A Democrat Breaks Ranks. Gallant James Carville Calls Her a ‘Used Condom.’ Ballot Measures to Watch. Is U.S. Turning into ‘Low Trust’ Society? A Usual Suspect Emerges in Decoy Dan Scandal. More

“‘Nuff Sayed!” shouts the New York Post.

“Haley Stevens Breaks with Abdul El-Sayed Over Campaign ‘Hate’” is the more measured take of a Wall Street Journal editorial. The editors write:

Abdul El-Sayed may yet pay a price for failing to distance himself from the growing antisemitism in the Democratic Party. On Sunday the Democratic nominee for Senate from Michigan lost the support of Haley Stevens, the Congresswoman who narrowly lost to Mr. El-Sayed in the primary.

Ms. Stevens had been scheduled to appear with Mr. El-Sayed on Sunday, but the nominee apparently didn’t like what he heard from her in advance and he told her to stay away. Instead Ms. Stevens appeared on Sunday with Republican nominee Mike Rogers and endorsed him.

“I do not stand with Hasan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses,” Ms. Stevens said, referring to Mr. El-Sayed’s joint appearances with the anti-Israel provocateur on college campuses during the primary….

Many Michiganders have already voted. But perhaps Ms. Stevens’s brave and principled stand will cause more Democrats to think twice about elevating to the Senate a man who is comfortable spreading poison about Israel and its supporters.

It is unusual for Democrats to break rank. Haley was greeted with a barrage of invective. Some Democrats in the House want to expel her from the House Democratic caucus. She is now a “party pariah.” Democrat James Carville responded by comparing Ms. Stevens to a “used condom”:

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville was slammed for disgustingly comparing Michigan Dem Rep. Haley Stevens to a “used condom” after she endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers over lefty candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

Carville said Stevens wasn’t even worth a used condom to Democrats after she broke with the party days before Election Day and sold her soul to the GOP for “two cheeseburgers” in his vulgar remarks Sunday.

“But your political career is over … if you think that these Republicans are gonna treat you as anything other than what they view you as, and that is, let me just break the news to you: a used condom,” Carville said Sunday in an episode of the podcast, Politicon.

Can you imagine the furor if a Republican called a woman that? Fortunately, I can’t imagine a Republican doing that.

The New York Times tries to downplay the reason for the break—Israel’s right to exist—citing bruised egos, but its description of the joint appearance that did not happen is worth reading. A former member of Mr. El-Sayed’s campaign, meanwhile, was among the dozen anti-Israel activists accused of terrorizing members of Michigan’s Jewish community, according to feds. A New York Post editorial commends Haley’s act of bravery as her party abandons Jewish voters:

Stevens has nothing to gain here. The Democratic machine, which prioritizes winning over morals, will disown her. She’s not looking for a future as a Republican. There is no money, no glory in this. There is only principle.

Unlike Liz Cheney, who became a heroine by endorsing Democrats, Stevens won’t be lionized because “‘Country over Party’ Goes Only One Way,” according to a Free Press piece by James Kirchick. But Haley’s action could have a big effect. Politics guru Mark Halperin suggests, also at The Free Press, that “by endorsing the Republican, she broke her formal rival’s odds. To win, El-Sayed may now need a blue tsunami.”

Powerline’s John Hinderaker addresses the “seismic” quality of Steven’s endorsement, including social media fallout.

And then there’s Alaska, where Democrats are busing in thousands of Dan Sullivans to vote. Just kidding—that’s a Babylon Bee headline. Decoy Dan is still on Alaska’s ballot, but the DOJ is appealing a lower court ruling that would go ahead with certification of the results. “Alaska’s decoy scandal brings back the usual suspects for shady election tactics,” writes GWU law professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley. But Turley focuses on a Usual Suspect—Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who played an outsized part in the Russia hoax.

New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn writes that the final polls show a surge for Democrats, but he adds a caveat—can we trust them? Meanwhile, Charles Lane writes in the Washington Post that President Trump is the sole author of Republican woes (if indeed such woes materialize). “Not since Caligula tried to make his horse a consul has a leader chosen so unwisely,” Lane writes of President Trump’s candidate choices.

A Wall Street Journal editorial highlights ballot measures to watch tomorrow: voter ID, transgender sports, a Frankenstein veto power, and more. Bill King of Real Clear Politics interprets early voting in Texas, and Miranda Devine says, “Don’t count Susan Collins out yet — tough Maine voters see right through lefty fairy tales“:

She knows the coast (“northern Massachusetts”) is a different world from the self-sufficient, deeply wooded parts of inland Maine, or the former mill towns where the remnants of the white working class live alongside Somali immigrants, or the potato farms of the east where she grew up. Where life is rugged, leftist fairy tales don’t fly.

It’s why Collins has hung on for 30 years in the Senate, pork-barreling strategically, keeping her counsel and defying the naysayers at every election. 

What an irony if the Republican majority is saved by the Senate’s most Trump-skeptical member.

Not going with the flow, Dan Balz, formerly at the Washington Post, writes at Jewish World Review that ‘’the Senate is an uphill battle for Dems, even with the wind at their back.”

What happens when a society becomes a low-trust society? The United States has always been a high-trust society. Two pieces in the WSJ suggest that this is changing. In “America’s Zero-Trust Reality,” Andy Kessler writes about AI-generated ads, politicians, and the new, ironically entitled Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything.” “I left the theater not trusting anyone involved with the movie,” writes Kessler.

Dominic Green addresses the issue of trust in society from a different perspective in “A Tammany Hall for Muslims in the West.” Green begins:

Democracy requires a high-trust, high-consensus society. The electoral legacy of our Age of Migration, and the studied mismanagement of multiculturalism, is low-trust, low-consensus societies. From Dearborn, Mich., to Manchester, England, multicultural societies produce interethnic competition, institutional capture and a shift in how government manages the public. …

There are many historical examples of complex, multicultural societies. We call them empires….

Europe has promised more than it can possibly afford, and its inability to deliver means trust will take another hit. It’s already happening. “Panic and Anger Spread as Europe’s Great Pension Covenant Unravels” is a Wall Street Journal headline. The subtitle: “Governments in the region are straining to honor the entitlements of future pensioners, threatening a fragile generational contract.”

“Europe’s Riots Are the Bill Coming Due for Socialism and Globalism” is the headline on Fred Fleitz’s piece at American Greatness. Mr. Fleitz was attending a conference at London‘s Chatham House. He was surrounded by—eeek!—global elitists:

The panelist later explained that Europe is better because of all the “free stuff”—free health care, free college, generous social benefits, government pensions, and so on.

This explanation wasn’t very convincing. These claims in fact reflect the global elite’s view of Europe as a paradise and of Trump’s America as a primitive backwater. The reality is that nothing is free.

Europeans pay for these benefits through some of the highest taxes in the developed world, and governments that cannot cover the bill borrow the rest. France’s public debt now exceeds 110 percent of GDP, and its borrowing costs have hit their highest level in more than two decades. The recent disastrous and violent demonstrations in France and other European nations made clear that Europe is neither superior to America nor a paradise for most young Europeans.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., drug prices are finally falling. “The Trump administration’s policies are helping bring down prescription drug costs and expand access to popular medications like GLP-1,” according to a story in City Journal.

Just for Fun. “Does Social Status Run in Families?” asks a review by City Journal’s Robert Verbruggen of a controversial book that claims that it does. …