Trump’s GOP rivals cry foul over canceled primaries
Republicans are making it easy for President Donald Trump, whose allies in South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Kansas moved in recent days to cancel their 2020 primaries to eliminate the possibility of trouble.
“Cowards run from fights. Warriors stand and fight for what they believe,” long-shot opponents Bill Weld, Joe Walsh and Mark Sanford wrote an oped piece Friday in The Washington Post.
Some Republicans called the cancellations a cost-cutting measure.
Canceling primaries is uncommon. Both parties used the tactic to protect incumbents across 10 or fewer states in 1992, 1996, 2004 and 2012.
Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman, said the push to cancel primaries represents the “drip drip drip of autocratic tendencies in the Trump administration.”
“This is the kind of thing that happens in autocratic nations led by dictators,” he said.
In other campaign news:
❚ A debate for the ages: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is shrugging off thinly veiled criticism from younger rivals that he is too old for the Oval Office.
The 76-year-old former vice president said Friday that he will prove his fitness through the campaign, even joking with one questioner, “You wanna wrestle?” And he pledged to release his medical records “when I get my next physical” before the Iowa caucuses in February.
At Thursday night’s debate, Julián Castro, 44, suggested that Biden was confused about his own proposals.
“Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Castro said, wrongly accusing Biden of misstating how people would secure health insurance coverage under his proposal for a Medicare-like “public option” plan to compete with private insurance.
Rival Cory Booker, 50, told CNN afterward that there are “a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling.”
Castro insisted after the debate that he wasn’t alluding to Biden’s age at all when he asked multiple times whether Biden was forgetting the details of his own health care proposal. The audience at Texas Southern University seemed to differ, reacting with gasps, groans and jeers. Biden’s aides called it a “low blow.”
Castro had a better outcome after calling out conservative commentator and Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who implied that armed Americans would have to shoot people coming across the border.
“Disgusting, anti-immigrant rhetoric from @TomiLahren in the wake of El Paso,” tweeted Castro.
Lahren backed down.
“Not what I meant & I apologize for the way it came out. I simply mean without a secure border we don’t know who is coming into our nation & those who do wish to do us harm will exploit it,” Lahren said in a tweet. “I’m NOT advocating for violence against any person, regardless of race or immigration status.”
❚ Bound for Otterbein: Democrats will hold their next debate Oct. 15 at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb northeast of Columbus, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
To Ohio Democrats, Westerville and suburban Columbus represent voter demographics changing in their favor. A 2018 national “blue wave” didn’t change much in Ohio on the congressional and statewide level. But Democrats picked up six Ohio House seats in suburban districts.
A second night could be added if more candidates meet the qualifying criteria. Eleven have made it so far – the 10 who participated Thursday night and businessman Tom Steyer.
❚ Good ratings: Fourteen million viewers watched the Houston debate on ABC and Univision. ABC said it was the most watched nonsports program of the night and also drew a large number of viewers online.