A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Friday, conservatives greeted news of a potential John Kasich and John Hickenlooper unity ticket in 2020 with mild bemusement. “[I] can’t escape the notion in my head that a Kasich Hickenlooper ticket would have all the momentum of a 2000 lb boulder trying to roll up hill,” a post at the Right Scoop read. “They’d make ‘low energy Jeb’ look like an olympic sprinter.”
“Hey, nothing says excitement like two governors who found themselves on the sidelines of their respective parties last year looking for ways to be relevant two years from now,” Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey wrote. “Who would jump on board this bandwagon? Presumably, voters who don’t really care about outcomes on abortion, guns, or health care. All five of them. And what will the slogan be? ‘Can’t make up your mind? Neither can we!’ ”
Not every commentator was so quick to dismiss the idea. “While third-party candidates struggle for both funding and name recognition, these men have advantages most third-party candidates don’t,” the Resurgent’s Ed Willing noted. “National profiles in each party, independent streaks, and media-friendly relationships and donor networks. And presumably, they carry less baggage or idiosyncrasies that the other ‘Governors squared’ campaign with Johnson/Weld in 2016.” At National Review, Jim Gerhaghty speculated that the two could split the anti-Trump vote:
The mission for the Democratic nominee in 2020 is to win the states Hillary won and find another 38 electoral votes. For the sake of argument, assume the independent ticket headed by Kasich wins his home state of Ohio; this leaves Trump with 288 electoral votes, assuming he keeps all the rest of his 2016 states red. But Kasich winning Ohio would keep those 18 electoral votes out of the Democratic nominee’s pile, as well. If Hickenlooper helps the independent ticket carry Colorado, that’s 9 electoral votes that the Democrat will have to make up elsewhere.
In other news:
Conservatives slammed the mainstream press for bias in its Hurricane Harvey coverage. NewsBusters ran a post highlighting an MSNBC interview with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott—in which the anchor suggested that undocumented immigrants fleeing the storm could be deported—and published another post on a CNN host’s reference to climate change. “It was only a matter of time before the liberal media started suggesting climate change was to blame for Hurricane Harvey,” the latter post read. “Thankfully, [the National Hurricane Center’s Bill] Read was quite dubious of this claim and pushed back that he ‘probably wouldn’t attribute what we’re looking at here’ seeing as how ‘[t]his is not an uncommon occurrence to see storms grow and intensify rapidly in the western Gulf of Mexico.’ ”
