Out Like a Lamb

It took awhile, but the vote in the special election in Pennsylvania's Eighteenth U.S. House District is officially in, and Democrat Conor Lamb (below) has won.  His victory, however narrow, is an embarrassment to Trump, who carried the district by 20 points.

Lamb ran on local concerns and economic issues, meaning that he distanced himself from the national party and its establishment leaders.  In other words, he ran talking about the real concerns of the voters.  No identity politics, no "cultural" issues, none of that stuff, just the basic worries about jobs, the economy, education, infrastructure, and health care.  Martin O'Malley's Win Back Your State PAC, which discourages Democratic candidates for office from talking about Trump, backed him, and Democratic strategist Lis Smith said that Lamb's victory shows that Democrats can win Republican areas by running on local issues and not on the issues of the coastal elites.  Lis Smith, by the way, is a veteran of Martin O'Malley's presidential campaign.

I wonder how much Democrats will learn from this win.  They'll probably keep pushing Trump as an issue to get out the vote for the midterms but miss the point of Lamb's victory - responding to voters.  Even if Democrats don't nationalize the midterms, the Republicans might, and Tom Perez at the Democratic National Committee may not be well-equipped to counter such a strategy.  But the victory of Lamb, who will run for a full House this November in a newly redrawn district thanks to a court-ordered redistricting due to gerrymandering, has been a major wake-up call for the Republicans and a sign that the wave waiting to wash them out of power in November is in fact a tsunami.  The Democrats now know how to win. All they have to do is follow through.             

Big Sky Disaster

Strike two!

Montana voters chose Republican Greg Gianforte over Democrat Rob Quist in the special election to fill Montana's only U.S. House seat, meaning that the Democrats have lost the second of three U.S. House special elections since they lost the Presidency.  This loss was despite - or maybe even because of - the fact that Gianforte shoved a reporter asking him questions about the health care debate in Washington.  While a majority of the votes cast were mailed in in advance and it was too late for Democrats to capitalize on the issue, some progressives have charged that, had Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez gotten behind Quist early like he should have, Quist would be going to Washington and not Gianforte.

But it turns out that Quist had feet of clay.  According to the Billings Gazette, records from his home county, Flathead County, show that Quist has been sued by U.S. Bank after failing to pay back a loan and has been accused of fraud by a former bandmate in the bluegrass/country group Mission Mountain Wood Band, in which Quist became a local music legend.

So, not only are the centrist establishment Democrats screwed up, so are the progressives who are trying (unsuccessfully) to take the party back.  They can't even vet their candidates properly.

It has become painfully obvious that  the Democratic Party is no longer capable of getting its act together.  Two-thirds of voters surveyed say the Democrats are out of touch with the American electorate - that's a larger percentage than the number of folks who disapprove of Donald Trump's performance as President - and the party still hopes to rely on identity politics going into 2020, dividing the country's voters of race, creed, and color . . . and if the gender card is played, deal Hillary back in - and claim that America can be great again when we are stronger together.

Hey, Democrats - go to hell!

My mother is exasperated with me for kicking the Democrats when they're down, but I can't think of an institution more deserving of a gutter kick.  Look, I wanted to see the Democrats nominate a presidential candidate who could, you know, win, but the party tipped the scales for Hillary while it silenced her opponents for the nomination, dismissed anyone who was against Hillary as a bunch of malcontents, and ignored the party's in-progress collapse in down-ballot races despite warnings from Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley - two of Hillary's opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination - while offering nothing for the party's liberal wing.  Then after Trump won, the Democrats put the same establishment jokers in charge of the party, and now even the liberals are coming up with substandard candidates for office who can't win to save their lives.  Quist's ability to win more of a percentage of the vote in Montana than Hillary won in November 2016 is seen as a victory of sorts, but the truth is that he still lost!

The Democratic Party is dead.  Let it go the way of the Whigs.  Come on, Tom Perez, admit it - your party is done!  Pull the plug and put the party out of our misery.  

And if Sanders devotees don't call a convention for a new party, well, I don't want to know them. >:-(