Yearly Archives: 2022

(The Center Square) – The slivers of information that Reince Priebus is seeing in Wisconsin has him expecting Republican wins up and down the ballot.

Priebus, who used to lead both the Wisconsin Republican Party and the RNC, told Jay Weber on News Talk 1130 WISN Monday that data collected by both organization shows independent and undecided voters breaking for Republicans.

“They are leaning overwhelmingly to Tim Michels and Ron Johnson,” Priebus explained. “When given the choice between Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes on the issues of education and crime – and in the case of Ron Johnson, inflation, gas, groceries – all of these things that are at the forefront of voters’ minds, by a longshot the Republicans are doing much better.”

Priebus says he doesn’t have an early or absentee vote count in the state, but said Republicans appear to be doing better than in 2020 when there was a flood of Democrats who voted early.

Priebus said Republicans, by and large, do most of their voting on Election Day.

Polls show both the race for U.S. Senate and governor in Wisconsin are essentially tied, though the last Marquette Law School Poll did give Ron Johnson a slight, two-point lead.

Priebus said if the polls show Michels and Johnson that close, it could be a comfortable victory for Republicans in Wisconsin.

“Look at Real Clear Politics, look at Walker-Evers in 2018. [Gov. Walker] out-performed that average,” Priebus said. “He was minus-two-and-a-half, minus-three, minus-four. Leading up to the election there were polls that had him minus-five, minus-six, minus-seven. Republicans don’t underperform in public polls.”

Gov. Walker lost that 2018 race by about 40,000 votes, which is a 1% spread.

Priebus said he will be watching voter data from East coast states to see if Republicans are going to have a good night Tuesday. But he said Wisconsin voters should watch three specific counties.

“I’d look at Brown County. I’d look to see how that’s breaking,” Priebus explained. “Then I’d combine Racine and Kenosha. If you look at those two counties in combination … if they are going for Ron Johnson and Tim Michels, forget about it. It’s done.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted a recently uncovered research program after reporting showed more than a million dollars in taxpayer funds were appropriated to find evidence that racism is to blame for poor sleep in minority communities.

“Critical Race Theory is a Marxist ideology based on bigotry and lies,” Cruz said.

Cruz’ comments come after The Center Square reported on the funding, which totaled nearly $1.2 million over three years. Cruz argued these health research funds would be better used finding medical cures.

“The National Institutes of Health should use taxpayer dollars to conduct actual scientific and health research in an effort to find real solutions and real cures,” Cruz said. “It’s outrageous that Democrats are sullying those efforts and funding the radical left’s poisonous agenda.”

The funding was allocated to Dr. Alexander Tsai, an associate professor at Harvard University who is carrying out the study through Massachusetts General Hospital, where he works as a psychiatrist.

According to grant documents in the federal database, the researchers’ hypothesis is that the disparity in sleep health in the Black community is “thought to be explained partially by experiences of interpersonal racial discrimination.”

“This application focuses on police use of deadly force on unarmed black Americans as a cardinal manifestation of structural racism,” the grant summary in the NIH database reads. “The central hypothesis is that police use of deadly force on unarmed black Americans leads to unhealthy sleep among other black Americans in the general U.S. population. This hypothesis has been formulated on the basis of strong preliminary data showing that police use of deadly force on unarmed black Americans leads to poor mental health among other black Americans in the general U.S. population.”

As the Center Square previously reported, NIH awarded $460,656 to Tsai in 2020, $439,970 in 2021, and $273,625 in 2022 for the research effort, which is titled “Racial disparities in police use of deadly force as a cause of racial disparities in sleep health across the life course.”

Other critics told The Center Square that the study is based on a false premise that doesn’t account for a myriad of other factors.

“It assumes that there is structural racism,” said Mike Gonzalez, an expert on critical race theory and diversity issues at the Heritage Foundation. “It assumes that the disparities are caused by structural racism and not a panoply of other reasons. There could be many, many hundreds of reasons why these disparities exist. That is the main problem with critical race theory … the disparities are real, but then it says well, the disparities are prima facie evidence that structural racism exists. … It’s not binary. There are decisions that people make. There are bad schools. There are problems with family formation.

“There are many, many things that could cause the disparities and by focusing on the ghost of structural racism, none of the other more practical reasons are explored and the problem never gets fixed,” he added.

Tsai has defended the program, saying “the study seems neither unsubstantiated nor grounded in racial ideology.” He also said the “public health significance” of the research justifies the taxpayer funding.

When asked whether lifestyle choices could be to blame for the sleep issues in his research, Tsai pointed out his study doesn’t address that but that it could be difficult to take that into account because those lifestyle choices could also be caused by racism.

“I think it would be a reasonable scientific undertaking to attempt to quantify and compare the magnitudes of the impacts of structural racism on sleep health vs. the impacts of certain health behaviors or health risk behaviors on sleep health,” Tsai said. “From an epidemiological perspective, one of the potential problems you might encounter is that both sleep health and these behaviors could have a common cause in structural racism (or, alternatively, these health behaviors or health risk behaviors could lie in the causal pathway between structural racism and sleep health). For example, if structural racism has a causal influence on alcohol consumption, and some threshold level of alcohol consumption is thought to have an adverse causal influence on sleep health, then it would be a difficult undertaking to make a direct comparison between the racism-sleep association vs. the alcohol-sleep association.”

Election day comes Tuesday, putting a range of major issues up for grabs as both parties battle for control of the House, Senate and gubernatorial races around the country.

The latest polling shows a tight but favorable electoral landscape for Republicans. FiveThirtyEight’s analysis and compilation of generic polls found voters overall prefer that Republicans control Congress by 1.2%.

Real Clear Politics’ polling projects Republicans will pick up four Senate seats, three governorships and roughly 31 House seats. RCP has Republicans up 2.8% on the generic ballot, while a Yahoo News-YouGov poll released Thursday has Democrats up by 2%.

This year’s midterm elections put several key issues up for grabs, including the future of many judicial nominees and the several-trillion dollars in congressional spending that kicked off during the pandemic and pushed the federal debt to more than $31 trillion this year.

On top of that, Republican lawmakers have laid out dozens of investigations since President Joe Biden took office on a range of topics, from federal funding of the controversial Wuhan lab some say was the origin of the COVID-19 virus, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s role in the pandemic, the Department of Homeland Security’s increasingly more aggressive censorship efforts with big tech, Hunter Biden’s affairs, and more. If Republicans win a majority, their investigations will have teeth.

“Everything is trending toward a Republican takeover of both chambers of Congress,” said Colin Reed, a Republican strategist, former campaign manager for Senator Scott Brown, R-Mass., and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies. “If the GOP does regain control, voters will expect them to deliver where the current leaders haven’t: tackling inflation, reducing the costs of energy and restoring a sense of confidence that is sorely missing right now.”

Close races are scattered in states around the country, taking the lion’s share of media attention and campaign dollars.

In Pennsylvania, Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz has gained on John Fetterman in the Senate race there as Fetterman’s difficulty communicating after a stroke have come into the spotlight, in part because of a recent difficult debate. Polling has the two candidates tied just a few days out.

In Georgia, Republican nominee Herschel Walker has managed to stay competitive in his toss-up Senate race with Raphael Warnock despite accusations that Walker paid for two abortions years ago. Walker has denied those allegations. RCP has Walker up by 0.4%.

Senate races in New Hampshire, Nevada, and Arizona, among others, are close races as well.

Gubernatorial races have garnered national attention and may be creating rising stars within the respective parties. In Arizona, Republican nominee Kari Lake has drawn attention for her contentious interactions with the press, in particular over election integrity in a swing state that was at the center of the challenges to the 2020 presidential election results. RCP has Lake up by 1.8% against the Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs.

Wisconsin’s incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers is fending off Republican challenger Tim Michels in a nearly tied race, one of several tight gubernatorial contests.

Democrats saw a real chance of maintaining control of the House of Representatives after a surge in engagement following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade earlier this year, but that support has dwindled since then.

A top issue in all these races is the economy. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product declined for two consecutive quarters earlier this year, the standard definition of a recession. The latest federal inflation data showed producer and consumer goods rose more than 8% in the last year, far outpacing wage gains. Gas prices hit a record higher over the summer, topping $5 per gallon. Despite a decline in gas prices since then, they remain higher than when President Joe Biden took office.

Reed said those economic issues would likely boost many Republicans to victory on election day.

“The 2022 midterm is shaping to end as it started: with a rout of the party in charge and a sizable GOP wave. With nearly every imaginable economic metric trending in the wrong direction, this election could not come at a worse time for the Democrats, who are out of time addressing the uncertainty hanging over everyone’s lives,” Reed said. “It’s hard to scare voters about what the out party might do when the current Congress has offered absolutely nothing in the way of an economic future.”

Polling data backs up that Americans are concerned about the economy. A Gallup survey from October showed 46% of Americans pointed to an economic issue as the “most important problem” facing the nation with 20% citing inflation and 18% picking the economy overall. For comparison, only 3% of Americans chose abortion and another 4% chose crime.

(The Center Square) – The Republican lawmaker who received fake military ballots in the mail says she isn’t sure they were sent to help.

Rep. Janel Brandtjen, R-Menomonee Falls, on Friday said the Democrats who run Milwaukee’s Elections Commission “ are not my friends.”

“If I did not know better, and I’m not really good at being a victim, I think this is more a case of some people trying to get some revenge,” Brandtjen said.

Milwaukee’s mayor on Thursday fired the city’s deputy elections director, Kimberly Zapata, after he said she admitted to ordering three fake military ballots and sending them to Brandtjen.

“These are the same people who I’ve [filed] open records requests on for [The Center for Tech and Civic Life] for at least 18 months,” Brandtjen explained. “Why would she risk her job, her pension, embarrassment, jail? All she had to do is pick up the phone and tell me this.”

Brandtjen added that she didn’t know Wisconsin’s MyVote system had a military ballot loophole until she got the ballots. Wisconsin law doesn’t require military members to register to vote or submit any form of photo ID in order to get a ballot.

Brandtjen said it’s not only disgusting that the woman allegedly faked military ballots, what she called stolen valor. She said it’s one more example of how the state’s voter system is open to the opportunity for voter fraud.

A Racine County man, Harry Wait, is facing charges there after he admitted to requesting ballots back in July for Wisconsin’s Assembly Speaker and Racine’s mayor. Brandtjen said another state lawmaker had someone request his primary ballot as well. And there are the unanswered questions about the Zuckerbucks, Democracy in the Park, and indefinitely confined voters that Brandtjen has been investigating since last year.

“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen so far, it’s literally as if someone has gone through our election laws and said ‘These are the loopholes we’re going to take advantage of,’,” Brandtjen added.

She said Wisconsin’s election loopholes and unanswered questions won’t be resolved until Republican lawmakers in Madison take action, hopefully with a new Republican governor after next week’s elections.

(The Center Square) – There’s a lawsuit in Green Bay that accuses the city’s election boss of not allowing poll watchers to actually watch people vote.

The Republican National Committee filed the lawsuit Tuesday. It claims that Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys is partially blocking election observers.

The suit says poll watchers can witness people sign-in, register to vote, and pick-up their ballot. But the suit says poll watchers are not allowed to see voters certify their ballots or return them to be counted.

“Jeffreys has refused to afford the public with the ability to observe all public aspects of the in-person absentee ballot voting process," the lawsuit claims.

Early voting began in Wisconsin last Tuesday. It will continue until the Sunday before Election Day.

"This is unacceptable: Republicans are going to court to deliver Wisconsinites the ballot box transparency to which they are legally entitled," RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement Wednesday.

Green Bay’s election managers haven’t commented on the lawsuit.

The case is one of dozens filed by Republicans in several states that focus on election issues, including what poll watchers can or cannot do.

The Green Bay lawsuit wants a judge to not only order Jeffreys to allow poll watchers to watch the entire process, the RNC is asking that a court order be placed at the entrance of every polling place "alerting electors and observers" about their rights as poll watchers.