OPINION

With Blue Senate Seats in Play in 2022, Bet on GOP Winners

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

We have been informed by all the smart people that the Senate map next year is going to be tough for Republicans, but liberal dreams die hard. They’ve already given up on the House and Nancy Pelosi is intent on making a progressive thunder run in the form of a $3.5 trillion-dollar budgetary kaiju that’s going to treat the purple district Dems like Godzilla treated Tokyo. The vaxx mandate idiocy will alienate everyone who hasn’t had a shot and most of those of us who have. Inflation is up 8.3 percent over a year ago, and so it’s no surprise that polls show that President * is about as popular as a horny hillbilly at a recreational canoeing convention.

But they can hold the Senate, they insist. Yes, that’s the good news, they insist. But there is no good news. There is only pain.

And you know that because Adam Laxalt is running in Nevada.

Now Ohio was always looking good with candidates like the woke JD Vance, Josh Mandel and Bernie Moreno. And in Pennsylvania, it was going to be tough, but my pal Sean Parnell just got the Trump endorsement in the disappointed state that bought Joe Biden a lobster dinner and got a peck on the cheek for its trouble. But no one saw Nevada on the radar as a pick-up for the seat held by – gee, who holds that seat? What senatorial wallpaper-person occupies that slot at the moment? The fact that no one knows, or cares, which utterly and totally reliable Schumer-voting mediocrity infests that spot right now is kind of the point.

Enter Adam Laxalt, a member of a famous Nevada political family closely aligned with Ronald Reagan that has a track record of winning seats in the Slot Machine State. But he would not have gotten in if he didn’t smell political blood in the water. And there’s plenty of chum, thanks to our incredibly inept Godfather III of a president.

We were promised no more COVID. We got more COVID.

We were promised no mandates. We got mandates. And stupid masks too.

We were promised we’d get out of Afghanistan. We got “America Held Hostage 2.0.”

We were promised the economy would come back. Well, the economy did come back, except it was Herbert Hoover’s economy – just wait until the stock market crashes next year. Invest in gold. And lead, if you can find it.

We were not promised $5 gas. We got gas, all right – we are getting the full, fragrant Swalwell version.

So, any Dem running for Senate in a state not wrapped-up in full-on lefty psychosis has, in President Asterisk, a hefty challenge not unlike a marathoner carrying Brian Stelter, who is a potato, on his back. As a Democrat, you can say what you want, run all the ads about how Trump is literally Hitler and how Texas abortion laws are the biggest issue ever was, and it all still comes back to how you are a reliable rubber stamp for the policy preferences of whoever the hell is behind the scenes pulling the levers on our animatronic chief executive.

So, whoever the hell is currently the Nevada senator up for re-election is 2022 has a big, senile problem named “Joe” at the threshold. Nevada is a purple state that’s been experimenting with Dems for a while like a suburban Connecticut sophomore at Wellesley experiments with xir gender identity. It might come out of there a blue-haired, pierced weirdo, but more likely it passes through the lib-curious phase and graduates, gets married, and buys an SUV to take her kids to soccer. That is, it will choose normality.

Adam Laxalt is the voice of that blessed normality. He’s got a normal family. His pronouns are normal. He’s the candidate of normalcy, not of the perma-pandemic, of CRT, of open borders, of defunding the police, and of climate cultism. 

Yet there’s also some extraordinary stuff about him. He’s ex-military. And his roommate in the Navy was … Ron DeSantis. You know, the next president? Governor DeSantis has given Adam his blessing. Trump will too, and he should – he owes Adam big. After all, I got to know Adam when he was fighting the battle in Las Vegas when I got there after the rigged election. He knows the score, and knows the state, and even though that fight was unsuccessful – I blame the national GOP for its unforgivable failure to prepare for the election battle – I watched Adam fight tirelessly for election integrity. He still is, even as others want to move on – Adam recently got into a shouting match with some regime journalists who were mad because he won’t back down and pretend the election was pure as the driven snow. Adam is uniquely capable of doing the necessary fighting again next year, this time (hopefully) with some back-up from the national party.

Adam gets it. He knows what time it is, and it’s time to fight. There’s not going to be any squishiness or fecklessness – he is full of feck. Adam Laxalt is exactly the kind of guy we need in the Senate, and he’s exactly the kind of candidate who can put a state like Nevada into play. After all, he’s already won a statewide race before.

His primary opponent is a legit war hero wounded in battle. He would likely vote the right way, if elected, most of the time. Now, the “if” is the tricky part. He lost a race somewhere else and moved to Nevada. He doesn’t know the ground. In a battle like this one, we need a guy with a deep and clear understanding of the political battlespace. No one can match Adam’s experience – he’s a pal, but I’m unsentimental in politics. Adam is the right guy because he is the reliable conservative most likely to win. 

And the other guy is, well, not woke. I hate to quote the garbage media, but here goes: “Asked twice whether he thought there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, Brown did not provide a clear answer. “That’s not something that I want to focus on,” he said. “That’s, once again, going back to events that are behind us, and what I want to do is look forward..." He said people face bigger problems than election processes and results..." (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 8/27/21)

Well, no and no. There is no bigger problem, and there was fraud. I saw it. The first night, we found a dead guy who voted. So, there was fraud. Like the proverbial woman who says, “Okay, I guess I’d sleep with a guy for $1 million bucks,” the real question is not what she is, but merely the amount.

You can’t be a competitive GOP senatorial candidate in one of the election integrity-challenged states if you refuse to admit election fraud is a problem. That’s disqualifying.

We need to ruthlessly focus on winning and winners. The map is opening up, folks. We have an opportunity here with an utterly incompetent dingus in the White House committed to another 18 months of screwing up. The old Prussian military used to assess officers on two axes – competence and aggressiveness. The best combo was competent and aggressive. The worst, incompetent and aggressive. 

That’s President * – we’ve rarely had a president so bad who was so deeply committed to being terrible. He and his congressional cronies are going to force something through in reconciliation that is going to be a disaster, and there will be other disasters as well. But they won’t stop. They won’t hesitate. They will be pedal-to-the-metal terrible and that’s bad for the country but great for our chances. We will get a preview of the pushback this week in neighboring California. If the recall passes – I give it 40 percent - then that will be an earthquake. But if it comes close, like a 5-10 percent loss in a state that went for Biden by like 30 percent, that’s an indicator too. And if it passes and Larry Elder wins (I think Larry likely wins if the recall passes) – wow.

Imagine Biden facing a fully GOP Congress. Think of how the libs’ heads will explode when candidates like Adam Laxalt, in states they thought were safe, pull it off. And think of how we will laugh.

Conservatives Must Stand Together and Fight. Join Townhall VIPAnd Check Out Last Week's Stream of Kurtiousness, I'm Excited About Joe Biden's Vaccine MandateAnd my podcast, Unredacted.

My latest conservative action thriller, The Split, is about what happens when America splits into red and blue countries. Get all six bestsellers, including People's Republic, Indian Country, Wildfire, Collapse, and Crisis!