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Former Minnesota lieutenant governor wins GOP primary, set to face conservative Dem in key battleground race

Former Minnesota Lt. Gov. Michelle Fischbach on Tuesday declared victory in the GOP primary for Minnesota’s 7th congressional district in the rural western part of the state. It sets up what is likely to be one of the most competitive battleground states as the GOP aims to end the 30 year dominance of Democratic incumbent Collin Peterson.
In a contentious five way primary, Fischbach, who earned crucial endorsements from both Minnesota GOP and President Trump in the final weeks, dominated the race by more than 59% of the total vote. She easily defeated out her strongest opponent, Air Force veteran and the GOP challenger from the district in 2016 and 2018, Dave Hughes by almost 40%.

FILE - In this Nov. 22, 2019 file photo, Michelle Fischbach visits a coffee shop in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski,File)

Despite the key endorsements and Fischbach’s long tenure as a state senator and nearly $350,000 cash advantage, her campaign was frequently caught in controversy.
Fischbach’s campaign manager was handed a restraining order against Hughes for allegedly calling him more than 300 times in “coordinated attacks” to disrupt virtual campaign speeches. Hughes also filed an FEC complaint accusing Fischbach of accepting more than $20,000 from political action committees that are controlled or influenced by members of her immediate family.
Furthermore, while she was able to secure the endorsement from the Minnesota GOP, it took 8 rounds of voting to gain the 60% needed for endorsement. Indicating that state party officials did not have resounding confidence in her campaign.
Her next challenge will be finding a way to distinguish her conservative brand from Peterson, the 15 term incumbent and chair of the House agriculture committee.
Peterson is considered one of if not the most conservative members of the house Democratic party. He is anti abortion, has received an A rating from the NRA and was one of two democrats to vote against impeachment of President Trump. His chairmanship of the house agriculture committee also gives him incredible influence in a district where cropland dominates the region. Peterson carried his primary easily with 75% of the vote.
In 2016, Trump managed to win the district by +30%, Rep. Peterson was able to retain his seat by a 5.1%. In order for the GOP to have any chance of taking back the house, candidates will have to dominate in rural districts such as MN-07. A recent Fox News Poll had Trump trailing Former VP Biden by 13% in a statewide race.
2020 may prove to be the perfect year for Fischbach to challenge. Cook Political Report, a non-partisan election rating service, has labeled this race a tossup, Peterson had his smallest margin of victory in 2018 since his first election in 1990, and with Trump on the top of the ticket it may be all she needs to overtake a longtime democratic stronghold.

Keen observers point out unusual elements of Biden’s Instagram post with Harris

We're all living in an age where every social media post is scrutinized down to the smallest detail, so you can imagine the rigorous inspection that Joe Biden’s Instagram post announcing Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate was subject to.
To the untrained eye, Biden is seen sitting at a smart desk dressed in a crisp shirt chatting with Harris on a sleek Apple laptop. The décor was something you’d see in a cavernous library at an illustrious New England university.
But social media users were able to spot some irregularities upon closer inspection.
Benny Johnson, the chief creative officer at Turning Point USA, the conservative student organization, took to Twitter shortly after Biden’s announcement and identified a note tucked under the laptop that was tough to read but he said looked something like a “script.”
He noted that Biden is s holding his iPhone upside down and any eagle-eyed observer can also spot a cartoon on his desk with a character screaming, “WHY ME?!”
Biden's defenders took to social media and said he is likely holding the phone upside down because another person was part of the conference and was on speaker phone.

The post illustrates how the 2020 campaign is in full swing after Biden's selection of Harris.
Biden wrote in the post that it is his great honor to announce his selection of Harris as his pick for a running mate and called her a “fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public  servants.”
He also credited her work with his late son,  Beau, and said, as attorney general, she“took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse.”
“I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign,” he posted.

Trump warns of mail-in voting 'disaster', predicts China, Russia will be 'grabbing plenty' of ballots

President Trump doubled down on his criticism of mail-in voting on Tuesday, telling Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview that it would lead to “catastrophic corruption,” and slammed the process as "a rigged election waiting to happen."

"This whole thing with his mail-in ballots, that's a rigged election waiting to happen. It's rigged and everyone knows it," Trump said.
"You can't send out 16 million mail-in ballots ... who knows who's getting them?" he argued. "The mailmen are going to get them, people are going to just grab batches of them and you talk about China and Russia,  they'll be grabbing plenty of them. It's a disaster. It's a rigged election waiting to happen."
The president and the GOP have been warning for months about possible fraud connected to mail-in voting. The RNC and the Trump reelection campaign have doubled their legal budget this year to hit back at efforts by Democrats to overhaul voting laws in response to the pandemic.
Democrats, pushing back against the claims by Trump and the GOP, say that cases of actual voter fraud are limited and claim that Republicans are trying to suppress voter turnout to improve their chances of winning elections.
"It's just common sense," Trump argued. "You wouldn't even have to know anything about politics or elections. It's common sense."
Trump clarified that because of the process required to obtain an absentee ballot, such voting is safer than general mail-in balloting — and pointed to a voter-fraud scandal out of New Jersey as evidence that universal mail-in voting would cause widespread problems.

"An absentee ballot is okay ...," he said, "but these mail-in ballots where they send millions of them all over the country, it's going to be a rigged election, and this country shouldn't allow it."
If the courts don't intervene, "you'll never know who won the election," Trump warned.
The process "can't work," he said plainly. "It hasn't worked in little districts. Small little defined districts, they can't do it. It's an impossibility. Plus, the post office isn't set up for this. The post office is not set up for millions -- when you look at what they did in Nevada ... where they're sending millions of ballots [to registered voters] and you don't have to have a confirmed signature, there's nothing to say that that person signed it.
"It's going to be catastrophic corruption."
Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Michael Goodwin: Kamala Harris an underwhelming pick for vice president

The great Peggy Lee song comes to mind: “Is that all there is?”
Sen. ­Kamala Harris checks off two big boxes for 2020 Dems — gender and race. But the moment, if not the actual choice, feels underwhelming because of the amateurish way Joe Biden and his team let the process spin out of control.
The drawn-out, overhyped vetting often made it seem as if the running mate would save the ticket. A month ago there were six finalists, then maybe 12.
Some openly campaigned, with Stacey Abrams and Karen Bass enlisting supporters to speak to Biden directly. Susan Rice talked up what she saw as her qualifications on television as if picking her was a no-brainer.
Much of the time it seemed as if the campaign was putting out leaks to give the impression there were developments when there were none. With Biden mostly basement-bound in Delaware and slow to roll out serious policy proposals, the veep hunt and the speculation took on outsized importance.
Throughout, there were two acknowledged subtexts. The first was Biden’s decision, in the midst of the #MeToo movement, that it had to be a woman, a vow that immediately undercut the credentials of the winner, no matter whom it would be. That’s what quotas do.
Would Harris have gotten the spot if men had been considered and acceptable? Merely to ask is to cast doubt on her.
The selection was even more tilted because it increasingly became clear that the veep candidate had to be not only a woman, but also black. The lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton among black voters helped sink her four years ago.
Although Biden largely owes his nomination to the turnout of black voters in the South Carolina primary, being Barack Obama’s vice president could not by itself guarantee him sufficient loyalty and turnout in November. He needed to shore up his party’s most important and reliable bloc, so the intrigue was really about which black woman he would select.
The second subtext is Biden’s obvious mental and physical frailties, with more than one observer noting that there was a good chance that the running mate could become president within a first term, should the Dems prevail. The president-in-waiting, as even Biden supporters put it.
His advanced age, 77, needed to be countered, and Harris does that, turning 56 in October. At her best, she’s quick and appealing, a contrast to his often befuddled and halting appearances.
Measured against those specific requirements, then, Harris is definitely qualified, though she’s not the superstar she once seemed destined to be.
Her trajectory in the primaries offers ammunition to both supporters and detractors. She started fast, yet ironically peaked after a debate in June 2019 — by attacking Biden over his friendships with Southern senators and his anti-busing stance decades ago.
Harris had, in effect, one good sound bite, “That little girl was me,” and one good debate. After that, she became a target and quickly wilted over charges from also-ran Tulsi Gabbard that she had been an overly aggressive prosecutor in California on relatively minor marijuana cases.
In the end, Harris did not give the kind of performance that leaves the public wanting more. Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for two examples, stayed until just before the deciding contests and got far better reviews than they got at the beginning.
Moreover, the simple fact that Harris was a prosecutor could be a big mark against her among many of those on the far left whom the ticket will need to attract. It’s possible the selection signals that Biden wants to separate himself and the party from the violent radicals leading riots and looting in many urban areas, but that would be unusual given how quiet he has been on the subject so far.

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Graham promises 'I'm going to find out' why FBI 'told the same lies' to lawmakers about Steele dossier in '18

The FBI under Director Christopher Wray's leadership deceived lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee during a 2018 briefing on the Russia investigation, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham told "Hannity" Monday, citing a document he obtained from the Department of Justice.
"This is really unbelievable ... " said Graham, R-S.C. "A year after they knew the Russian dossier was no longer reliable, they told the same lies to the Congress, not just the [FISA] court, as a completely new front of legal liability, and I'm going to find out what happened."
According to Graham, the committee called the FBI to testify on the reliability of the notorious Steele Dossier. The dossier was pivotal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants the bureau obtained for former Trump aide Carter Page as part of its "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation into Russian election interference.
The senator said that the FBI told the committee there was no reason to doubt the dossier and the primary sub-source that ex-British spy Christopher Steele used to put together the dossier, despite the fact the source had previously said that the dossier mischaracterizes the information he gave Steele.
In one line of the document released Sunday, the FBI said that "[a]t minimum, our discussions with [the primary subsource] confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele."
Graham argued, however, that the unnamed sub-source "told the FBI that the dossier is a bunch of bar talk, hearsay, never corroborated," and that it should be taken "with a grain of salt," but "they continued to use it against Carter Page to get a warrant in April and June [2017]," he explained.
Documents recently released by the Senate Intelligence Committee indicate that there were strong doubts about the reliability of the Steele Dossier as early as December 2016. As the FBI and CIA worked together to create an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to present to President Barack Obama, those in the CIA camp, according to the now-declassified interviews conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee, worried that the FBI was playing up the Steele Dossier too much.
Graham called on FBI Director Christopher Wray to address why "the Senate Intel Committee was briefed about the dossier and the Russian subsource in the same fashion that the FISA court was briefed," which Graham called "very misleading."
"This happened on Wray's watch," he emphasized.
"Apparently, somebody on the Intel committee and the Senate wanted to be briefed about the reliability of the sub-source," Graham said. " We found that briefing paper and they told the Senate Intel committee the same story they told the FISA court. They did not tell the truth about the Russian sub-source, just about the dossier and I want Christopher Wray to account for how that happened."
Fox News' Tyler Olson contributed to this report.

Peter Kirsanow says 'defund the police' movement will 'redound to the detriment' of left, Democrats

Democrats' push to "defund the police" is backfiring as protests spread into elite neighborhoods and produce more violence in U.S. cities, attorney and U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Peter Kirsanow argued on Monday.
"The insanity related to 'defund the police' is now going to redound to the detriment of the left, Democrats and it's going to have a cultural impact also," Kirsanow told "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
"People are going to be fleeing the cities. In inner-city neighborhoods, we've seen this over and over and over again and now it's metastasizing into the broader environs such as the 'Magnificent Mile' in Chicago and more elite neighborhoods, and the left understands, Democrats understand -- this does not help their candidate in November. And because the media is carrying the water quite blatantly now for the left and for Democrats, they will shut this down."
Kirsanow added that Democrats are "alienating" Americans with their stances on law enforcement.
"This is different than Ferguson and it is qualitatively and quantitatively different than Ferguson," he said, referring to the unrest following the death of Michael Brown in 2014.
"Again, they actually tried to change the cultural, the sociological landscape and that's going to take a while to put the genie back in the bottle ... that's a real problem for them, especially now, because they are trapped. They know they must defeat Trump, [but] they have no way out. They've been riding this for a while and they don't want to antagonize the Black Lives Matter movement or the far left. By the same token, they know they are alienating just average, everyday people who are saying 'Wait a minute, what happens to me?'"
Kirsanow even suggested that Democrats could lose enough Black votes for Trump to win re-election.
"Here's the real troubling part for Democrats," he said. "81% of blacks either want police presence to be the same or greater, because it's Black neighborhoods, as usual, that suffer most ... It's spreading out into other neighborhoods too. But if just 2-3% of those individuals shift their vote to Trump, game over."
Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., who led the House's recent efforts on criminal justice reform, recently said the slogan "defund the police" was "probably one of the worst slogans ever." She went on to explain that while she did not support “defunding” police, she believed law-enforcement budgets could be reduced if communities did not rely on police officers to deal with issues outside of their training.
Fox News' Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.

Squad member Omar in primary spotlight as 5 states hold contests Tuesday

Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont and Wisconsin hold primaries on Tuesday, with a Georgia holding a Republican primary runoff in the state’s 14th Congressional District.
But the race grabbing the most national attention is in Minnesota, where Rep. Ilhan Omar - known from coast to coast as one of the four members of the group of progressive first-term congresswomen of color known as “The Squad” -- is facing a Democratic primary challenge from a candidate who’s vastly outraised the incumbent.
The firebrand freshman lawmaker quickly became a nationally known politician two years ago as one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress -- and for her outspoken criticism of President Trump. But the attention surrounding the Somali born progressive lawmaker – and her Twitter feed – have made her a target of Republicans and even some fellow Democrats. And Omar’s no stranger to controversy, apologizing early in her congressional tenure for making comments viewed as anti-Semitic.
Omar has the backing of some of the biggest names in politics – such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, progressive leader Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont – whom she joined on the campaign trail when the populist champion was running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
She also enjoys the support of leading Minnesota Democrats, such as Gov. Tim Walz, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, state House Speaker Melissa Hortman and Attorney General Keith Ellison. And she has the backing of local unions and the state party as she runs for a second two-year term representing Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District – which covers much of the city of Minneapolis and was ground zero for the nationwide protests sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.
But in the crucial battle for campaign cash, she’s been walloped by Antone Melton-Meaux, her main primary challenger in the multi-candidate field.
The lawyer and mediator hauled in an eye-popping $3.2 million in the April-June quarter of fundraising, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. That far surpassed Omar, who raised nearly half-a-million dollars during the same period of time. Melton-Meaux reported having $2 million in his campaign coffers as of the end of June, nearly double of Omar’s $1.1 million cash on hand.
The fundraising advantage for a newcomer challenging an incumbent is striking.
Meltons-Meaux, who’s criticized Omar for the number of votes she’s missed,nlanded the endorsement of the Star Tribune – Minnesota’s largest newspaper.
Meltons-Meaux – who says he supported Omar’s 2018 campaign – pointed to the controversies surrounding the congresswoman as the reason why he decided to run for office. He’s argued that Omar’s “lost the trust of the Jewish community by her insensitive and harmful tropes.”
Omar has worked to repair any potential damage – holding regular discussions with the Minneapolis Jewish community – and supported House resolutions condemning anti-Semitism amid the shooting last year at a Poway, Calif., synagogue.
Omar’s campaign last month put out an internal poll showing her with a large double-digit lead. But former Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor (DFL) Party Chairman Mike Erlandson said he thinks “the race is much closer than that. The numbers that have been shared with me from some other private polls show the race within striking distance for Antone. He’s run a strong campaign.”
The District – which used to be represented by Ellison – is one of the safest blue districts in the country, which means the winner of the Democratic primary will be the overwhelming favorite in November’s general election.
Fellow "Squad" member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also faced a well-financed Democratic primary challenger in the New York State’s June primary. Former CNBC correspondent and anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera hauled in roughly $2 million ahead of the contest. But Ocasio-Cortez dramatically outraised her rival and crushed Caruso-Cabrera and other challengers in the contest.
Another member of "The Squad," Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, also faced a formidable primary challenge from former Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones. But Tlaib vastly outraised her challenger and ended up trouncing Jones by a two-to-one margin in last week’s primary election.
The fourth member of “The Squad” -- Rep. Ayanna Pressley who represents Massachusetts’ 7th congressional District – doesn’t face a Democratic primary challenge in the state’s Sept. 1 primary. And she may not face a Republican in November’s general election, as none qualified to place their name on the primary ballot.
Georgia showdown
A GOP primary runoff in a congressional district in the northwest corner of Georgia is also grabbing national attention because of controversy surrounding one of the two candidates: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Two months ago some top House GOP leaders disavowed Greene, who has reportedly made racist Facebook videos and embraced QAnon movement conspiracy theories.
Greene and neurosurgeon and business owner John Cowan – who are both touting their conservative credentials - are battling for the Republican nomination to succeed retiring Rep. Tom Graves in the deeply red district. The winner will be considered the overwhelming favorite in November’s general election.
Establishment Republicans are worried that a Greene victory would be a stain on the GOP as it tries to cope with national protests over systemic racism. And they say it would be a step back for a party that saw longtime Rep. Steve King of Iowa – who had a history of making racist comments -- defeated by a Republican primary challenger in June.
Wisconsin
Four months after Wisconsin’s controversial April primary election – which witnessed a lack of poll workers, long lines, and little social distancing as the coronavirus pandemic was sweeping across the nation – the state holds another round of primaries.
This time around there’s little of the partisan warfare the proceeded the April contest – and this time around 170 polling locations will be open in Milwaukee. In April, just 5 polling locations were available for voters in the state’s largest city.
Connecticut
Cities and towns in Connecticut are experiencing a record-breaking surge in absentee ballot requests – amid serious health concerns over in-person voting at polling stations due to the coronavirus. The spike comes after the state’s Democratic governor and secretary of state expanded eligibility for absentee voters and mailed out ballot applications to registered voters.
Even though it’s just a formality at this point, the state is holding both Democratic and Republican presidential primary contests, as well as down ballot contests.
Vermont
Republican Gov. Phil Scott is the favorite as he faces four GOP challengers in his bid for third 2-year term steering Vermont. There are four Democrats running in their party’s primary, including current lieutenant governor David Zuckerman.

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