An interested reader sent us the following panicky email from California's Gavin Newsom for Governor campaign.  Get a load:

That's weird stuff, indeed, given the punditocracy's comfortable assertion that Republican John Cox, who's challenging Democrat Gavin Newsom for the governor's seat in California, hasn't got a snowball's chance in Death Valley of getting elected.  After all, isn't California the immutable blue state?  The state that will never vote red?  Don't Democrat voter registrations outnumber Republican registrations twenty to one?  The state with all those Democratic Party voter registrations, buttressed by its motor voter law, registering all comers, illegal or otherwise?

Trump himself has repeatedly stated he doesn't visit states much if he's got a solid lead in the internal polling.  He made just those remarks in speeches to South Carolina and Montana, which were rollicking fun to listen to...well, if you're a Republican.  It would make sense that his team wouldn't bother with states where a Republican candidate is certain to lose.

That's true especially with Vice President Mike Pence, who's a rather important part of the Trump team and the only guy on it with a political base of his own who can't be fired.  Trump would send someone that significant to California?  To waste his time?  To talk to nonexistent Republican voters?

Not if it were a losing race.

It says a lot about how full of surprises this midterm election might just become.  The Pence decision would have been based on internal polling suggesting that the Democrats' blue wave isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Already the results were there in the primaries, and we can also see it in the Democrats' squabbles over leadership.  Today I wrote about how many of their supposed brightest stars are brimming with fake followers.

This doesn't sound like good news for the Democrats.  The Trump era is the era that throws prognostications of pundits out on their ears.  Pence's visit is reason for Republicans to look for some surprises.