-Sayed? Certainly not Iran or Islamist extremism, as El-Sayed’s frantic attempts to escape his past actions and statements have backfired.
El-Sayed’s biggest blunder — his declaration that “hurt people hurt people” after an attack on a Michigan synagogue — has never receded in the public’s mind. Rogers, meanwhile, has methodically campaigned in traditional Democratic strongholds in and around Detroit and Pontiac and stresses his distinguished career as a federal and state legislator, FBI agent and Army officer.
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Peggy Flanagan and James Talarico simply haven’t, and apparently cannot, connect with the center of their states’ electorates. They are just “way outside the ‘40s’” where most of American politics, like most NFL games, are played. Flanagan’s campaign is mired in the swamp of the massive fraud that engulfed part of the Twin Cities’ Somali community. Talarico’s long tenure among “the woke” has haunted him throughout the campaign, as has his resting face of innocent cluelessness.
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Up in Maine, Troy Jackson got waxed by the veteran Collins in four out of four debates in all of which Jackson struggled with very basic questions about very basic issues — like the enormous difference between Medicare and Medicaid. “Oh shut up!” Jackson also grunted into a microphone on the debate stage as Collins made a joke about a debate disrupter being a Jackson supporter.
Mainers are a polite lot. They also know that turning out the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee in favor of a guy who often looks like he slept outside and just woke up would be a singularly unwise trade for everyone in the state. When the Democratic Socialists of America’s (“DSA”) hand-picked erratic and voluble Graham Platner had to exit the Maine race, the Maine Democratic Party could have picked anyone in the state to replace him. That they chose Jackson, the third place loser from the then just-completed Democratic gubernatorial primary, remains one of the baffling questions in a year of political surprises.
The GOP is “coming home” as President Donald Trump has exhausted his own team with daily rallies and sometimes two. The cliché that “it all comes down to turnout” isn’t lost on the president who knows the hatred of the left is priced into his persona, but that getting his own voters to the polls is exactly what his rallies do.
Republicans learned from their “Tea Party” years that candidates cannot win with their bases, but also that you can’t win with just the base. Democrats have forgotten their wilderness years of 1980 through 1993, which only ended when Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council pulled the entire party back towards the middle.
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Now the DSA has put the Democrats in full “Thelma and Louise” mode as they have accelerated their party over the left cliff of national politics. The “false positive” of Mayor Mamdani’s narrow win in the New York mayoral race last year proved to be a disaster for mainstream Democrats this year.
“50% plus 1” is the formula. The Democrats of 2026 forgot that recipe even as the Republicans of 2010 and 2012 did. The consequences will be revealed next Tuesday.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.