Democrats Have a Damning Retort to Republican Gotchas

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

I’ve come to think of Abdul El-Sayed as the gotcha piñata.

The Democratic nominee in the crucial U.S. Senate race in Michigan is stuffed full of past comments that placed him to the left of most American voters — a difference that he’s now minimizing.

And Republicans are whack-whack-whacking at him, hoping for those goodies to tumble out.

The preternaturally smug Fox News host Jesse Watters administered some of the whacks last week, when El-Sayed sat for an interview that had all the cordiality of a cage fight. Watters resurfaced El-Sayed’s expressions of support for the Green New........

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