Congratulations, Virginia – heckuva job!
So you elected a failed hedge fund manager who cozies up to white nationalists. Truly a feat that is worthy of Alabama.
And you though Ron #DeathSantis is bad (and he IS bad)? As Jack Nicholson said in that movie, “wait till they get a load of me” (more here).
And by the way, I think this is a pretty smart early take on yesterday’s results. As Susie Madrak says, there’s only so much you can do against a propaganda operation that grinds out BS for one of our major political parties on a 24/7/365 basis, but one thing you CAN do is get out in front on messaging. And it appears that Terry McAuliffe In VA tried to run some kind of a “centrist Dem, ‘90s-Third-Way’” kind of campaign, which was barely good enough back then and DEFINITELY isn’t good enough now.
I wonder if anybody on the “D” team bothered to reach out to, say, AOC on the subject of doing deep canvassing in VA to find out the key issues motivating Dem voters and speak to those issues to drive turnout? I think vax and mask mandates for school kids should be a no-brainer on that one, as well as renewable energy investment (I don’t know what VA could do about student debt relief, but that’s a front-of-mind issue too). Did McAuliffe pay attention to any of that stuff? Or was he too busy “measuring the drapes”? Or saying “Youngkin is Trump, Youngkin is Trump” over and over and think that would be good enough (I seem to recall a pretty ancient political axiom that “you can’t make decent music playing the other guy’s fiddle,” meaning of course that you can only bash your opponent with his talking points for so long until it gets tiresome to the voters that you need).
Given all of this, I thought this was a pretty clear-eyed commentary from David Pakman (and Phil Murphy definitely won, by the way, but yeah, you could argue that it shouldn't have been as close as it was)...
Update 1: As is often the case, I find myself in agreement with The Rude One here.
Update 2: I also thought this was a pretty telling data point – McAuliffe actually out-performed Dem incumbent Governor Ralph Northam four years ago by about 200,000 votes (noted here among other stuff, some I take issue with to be honest), but he got creamed by the swing in non-college white women (and non-college white men, of course), as noted here. If somebody wants to bitch and say, “Oh, that’s typical Dem elitism”...uh, no. It’s actual data, moron!
Update 11/7/21: I have a lot of respect for Amy Siskind, but I have what amounts to a feeling on the whole “non-college white women voting for Glenn Trumpkin” thing instead of McAuliffe, with Siskind pretty much saying that that demographic voted the way they did because of racism (here – and no, I don’t have any data to support my argument, but only a hunch at this point).
As opposed to racism, could you also argue that that demographic voted the way they did because a lot of them are single-parent heads of households working low-wage jobs, and the most important issue to them was when they could get their kids back to school so the single moms wouldn’t have to pay for child care anymore (and Trumpkin was the one telling the schools to open, COVID be damned)? Please understand that I DO NOT support this policy; to me, it doesn’t matter how quickly you get the kids back to school. There could be another outbreak, the kids have to go home and everyone is on Zoom again if you don’t do it right. All I’m saying is that McAuliffe and his people could likely have done a better job of “taking the temperature” of that demographic before he figured out what his position was on that issue. Did that cost him that group of voters? I don’t know, but I sincerely hope what passes for the “brain trust” at the DNC takes a good, long, hard look at this.
Update 11/23/21: I saw some unconfirmed reports that AOC was told to stay away from this contest. If that's true (and when I find more reliable sourcing, I'll include it here), then I can't think of a word for the stupidity, though it is sadly typical (more food for thought is here).
...and returning to the attempted takeover of our government on 1/6 (and what does it tell you about the life forms in this country that chose to reward last night the political party behind that horror show?), Farron Cousins tells us about the judge mocking the Capitol rioters for complaining about prison (too effing bad, losers!)...
...and Sam, Emma and Matt of The Majority Report tells us that Josh Hawley recently said that feminism drove men/boys to porn and video games (Hawley looking for and probably finding some more easy marks a la The Gropenfuhrer...mildly NSFW/H)...
...and John brings us the truly vile and disgusting story of Sean Parnell of our beloved commonwealth (more here)...
...and I now give you the latest installment of “This Day In Doomsy History” (more or less) from 11/2/14, with “the first honest Internet provider ad” in light of this (definitely NSFW/H)...
...and by the way, happy recent 90th birthday to Dan Rather – I still remember all of the stuff with Dubya and the Texas Air National Guard (here), and how Bushco got their pal Dick Thornburgh to do that alleged “audit” of the story with CBS (i.e., threatening the network to go back on the story and leaving Rather and producer Mary Mapes out to dry)...typical of the Bush gang to NOT say “yeah, I got preferential treatment – so what?” and instead say the documents in question weren’t right because the typewriter keys were crooked, or some such nonsense (w/ Chris Hayes)...
...and yeah, after last night, I confess that I need a laugh, and I thought this story about “the A&W 3/9ths Burger” was pretty damn funny, as David Shuster tells us...
...and happy upcoming 60th birthday to David Bryson of Counting Crows.
No comments:
Post a Comment