Republican candidates prevailed in two special elections Tuesday. Both races were cast as a referendum on President Trump’s performance during the pandemic.

In Wisconsin, voters in the 7th Congressional District elected state Sen. Tom Tiffany, described as a “soft-spoken” but “fierce ideological conservative,” to replace former Congressman Sean Duffy. Tiffany won 57% to 43% against his Democrat opponent.

While this working-class district leans to the right, Republicans cannot take it for granted. The Romney/Ryan ticket won it by only three points in 2012. But the Trump/Pence team carried it by 20 points in 2016. Old Republicanism doesn’t sell well here.

Meanwhile, out in California’s 25th District, it’s a real squeaker. [Sarcasm alert!] Republican Mike Garcia is ahead by only 17,000 votes. That represents a 12-point lead at this point and should be good enough to win.

Except for one problem: It’s California, home of the vote-harvesting phenomenon. Many of the outstanding votes yet to be counted in Tuesday’s election are in Los Angeles County.

The state of California and the Democrat Party (really the same thing) are saying that ballots that arrive as late as Friday will be counted, giving them a couple of extra days to harvest ballots.

This is all the evidence anyone needs to understand why we should not have nationwide mail-in voting. It will turn into nationwide mail-in cheating.

Pelosi’s Really Big Bill

Most policy experts believe we will need another round of stimulus to ensure that small businesses being crushed by pandemic restrictions will survive.

I think it is only fair that the government compensate entrepreneurs and workers for the impact of policies that are forcing businesses to shut down and causing mass unemployment. Millions of families are suffering right now.

But Speaker Nancy Pelosi is clearly swinging for the fences. Tuesday, she introduced a massive 1,800-page, $3 trillion stimulus bill.

It’s stuffed with every kind of progressive program imaginable, including bailouts for the Post Office, student-loan forgiveness, bailouts for bloated government agencies, an amnesty provision, and bailouts for state and local governments.

The $1 trillion in state and local bailouts are not helpful for the coronavirus. Previous aid bills already did that.

What Pelosi is trying to do now is bail out pension promises that many people knew could not be kept. She’s trying to force taxpayers in conservative states that follow responsible fiscal policies to bail out big-spending progressive states.

By the way, what does marijuana have to do with the coronavirus? Cannabis is mentioned 68 times in Pelosi’s bill! She must have been high on something when she wrote it.

And don’t forget that the House is out of session right now. That means there’s no committee process at work here. No Republicans were consulted. The White House wasn’t consulted. No Senate Republicans were consulted. Pelosi wrote this bill by herself with input from the far-left flank of her caucus.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Pelosi’s wish list as a “far-left extreme makeover.” Pelosi knows she’s not going to get everything she wants, but she wants to get as much as she can.

And if her bill fails, Democrats will go into the election saying, “We wanted to help our heroes, but callous Republicans voted it down.” Sadly, even the pandemic is being politicized. And that may give you some idea why Democrat governors are working so hard to keep their states shut down.

The Progressive Shutdown

The health director of Los Angeles County announced Tuesday that she was extending the stay-at-home order for another 90 days.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared Tuesday, “We’re not going to be filling stadiums in the fall.” That was devastating news to millions of Michigan sports fans.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf is threatening to cut off aid to counties that violate his shutdown orders. Many of these counties are rural with few coronavirus cases. Coincidentally, they also voted for Donald Trump.

Just imagine if Donald Trump told a big city that voted for Hillary Clinton, say Philadelphia, “If you don’t open up when I tell you, I will cut off federal funds to your city.” Every media outlet would be screaming.

Evidence of Collusion

The revelations that the entire Russian collusion scandal was a complete hoax just keep coming.

We know that virtually every leader of the Obama intelligence operation was regularly telling reporters that the evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign was overwhelming. At the same time, they were telling investigators in classified hearings something entirely different — that they had no evidence of collusion.

Leading left-wing newspapers that broke stories based on what these intelligence officials told them won Pulitzers for their reporting. The Pulitzers should be given back, unless the category was “fiction.”

Well, here’s the latest. Tuesday night, Fox News reported Obama CIA Director John Brennan spiked intelligence that Russia actually favored Hillary Clinton in 2016 because the Kremlin saw her as more “malleable” and didn’t know what to make of Donald Trump.

I have said all along that the notion that Vladimir Putin favored the “America First” candidate over the globalist, open-borders, gut-the-Pentagon candidate was insane. It was laughably absurd on its face.

This latest news confirms what national security expert Fred Fleitz wrote last month: That in order to promote the false collusion narrative, Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence that Russia favored Hillary, and instead supported low-quality intelligence that failed to meet normal standards that suggested Putin favored Trump.

This latest revelation shows there was plenty of collusion — between the Deep State and the political left.

China’s Treachery

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert yesterday to research labs and pharmaceutical companies that Chinese hackers are attempting to steal vital data related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

One CNBC reporter said his sources inside the government told him that they were very concerned that Chinese hackers weren’t just trying to steal data but that they may also try to corrupt it in order to sabotage our efforts to create a vaccine.