Friday, February 24, 2017

Are the tantrums working?


Back in my younger days, I had my share of temper trantrums. My mother would stare at me and say “are you done yet… okay… do what I told you when you’re done screaming.” Reality set in and I did whatever I was supposed to do. I’d love to see my mom greet some of these anti-Trump supporters screaming about this and that. My mother would say: “are you done yet… well stop acting silly and vote so that you can make a real difference”.
Over the last few weeks, the political terrain has been flooded by some of the silliest statements this side of reality. Yet, are these anti-Trumpistas really moving the ball?  Are they going to win back the House or Senate with this behavior? My guess is that red state Democrats running for reelection in 2018 are whispering “No“.
We may soon know just how effective the anti-Trump street campaign has been, as John Kraushaar wrote about an upcoming special election in Georgia to replace Dr. Price, now in the Cabinet. It’s a district that Mr. Trump won by 2 points and Mr. Romney won by 20 in 2012. It may an early test,as we see in the article:
On pa­per, this elec­tion should be a golden op­por­tun­ity for Demo­crats to make polit­ic­al in­roads. 
The dis­trict is filled with the type of col­lege-edu­cated voters who have grav­it­ated away from Trump—in­clud­ing in­de­pend­ents who don’t have strong par­tis­an loy­al­ties but tend to vote Re­pub­lic­an. 
 
El­ev­en Re­pub­lic­ans will be fight­ing against each oth­er on an all-party primary bal­lot, mak­ing it likely the even­tu­al GOP stand­ard-bear­er will be wounded head­ing in­to an ex­pec­ted run­off. Trump’s pres­id­ency has got­ten off to a rocky start, giv­ing any Demo­crat plenty of ma­ter­i­al to work with.
But the early Demo­crat­ic fa­vor­ite in the race is about as awk­ward a fit for this par­tic­u­lar dis­trict as Demo­crats could find. Jon Os­soff, a self-de­scribed in­vest­ig­at­ive film­maker, is a 29-year-old Bernie Sanders back­er and a former na­tion­al se­cur­ity staffer for lib­er­al Rep. Hank Johnson…
Os­soff fills the con­front­a­tion­al role to a tee. 
In case his cam­paign mes­sage wasn’t clear, his web­site is em­blazoned with the head­line: “Geor­gia: Stand Up To Trump.” 
Mak­ing the race about Trump is help­ing him raise his pro­file and bring­ing in loads of cam­paign cash. 
But money isn’t a sub­sti­tute for a mes­sage that can win over Re­pub­lic­ans who will find Os­soff’s down-the-line lib­er­al views as prob­lem­at­ic as Trump’s pop­u­lism. 
Demo­crat­ic act­iv­ists may be en­er­gized by Os­soff’s broad­sides against the pres­id­ent, but they will end up dis­ap­poin­ted if he doesn’t meld them with a cent­rist mes­sage de­signed to at­tract dis­af­fected Re­pub­lic­ans…
If Demo­crats can even run com­pet­it­ively in this dis­trict, it would be a sign that an unadul­ter­ated anti-Trump mes­sage can pay di­vidends. 
But if the next Re­pub­lic­an nom­in­ee per­forms like Price—who nev­er won less than 62 per­cent of the vote in his sev­en cam­paigns—it will send a sig­nal that simply be­ing the op­pos­i­tion isn’t enough to win back con­trol of Con­gress.
“If you have an old white guy who’s hard right-wing, pro-Trump, anti-Muslim, and anti-gay mar­riage run­ning against a wo­man who comes across like Michelle Nunn, that’s the dy­nam­ic that could be a prob­lem for us,” said one GOP strategist track­ing the race.
 “But you’re not go­ing to have that dy­nam­ic.”
We remember that the GOP won governor’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia in the fall of 2009. They were seen back then as signs that the Tea Party efforts were paying off in votes. Then came Scott Brown’s victory in the special election to replace Senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts in January 2010.     
My guess is that the GOP will hold on to the seat because Michelle Nunn is not running.     
The left will probably react by saying that they lost because they didn’t scream loud enough or were too centrist.
One of these days, the Democrats will learn another one of my sweet mom’s lessons of life: the problem with screaming is that nobody listens.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.


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