The caravan of several thousand Hondurans that's making its way through Mexico to the U.S. border is just the thing for Republicans looking to rile up their base and keep Democrats from winning back the House.

“It’s manna from heaven,” Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide, said of the caravan and its timing so close to the Nov. 6 midterm elections. “Donald Trump equals American patriotism and strength, strong military, strong borders, and law and order. This caravan reinforces this.”

Thousands of migrants have been walking from Honduras to the southern border, garnering extensive media coverage and the attention of the president along the way. Trump used the slow-rolling event Monday morning to blame Democrats for the lawlessness seen on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Republicans are expected to narrowly hold onto the Senate but lose the House to Democrats after they pick up 25 to 35 seats or even more. But for Republicans, the caravan is an imminent threat they can point to as a reason to keep them around.

“Base voters are really fired up about illegal immigration, so the more Trump is talking about it, the better it is overall,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist. “We don’t know if it’ll be enough, but we know the president has the biggest megaphone, and if anyone is going to make the message, he’s going to be the best person to deliver it in a time-sensitive way.”

The caravan, O'Connell said, has given Republicans the “pictures and events needed” to harness the party’s message on immigration.

Read more from Melissa Quinn at the Washington Examiner

Republicans Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland are the two most popular governors in America, and they’re also cruising to re-election in two of the bluest states in the country.

While the rest of the country braces for a potential anti-GOP wave, Mr. Baker and Mr. Hogan have overseen strong state economies and found ways to avoid the nasty divisions over President Trump that have ensnared the political conversation in so many other races.

They’ve hewed to the center on hot-button issues such as immigration, and have also avoided Trump-style rhetorical bombs, leaving them with approval ratings that would be the envy of any governor.

Mr. Baker had a 70 percent approval rating and Mr. Hogan was at 67 percent — first and second in the country, respectively — according to Morning Consult’s latest tally sheet.

GOP strategist Ford O’Connell said Republican voters will give some leeway to the governors on key party issues like guns and abortion if that’s what it takes to win in tough areas.

“There’s no point in being able to push the map and go to places where we don’t normally go just because someone isn’t a pure polemic and then cut off our nose to spite ourselves,” Mr. O’Connell said.

Mr. Hogan has also gone through a public bout with skin cancer this year, adding a personal element to his persona as a successful businessman.

“Being a cancer survivor and being someone who’s really done what is largely seen as a good job in his state — both economically and not resorting to partisan tactics — has served him well,” Mr. O’Connell said.

Read more from David Sherfinski at The Washington Times

President Trump is working hard to make the U.S.-bound migrant caravan into an election issue, but so far it’s not resonating broadly with voters or forcing Democrats to play defense.

Whether on the stump, in tweets or before a microphone, Mr. Trump hammers Democrats for the thousands of migrants marching from Central America toward the U.S. He warns that it’s evidence of an immigration crisis and a threat to national security, with gang members and even potential terrorists hiding amid the marchers.

He said Monday that he has declared it a national emergency and has alerted the Pentagon to be ready to respond.

Mr. Trump blamed leaders from Honduras, whence most of the migrants come, Guatemala, through which they traveled, and Mexico, where thousands broke through the border this weekend.

So far, Democrats have been able to shrug off the issue. Questions about the caravan have been absent from debates in key Senate races over the past week.

Although cable news channels have given the caravan plenty of airtime and reporters peppered Mr. Trump on Monday with questions about his plans for the caravan, they have been less interested in what Democrats have to say.

But it is a high-priority issue for Republican voters, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey last week.

Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said that may be good enough for Mr. Trump heading into November.

“You are essentially talking about a base election,” he said. “The key is: Can you turn out your base better than the Democrats can? And for us, this may not pull in a lot of independent voters given the timing of it, but it is certainly an issue that can fire up even more Republican voters.”

Read more from S.A. Miller and Stephen Dinan at The Washington Times

A caravan of 3,000 migrants is moving north through Central America and toward the U.S. southern border — on a collision course with the midterm elections, as yet another factor that could sway voters.

“I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught — and if unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!,” President Trump tweeted yesterday. 

A day earlier, he tweeted, “Hard to believe that with thousands of people from South of the Border, walking unimpeded toward our country in the form of large Caravans, that the Democrats won’t approve legislation that will allow laws for the protection of our country. Great Midterm issue for Republicans!”

The thousands of Hondurans are making their way through Guatemala, headed toward Mexico and, if they’re allowed through, plan to head onward to the U.S., as the contentious midterm elections approach Nov. 6.

“Midterm elections are primarily about which party can better turn out its base, and there is no single issue in 2018 that fires up the GOP base like illegal immigration,” GOP analyst Ford O’Connell told the Herald, saying it’s one of a handful of issues that can help the Republicans keep control of the Senate and possibly the House. 

Read more from Sean Philip Cotter at the Boston Herald

The political world was jolted from the 2018 midterm elections to 2020 after Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren rolled out a campaign-style advertisement declaring her Native American heritage.

The ad was meant to be a rebuke to President Donald Trump regularly derides the blonde, blue-eyed senator as "Pocahontas" and offered to personally donate $1 million to Warren's favorite charity if she took a DNA test proving her Native American heritage. Warren's origin story includes the claim that her mother was part Cherokee and part Delaware.

Rather than definitively answering questions about Warren's ancestry, it virtually confirmed her intent to run for president in 2020 and made clear that she wants to brawl politically with President Trump.

Not to be outdone, Trump was back on the insult bandwagon Tuesday morning, tweeting, "Pocahontas (the bad version), sometimes referred to as Elizabeth Warren, is getting slammed. She took a bogus DNA test and it showed that she may be 1/1024, far less than the average American. Now Cherokee Nation denies her, 'DNA test is useless.' Even they don’t want her. Phony!"

However, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he thrives in a combative environment. Republican strategist Ford O'Connell, Democrats will be giving Trump a gift if they decide to fight him on the basis of insults. "There is nothing that President Trump loves more than trying to litigate his insults," he said. "When you're trying to push back on him in these fights he is going to win."

Part of Trump's success in the Republican primaries was systematically branding his opponents with demeaning and memorable nicknames, from "Lying Ted" Cruz, to "Low-energy Jeb" Bush, and "Little Marco" Rubio. He has already branded the top 2020 Democratic contenders "Sleepy Joe" Biden and "Crazy Bernie" Sanders .

"It may be jarring at first, it may turn a few people off, but it's pretty much worked out for him because he's looking to his strength," O'Connell continued. "And nobody in the Democratic Party has any idea how to fight when they get down in the mud with him."

Read more from Leandra Bernstein at WJLA

Republican strategist Ford O’ Connell and Democratic strategist Wendy Osefo discuss how Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) DNA results and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s CBS interview will impact the midterm elections.

Watch the video at Fox Business

President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats do not agree on much, but they seem to be on the same page in viewing the midterm elections as a referendum on his first two years in office, with both parties hoping that paradigm gives their candidates an advantage in November.

Trump has made the connection explicit, telling voters at several recent rallies that a vote for their local Republican candidate is a vote for him. He has also warned a Democratic Congress could try to impeach him.

Trump’s “Make American Great Again” rallies have become less of a national media spectacle over time, but experts say they can still have a significant impact in local media markets where they are held. As the president delivers hourlong unscripted diatribes, airing grievances and regaling audiences with tales of victory, the White House is hoping his performances will inspire his fervent supporters to show up at the polls on Election Day.

Riding high on a few notable recent accomplishments—including confirmation of his second Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh—Trump has stepped up his campaigning schedule and his media presence. He has spoken to several outlets in the last week and he sat down for his first interview with “60 Minutes” since soon after the 2016 election.

“What has really changed here over the last three to four weeks is, prior to the Kavanaugh fight, Republicans and Trump supporters were extremely complacent,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said. “They didn’t really understand the stakes of the election. They didn’t really believe the polls.”

“Obviously, you always want the president’s approval rating closer to 50 percent,” O’Connell said. “But at the same time, this is a situation where the Senate is in states favorable to Republicans and some House races are in places favorable to Democrats.”

The House and Senate battlefields look vastly different at the moment. Most experts say Democrats have a very strong shot at taking control of the House, but Republicans are widely expected to retain the majority in the Senate.

“You’re really seeing a split situation between the House and Senate,” O’Connell said, with Republicans going on offense in Senate races but still playing defense in many tight House campaigns.

“It’s always important to have positive reinforcement, especially in final weeks, but in this case, people know how they’re going to vote,” O’Connell said. “The question is whether they’re going to turn out to vote or not.”

Read more from Stephen Loiaconi at WJLA

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren rallied the crowd at a town hall in Roxbury yesterday, pushing the need for Democrats to gain control over the House and the Senate in the upcoming November midterm elections, but her GOP rival Geoff Diehl and polls suggest the longed-for Blue Wave is over — Warren’s party overplayed its hand in the Kavanaugh confirmation fight.

GOP political operative Ford O’Connell said Democrats took a hit after from the “Kavanaugh effect.”

“Absolutely it backfired on the Democrats because it woke up Republican voters,” said O’Connell. He said prior to the Kavanaugh hearing, there was a much-touted “Blue Wave” which has now receded.

O’Connell said Democrats are “all but locked out” of the Senate, though the House is up for grabs and could fall into Democratic hands.

In the House, Republicans are projected to take 201 seats while Democrats will land 205 seats. The remaining 29 seats are a toss-up according to the polls, with 218 seats needed to maintain a majority.

In the Senate — now split 51-49 in the GOP’s favor — the Democrats are projected to hold just 44 seats, while the GOP is secure in 50 seats, with six seats mostly leaning Republican, raising the prospect of a larger GOP majority there.

Read more from Alexi Cohan at the Boston Herald

Prior to the wall-to-wall media coverage of now-Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, there was a real chance that Democrats could capture control of both the House and the Senate.

Now the blue team is all but locked out of taking back the Senate.

Why? Simply put, self-identified Republican voters as well as Trump voters were complacent. They didn’t believe anything was at stake in this upcoming election nor did a majority of them think that Democrats were all that likely to win back the House, according to a Republican National Committee internal poll.

The Democrats’ politically motivated smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh changed all of that. It was a wake up call for Republicans. In July of 2018, there was a 10-point gap between the number of Democrats and Republicans who said the 2018 midterms were “very important.” Now, that enthusiasm gap has been whittled down to just two points, because a larger share of Republicans has become energized.

What is also heartening for the Grand Old Party is that independents by a 28-point margin disapprove of the Democrats’ handling of the Kavanaugh nomination.

With a little more than three weeks to go, the Republicans can’t just rest on their Kavanaugh and economic laurels. There is still a significant amount of ground that has to be made up if they are to have any chance of holding onto control of the House even if by only a sliver.

Some prognosticators believe that Democrats are currently within a dozen seats of re-taking the House. And Republican allies are not shy about which specific House seats are in danger.

So what is it that Republicans have to do in the remaining days to stave off the Democrats in the House? Aside from praying for an electoral miracle, they need to remind voters, particularly independents, that the Kavanaugh saga is not a one-off but a sign of things to come from the Democrats.

Read more from Ford O'Connell at The Hill

As U.S. President Donald Trump was still weighing on possible candidates to replace Nikki Haley, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, experts say that the successor will likely be Trump's mouthpiece at the international arena while bearing less importance in America's foreign policy making process.

On Tuesday, Trump accepted Haley's resignation, which came as a surprise as many high-level administration officials have been blindsided about the news. Haley said she will remain in the post till the end of the year.

Many believed that Haley fulfilled her job as U.S. envoy to the United Nations. As U.S. online media BuzzFeed put it, Haley "managed to represent the United States at a multilateral institution for an administration that is highly critical of multilateralism."

While much still remained unknown about why the 46-year-old former South Carolina governor chose to announce her decision now, less than one month away from the Congressional mid-term elections, people have already shifted attention to the candidates who will succeed her post.

Haley's replacement is going to be someone willing to "make the president's case" and "be his mouthpiece," Ford O'Connell, a Republican and news commentator who frequently shows up on TV, told Xinhua.

Read more from Matthew Rusling at Xinhua