The good news is that Conor Lamb has officially won a special election against a fervent Trumpkin in Pennsylvania.
Voting for Saccone is exactly what the president wanted his supporters to do. Trump cared enough about Saccone winning that he joined him on the campaign trail multiple times and sent Vice President Mike Pence and members of his family, including son Donald Trump Jr. and daughter Ivanka Trump, to stump.
He even pushed a controversial announcement on steel and aluminum import tariffs so it would land a week before the special election.
None of it worked.
Trump voters ended up either staying home or proving they could just as easily cast their votes for a Democrat with the right message, especially when Trump wasn’t the candidate on the ballot.
It’s a loud clear sign that Trump’s influence with the electorate is waning. However, I still worry — the Democratic party has a tendency to get over-confident and blow it in the long run. I don’t want us to be thinking we can sail to victory. I want Democrats to be worried.
The force acting against the Democratic Party’s tendency to fumble on the 1 yard line is Trump as a perpetual idiocy machine. He’s not going to stop. We can’t even imagine what we’re going to enraged by in November.
Best case scenario, it’s not war.
For context, I like something Chris Savage pointed out. If Saccone had gotten 2 more votes per precinct, he would have won instead. Get Out The Vote matters hugely, and it’s where we have to spend our energy coming in to November.
The real danger is that the DCCC will draw the conclusion that the way to win Congress is to run all centrist candidates, and to hell with progressives. That is something that DCCC wants to do anyway, so it would take very little to push them completely in that direction.
Instead of trying to push this race into the Procrustean bed of ‘what this means for Trump?’ it would appear Conor Lamb actually campaigned on issues:
“Mr. Lamb has done what many Democrats have been unwilling or unable to do: speak directly and plainly to voters about their concerns. Smartly, he has not turned this race into a referendum on Mr. Trump’s popularity, which has been a losing proposition in other races, including in the 2016 presidential election.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/opinion/pennsylvania-democrats-special-election.html
yes, small victories ahead of a war. don’t rest on laurels. optimistic from the energy and persistance shown by the “youngins” who marched yesterday despite all the barriers thrown in front of them. I doubt Lamb’s victory will thwart the Blue Tsunami approaching.
yes, I am sounding like “pollyanna”. PZ has good advice. Democrats keep pushing, small advances are not “victory”, only an interim success. The GOP is still a too strong brick wall, even as they suffer small defeats. Keep chipping away the edifice, it will not collapse from any single chip, must be whittled away to powder.
—
?
you still have massive gerrymandering to overcome.
remember 2014?
no, I mean… REMEMBER IT.
Lamb ran a good campaign focused on local issues and won in a gerrymandered district that should have been Democrat proof. That wasn’t due to over-confidence, but rather grassroots hard work. So roll up your sleeves and put on your walking shoes, we have a few tens of millions of doors to knock on between now and November 6th.
Resist.