Maybe it’s all those state fairs and all those fried Oreos that’s scrambling the minds of Midwesterners this summer. Or maybe it’s just the fact the political factions of states like Minnesota and Wisconsin really identify with and love Billy Joel’s classic lament “I Go To Extremes”.
Honestly, I’m at more of a loss than ever to try and explain what and why the ballot boxes of these great Great Lakes states will be stuffed with names and chads like the ones that will be chosen later today. As THE ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Scott Bauer and Jonathan J. Cooper previewed yesterday:
Progressive candidates for governor in Wisconsin and U.S. Senate in Minnesota are making their final pushes ahead of Tuesday’s election, increasing the pressure on a Democratic establishment that has spent the year on its heels.
The primaries come a week after Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s divisive and costly U.S. Senate primary. El-Sayed’s victory has energized the left while stoking fears among Democratic Party leaders that the shift to the left, particularly in battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin, will make it more difficult to win in November.
Consider me most def in the camp of those “leaders”, but not for the knee-jerk reasons that those who insist that one vote along one’s party line come hell or high water would otherwise demand. As someone who has intimately known some of the companies that consult and advise numerous local DNC chapters around the country over the years, I am fully aware of how flawed and backward many of the techniques they use to provide their recommendations have been. Judging by some of the “personalities” they have trotted out for these crucial contests, I’m not seeing that things have changed all that much for the better.
As Bauer and Cooper continued:
In Wisconsin, democratic socialist Francesca Hong is trying to win a four-way Democratic primary for governor where her top opponent has been endorsed by popular Gov. Tony Evers, who isn’t seeking a third term…Evers and more establishment Democrats were hoping to finally coalesce around (Milwaukee County Executive David)C rowley in the final days of the chaotic primary that saw two other candidates drop out, most notably former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes on July 29.
Republicans are putting money behind Hong, thinking she will be the better matchup for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany in November. The Republican Governors Association has spent nearly $3.6 million through its Right Direction Wisconsin PAC on ads contrasting Hong with President Donald Trump and playing up her liberal policies…The president called Hong a communist in remarks on Wednesday, where he mentioned a 2020 social media post by Hong calling for Thanksgiving to be canceled. Asked about the post this week, Hong reversed herself and said that Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday.
Hong, speaking to supporters Monday afternoon, said the coalition she built isn’t just about winning the primary…We have to come together to defeat Tom Tiffany,” she said, adding that she would welcome Evers campaigning with her after the primary.
Yeah, Evers isn’t exactly signing up for that gig just yet:
Evers got behind …Crowley on July 18, the same day Crowley reentered the race after dropping out 10 days earlier. Crowley rejoined after the candidate he backed, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, ended her candidacy amid a campaign finance scandal. Evers and Crowley were crisscrossing the state together in the last days before final ballots are cast Tuesday.
That’s the sort of chaos typically seen during the sausage races at the Brewers’ games. The Brewers may be the best team in baseball so far, but it ain’t because of their between innings entertainment. What it does ensure is that the party is as splintered and fractured as any and virtually assures that whomever does emerge “victorious” will do so with even less of a “mandate” than the one that Abdul El-Sayed received last week from a statistically insignificant subset of Michigan democrats. Leaving these changemakers with the unenvitable task of begging and pleading for solidarity with scant little more rationale as “we can’t have another “Trump” win.
Say what you will about Trump and his acolytes, but when they anoint a lackey to raise its movement’s odious banner, they do so with a lot less infighting and divisiness than their opponents. And in a general election in a purple state, numbers mean much more than idelogies.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Minnesota witness the literal sh-tshow that took place last week, appropriately at a Redwood Country gathering called Farmfest that FOX 9’s Corin Hoggard provided the narrative for:
Four major candidates for governor—Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Kendall Qualls, Lisa Demuth and Mike Lindell—spoke at length about their plans for Minnesota’s agricultural future. The forum focused on issues such as saving family farms, property taxes, and keeping markets open for Minnesota’s products.
Mike Lindell called the race “a spiritual battle of evil and good of biblical proportions,” while Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth said, “as your governor, I commit that I will support our federal immigration law.” Kendall Qualls emphasized his outsider status, saying, “government doesn’t stabilize anything. If anything, they need to get off the backs of the people that are doing the work.”
The mere fact that someone with the “qualifications” that Lindell has is a serious candidate in what initially started out as a dogwhistle effort to replace outgoing source of ridicule Tim Walz would typically merely be fodder for comedians and entertainers. But in a state with precedents for electing an actual comedian (Al Franken) as a senator and an actual entertainer (Jesse Ventura) as its governor nothing can be summarily dismissed as an unlikely outcome.
It’s no more normalized in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes’ race for Senate that our AP duo further profiled:
In neighboring Minnesota, voters are choosing between moderate U.S. Rep. Angie Craig and progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in a Democratic U.S. Senate primary that’s playing out in the aftermath of Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement surge in the state.
In a driveway in suburban Eagan on Sunday, Craig spoke to the angst among Democratic primary voters who feel that Washington isn’t working for them. Members of Congress need to stop trading stocks and becoming lobbyists when they leave office, she said, and the U.S. needs to restrict the flood of corporate campaign spending…Flanagan campaigned Saturday with U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, who helped her make the case that Washington needs a shake-up to root out the deep-pocketed forces propping up a broken status quo. “It is big corporations, it’s special interests who are putting their thumb on the scale in our elections across the country,” Flanagan said. “And it’s not just Republicans. It’s Democrats, too.”
I get that there is a determined minority of generally younger and stymied voters that feel the way Flanagan and Hong do. They tend to be of the same sort of fanbase that actually believes that a congresswoman barely old enough to actually run for the presidency is somehow the ideal choice to run the entire nation. And actually created a firestorm of supportive emojis this past weekend when she yet again took to social media to send out a cryptic personal update in a manner that emulates how Taylor Swift would telegraph her intentions. Per the DESERET NEWS’
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a possible contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, is freezing her eggs in hopes of being a mother one day, she announced in a video on Instagram. “Normally, I keep my private life quite private. But I have made the decision to freeze my eggs. And I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and there isn’t a ton out there, and it can feel very daunting,” she said, adding that she knows there is political risk in making the decision public…Egg freezing has been increasingly popular among young women who want to delay or preserve the ability to start a family.
Perhaps she’s taking to heart her standing in certain polls that show her to be among the current clubhouse leaders in the race to 2028 more heavily than her actual plurality, which has hovered barely around double digits for the better part of her fourth and least active term as in a district that covers parts of two boroughs of which she rarely sets foot in one of them–the one I used to live in and know far too many of her actual constituents who can count on one hand the numbers of issues she has chosen to address that materially impacts any of them.
Which makes what Graham also reported on all the more eye-opening:
Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Ocasio-Cortez was asked about her future by host Jonathan Karl, and the conversation first went to politics before turning personal. Karl asked if she planned to run for president, and Ocasio-Cortez replied she hadn’t ruled that out, and also hadn’t ruled out running instead for the Senate. He then asked about the Instagram posts, to which Ocasio-Cortez replied, “In this political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country and normalize them.”
If this is who is being perceived as the latest iteration of the great young hope that draws comparisons to the memory of John F. Kennedy and the rapid rises of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, is it any wonder that the voters in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin are being strongarmed into the sorts of compromises that their states’ puppeters are foisting upon them this month?
When I piss more people than I otherwise would like to with my persistent and often inflammatory questions as to why they waste so much damn time click-baiting Trump derangers and nodding like sheep at 3000-word posts that regurgitate every single personal insult and boorish behavior that he or his ship of fools inflict upon it is because the end result of ignoring the amplification of broader-appeal choices more capable of winning a general election are races like the ones that will at least start to be settled tonight.
I know what kept me from running. But it didn’t stop me from identifying local candidates that I’ve previously profiled and did volunteer work for. And I’ve done my part to at least try at times to find several examples of candidates in other states that have been able to come away with larger pluralities and far better chances to actually win in November than El-Sayed was able to muster last week and that tonight’s winners will be able to carve out.
Have you even done that? And if you do have the money and the residency, why didn’t you run? At bare minimum, at least write even half as long a post as you otherwise do bitching and monaing about what an awful person the fat fool in the White House is articulating what you might suggest to someone like Francesca Hong to make herself more credible rather than confessing and trying to backpedal about social anxieties about being triggered by national holidays?
If you haven’t, then I suppose you’ll be enjoying tonight’s results more than I will. Have an extra fried Oreo or two for me, and do send a half-dozen AOC’s way. Especially now that she doesn’t have to worry about her hormonal levels for a while.
Until next time…