There seems to be some level of disagreement out there
in the outer fringes of leftwing lunacy when it comes to the recent election
that took place in Kansas’ 4th congressional district. Because of the closeness of the outcome and
the fact that the district has been reliably Republican for 20 years, there are
some who describe it as being an opportunity lost while others describe it as a
harbinger of things to come and still others say it’s much ado about
nothing. After a longshot Democrat
candidate came within seven points of winning, progressive strategists have since
come out to blame the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) for
not putting enough money and resources into the contest, and national
operatives more broadly for paying too little attention to it.
And despite the fact that Republican Ron Estes won
the Kansas special election Tuesday evening, prominent news outlets were quick
to interpret the win as a positive sign for Democrats. NPR asserted the race was in a very strong
Republican district and should have been won easily. The reason the race was close, NPR suggests,
is because the race was a referendum on Trump, and not a referendum on Hitlery,
like the district voted in 2016. The
outlet blared the headline: “A Special Election In Kansas Could Signal ‘Big
League’ Problems For GOP, Trump.”
Politico noted that the Democrat party didn’t shell out any cash in the
race, and compared that to the fact that President Trump, Vice President Pence,
and Speaker Ryan all held fundraisers and campaigned on behalf of Estes.
Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer noted in ‘Playbook’
that Trump carried the district with a 27 percent lead over Hitlery, implying
the win should have been much bigger, so it was a good sign for Democrats. They wrote, “The DCCC did not spend a dime in
this race. Again: Trump won this district by 27 points.” CNN called the race a “surprisingly strong challenge”
to Republicans, asserting that the GOP closely avoided a loss. Some unnamed GOP staffer told CNN, “This
should be a wake-up call to the Administration and the Republican
Congress.” And then added, “The
Democratic base is fully mobilized and unlikely to be defused. We will have to
beat them. That will take motivating our base. So far we have not.” CNN ran the ominous headline: “Republicans
avert disaster in Kansas but 2018 trouble looms.”
And it was Jim Dean, president of something called
‘Democracy for America’, a progressive advocacy group, who said, "To the
Washington Democratic insiders who wrote this race off before it began, it’s
time to wake up and realize that the grassroots expects this resistance effort
to be waged unflinchingly in every single county and every single state across
the country.” And then we have Bernie
Sanders’ former presidential campaign team, now running a group called Our
Revolution, that piled on saying, “The Democratic Party can no longer ignore
districts that they consider ‘safe’ for Republicans.” Even the Democrat candidate, James Thompson,
himself said that the party needs to become more active everywhere – even in
conservative districts and states.
Thompson’s ‘strength’ heading into the final days of
the Kansas special election is said to have stunned Republicans forcing
national GOP officials to make a major, last-minute effort to help their
nominee. Democrats in Washington flatly
reject the charge that they did anything wrong in Kansas, arguing that
involvement from the national party would have been counterproductive and an
unwise use of scarce resources. For many
reasons, moving the needle in a district this conservative is difficult for a
group like the DCCC. But the split over
Kansas is emblematic of the rift growing wider between the activists and the
operative class as two wings of the Democrat Party struggle to find common ground
not only on policy but on the strategy and tactics that might lead them back to
power.
Although the race was closer than former Rep. Mike
Pompeo’s win in 2016, politically speaking it was hardly close. Estes won with 52.5 percent of the vote, and
Democrat candidate James Thompson earned 45.7 percent of the vote. That’s substantially lower than Pompeo’s 60.7
percent of the vote in 2016, but the lower number could be a result of any
number of factors. For starters, 275,251
people voted in the 2016 election, indicating that the presidential race
brought a lot of people to the polls, and only 120,897 people voted in the
special election. Estes also didn’t have
anywhere near the high name recognition enjoyed by the nationally-known Pompeo,
who had held the seat since 2011. So I
think we can all agree that come liberals are making some fairly broad
assumptions here.
Meanwhile, Democrat allies of the DCCC have argued
that running TV ads in the Kansas district would likely have done more harm
than good because the Republicans could have then used them to argue that
Thompson was nothing more than a tool of the national party – a potent
criticism in such a conservative area.
They also say that calls for the party to help with mail or field staff
would have taken months of preparation for a race nobody knew would be
competitive until just last week.
Apparently the DCCC did not even conduct a poll of the race until just days
before the election. Ian Russell, who
served as DCCC’s political director last year, said, “Everybody’s internal
numbers on both sides didn’t have this being a race in time to start a field
operation.”
Mr. Russell then went on to add that the committee
also had to be realistic in its assessment of the race, which many party
strategists deemed unwinnable even with an energized Democrat base. Any investment from Democrats would have most
assuredly been met with an equal or greater response from Republicans, while
donors might have been misled into thinking that a victory was imminent. Russell said, “The DCCC has to be honest with
its donors about where they have opportunity.”
And he went on to say, “If you cry wolf all the time, it makes it very
difficult to actually move resources you have a real race.” But that misses a larger point, some
progressive leaders say. To many on the left, the party went to great lengths
to ignore the race entirely, refusing to acknowledge it in emails or fundraising
pitches.
But we can rest assured that Democrats will continue
to use every opportunity that they can to demonstrate that discontent,
regarding President Trump, is mounting and tend to favor them come 2018. Progressives and the DCCC will have another
chance to get on the same page next week, during another special House election,
this one in the north-Atlanta suburbs, one both parties see as a political
bellwether. The political committee has had field staffers working in the
Georgia congressional district for months and is spending $250,000 on
get-out-the-vote ads on African-American radio stations. The efforts are poised to benefit Jon Ossoff,
who has become a favorite of the activist left, which has helped him raise more
than $8 million for his campaign in only a couple of months.
National Democrats have long had reservations about
the viability of the race, but they do see it as being a better bet than the
contest in Kansas. And DCCC officials say their involvement there – along with
the relationship they’ve tried building with activists groups and the 20
staffers they sent into Republican districts in February – is proof they have a
strong partnership with their party’s grassroots. Meredith Kelly, DCCC spokesmoron, said, “Energy
amongst Democrats is off the charts, which the DCCC recognized and acted on
earlier than any previous cycle.” She
said, “We now have a good sense of energy that’s out there in terms of how it
actually translates at the ballot box.” She added, “That certainly is going to shape
how we look at the remaining special elections and the general elections next
year.”
But the problem is not the Democrat strategy being
applied to the elections, the problem, I would argue, is the message of the
Democrat Party. It’s a message that
simply no longer connects with working class Americans. Americans who place more importance on having
a job than allowing thousands of refugees into the country. Things are already getting
better because of Trump and the Republicans in Congress. Hopefully, it will be years before the Democrats
are ever able to again gain control of anything. But lest we forget, liberals are far from
being powerless because they still control the media, the majority of our most
powerful corporations, and our entire education system. And the ‘Republican Establishment’ in
Congress continues to allow the ‘snowflake’ Democrats far more power than they
have to.
Considering their habit of refusing to look in the mirror and correct your errors and doubling down on the far left rhetoric that caused your losses in the first place, there is zero reason to expect anything other than more losses. So let the Democrats spend all they want, I very much doubt they’ll win in Georgia. In the end, The Republican will take his seat in Congress. But even with all that being said, the Republicans in Congress, beginning with our hapless Speaker of the House, and a less than impressive leader in the Senate, must get busy working ‘together’ in advancing the Trump agenda or there will undoubtedly be Hell to pay come November 2018. Replace Obamacare, cut taxes and begin work on ‘The Wall’ THIS YEAR and then brag about it all next year in the run up to the election and it’s a done deal.
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