Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blamed both failed Senate candidate Cal Cunningham’s extramarital affair and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death for the Democratic Party’s inability to secure a Senate majority.
During a recent call with donors, Schumer lamented that Cunningham “couldn’t keep his zipper up” and got entangled in an adulterous sexting scandal, according to knowledgable sources who spoke with Axios. Cunningham had been expected to seize the Senate seat from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who ended up keeping it by a narrow margin.
As The Daily Wire reported of the Cunningham scandal:
Calls for an investigation into North Carolina Democrat Senate nominee Cal Cunningham are growing after an FEC complaint filed by a watchdog group called into question his use of campaign funds and after he admitted to a sex scandal.
“California woman Arlene Guzman Todd said earlier in October she had two in-person encounters with Cunningham, who is running for Senate in North Carolina,” Fox News reported. “She detailed one encounter in March in Los Angeles that did not include intimate contact and a second in July in North Carolina where she said they were intimate.”
Despite running for office in North Carolina, Cunningham appears to have had multiple campaign events in California, where he allegedly had the affair.
“On March 7, 2020 a prominent California political donor posted on Facebook that she had met Mr. Cunningham at dinner the night before,” Americans for Public Trust said in the complaint. “On October 6, 2020 it was reported by a local North Carolina press outlet that Mr. Cunningham had engaged in an extramarital affair in California in March of 2020.”
During the call, Schumer also pinpointed Ginsburg’s death as a reason that Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was able reframe the debate about replacing Supreme Court justices and hold onto a seat Democrats had hoped to flip. Despite not leading in any public poll against her opponent Sara Gideon, Collins appealed to Democrats, independents, and undecideds by refusing to vote for Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Chances of an outright majority are impossible, though the Democrats have pinned their hopes on the two upcoming Georgia runoff races in January, which would allow a Vice President Kamala Harris to have a tie-breaking vote and thus effectively give a green light to the agenda of Senate Democrats.
The Georgia races have already come under investigation for voter fraud from outside groups allegedly attempting to get out-of-state voters to cast their ballots. As The Daily Wire reported:
A group that was previously led by Democrat Senate candidate Raphael Warnock is under investigation by the state of Georgia for its voter registration activities, Georgia’s secretary of state announced on Monday.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that he had launched an investigation into “third party groups working to register people in other states to vote here in Georgia.”
“We have opened an investigation into a group called America Votes who is sending absentee ballot applications to people at addresses where they have not lived since 1994; Vote Forward, who attempted to register a dead Alabama voter, a woman, to vote here in Georgia; The New Georgia Project, who sent voter registration applications to New York City, at Operation New Voter Registration Georgia, who is telling college students in Georgia that they can change their residency to Georgia and then change it back after the election,” he said. “Let me be very clear again, voting in Georgia when you are not resident of Georgia is a felony.”
Related: NC Dem Senate Candidate Blames GOP Incumbent After Sexting Scandal