Off the wall?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Off the wall?

But in May, after Rubio left the race, Issa transferred his allegiance to Trump with an almost Chris Christie-like enthusiasm. At a May 27th Trump rally in San Diego, Issa compared Trump to Ronald Reagan. A few weeks earlier, he had published an op-ed in The Hill chastising fellow-Republicans for not backing Trump. The piece was headlined “Memo to Bushes, Other G.O.P. Holdouts: Get on the Trump Train.”

During his spring transformation into a Trump superfan, Issa may have calculated that his own primary, on June 7th, would benefit from a surge of Southern California Trump voters. California uses a so-called jungle-primary system, in which candidates of all parties run in the same race, and the top two candidates advance to the general election.

The Trump surge never materialized. Issa won just fifty-one per cent of the vote. The runner-up, who is now Issa’s general-election opponent, was the retired Marine Colonel Doug Applegate, a Democrat who had never run for office and was outspent by Issa fifteen to one. News of Issa’s near-upset shocked political observers. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Applegate to a list of candidates who could flip a House seat from red to blue, and Applegate attracted the services of an experienced campaign manager, Robert Dempsey, whose most recent job was overseeing Bernie Sanders’s primary campaigns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Jersey. When I spoke to Dempsey this week, he told me that Issa’s embrace of Trump would be a dominant issue in the campaign. “Issa called Trump ‘the obvious choice,’ ” Dempsey said. “He is all in on Trump.”