By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, April
19, 2022
I guess we
should move on to politics for a bit. Next month there’ll be big Senate
primaries in places like Ohio — where Republicans will have to choose between
the newly anointed Trump favorite J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame and a
bunch of noncelebrities — and Pennsylvania, where they’ll have the option of
selecting Trump’s man, Dr. Oz of Oprah fame, or a half-dozen alternatives
without reality-TV careers.
Those non-celebrity, and
non-reality-TV-star Republican senatorial candidates may be a lot better or
more qualified, but Collins can’t be bothered to learn any of their names. She
chuckles that “the Republican Party is going to become the Home for Unwillingly
Retired Entertainers” but doesn’t bother to tell readers anything about any of
the other options. Too much work! Too much effort!
And these two states don’t lack for other
options: In Ohio’s GOP Senate primary, there are state senator Matt Dolan, businessman and Trump campaign state-finance co-chair Mike Gibbons, former state treasurer Josh Mandel, Ohio GOP chair Jane Timken, and two candidates running well behind, Mark Pukita and Neil Patel. All of them are running against the better-known, and now
Trump-endorsed, J. D. Vance. Vance is in the odd position of being the now-Trump-endorsed candidate
in a crowded primary, after
allegedly saying Trump might be “America’s Hitler” back in 2016.
While Trump’s endorsement is likely to
help, Collins couldn’t even be bothered to mention the polling frontrunner, at least
for now. According
to RealClearPolitics, only the Trafalgar Group has released a poll this month, and it shows
Mandel at 28 percent, Vance at 23 percent, Gibbons at 14 percent, and Dolan at
12 percent. Back in early March, Fox News showed Gibbons leading the pack at 28
percent, Mandel at 20 percent, Vance at 11 percent, and Timken at 9 percent.
There is no threshold for a runoff; all a
nominee must do is get the most votes when they’re all counted after the May 3
primary. Note that Ohio has an open-primary system, so a voter does not have to
register with the Ohio Republican Party beforehand to vote in that party’s
primary. The Ohio Democratic Senate primary is not expected to be competitive,
with congressman and short-lived presidential candidate Tim Ryan likely to win easily.
Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary is
relatively crowded, too, with Oz; veteran, former Treasury Department official, and Bridgewater
Associates CEO Dave McCormick; African-American conservative commentator and former Army
reservist Kathy Barnette; President Trump’s ambassador to Denmark and Greenland, Carla Sands; former GOP lieutenant-governor nominee Jeff Bartos; and former Pennsylvania State Boxing Commissioner and attorney George Bochetto and attorney Sean Gale seemingly well behind.
McCormick enjoyed a small but fairly
consistent lead in the relatively sparse polling, but the latest Trafalgar Group survey put Oz ahead by three points.
In Pennsylvania, only registered party
members can participate in a political party’s primary election. The Democrats
have a Senate primary that once looked like it might have been competitive
among lieutenant governor John Fetterman, U.S. congressman Conor Lamb, state representative Malcolm Kenyatta, and progressive activist Alexandria Khalil, but Fetterman now appears to have a substantial lead in the polls.
(Notice that I’m providing links to all
the candidates’ campaign sites, so if you want to know more about them, I’m
enabling you to do that!)
Collins didn’t mention Georgia GOP senate
candidate and football legend Herschel Walker, but she would probably lump him in with the other celebrity
candidates. And no doubt about it, Walker
is way ahead in polling of the primary and enjoys a small (within the margin of error) lead against incumbent Democrat
Rafael Warnock in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. (When you are arguably
the greatest college football player of all time, lead the University of
Georgia Bulldogs to the national championship in 1980, and win the Heisman
Trophy in 1982, a lot of Georgians will remain eternally grateful.)
But other GOP Senate candidates do exist
in Georgia, in the form of state agriculture commissioner Gary Black, former state representative Josh Clark, U.S. Air Force captain and entrepreneur Kelvin King, and former U.S. Navy SEAL and director of Intelligence Programs on the
National Security Council, Latham Saddler.
Lots of people in the left-of-center
mainstream media fume about shallow, uninformed celebrity candidates and how
these fame addicts aren’t truly committed to doing the work of being a
legislator, and then give all their attention and airtime to shallow, uniformed
celebrity candidates.
All these non-celebrity candidates have a
story to tell, and a lot of them have some significant accomplishments outside
of the world of politics and government. Yes, newspaper pages and television
airtime are finite resources and not every polling-at-5-percent-or-less
longshot candidate can get, or deserves, a lot of earned media. But this is why
you see these longshot candidates making YouTube videos of themselves giving away AR-15 rifles. Maybe some of these candidates are genuine clowns who belong in a
circus, or maybe they’re responding to the incentive structure of a media
environment that prioritizes and celebrates circus clowns. When’s the last time
anyone called your attention to candidates who have published a detailed and realistic
series of policy white papers, spelling out their specific legislative agenda
with clarity and an astute understanding of how the government works?
Collins sure as heck isn’t going to do
that. She isn’t genuinely concerned that the Republican Party is too enamored
with celebrity candidates. She has just heard about Vance and Oz, and that’s
what’s shaping her perception of the party. For all her complaining about
celebrity Republicans, she likes that their names are easy to remember.
Few Democrats or left-of-center media
voices have any genuine preferences among competing Republicans; most
left-of-center media voices just want every Republican primary to turn into a
demolition derby. (Collins also refers to the “the pro-choice faction of the
Republican Party,” and . . . I’m sure there are a bunch of openly pro-choice
Republicans still around, but “the faction” has not been a major factor in GOP
politics in a long, long time.)
As it stands, I’m generally not a fan of
celebrity candidates, because they tend to dramatically underestimate the
difficulty of campaigning, governing, or both. I don’t live in Ohio,
Pennsylvania, or Georgia, and the decision of who to nominate in those states
will be decided by Republicans who live there.
But from where I sit, the
Harvard-educated, Peter
Thiel-backed J. D. Vance is chasing the
populist/nationalist vote with all of the grace and precision of an ostrich on
crack cocaine:
·
“Honored to have Marjorie [Taylor
Greene]’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back
from the scumbags,”
·
“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t
really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
·
“I’d like to hear zero about Afghan
refugees until we get every single American out first.”
Vance looks and sounds like a man who’s
terrified of being attacked over his Ivy League education and Silicon Valley
friends, so he is out to prove no one can ever out-populist him, going to
absurd lengths. Maybe it won’t matter; it’s a good year for Republicans, and
Ohio leans heavily toward the GOP these days. But Ryan is probably the best
candidate the Democrats can run there this cycle.
Mehmet Oz has been a Republican for about
20 minutes, there’s
considerable evidence he is a quack, he’s uncomfortably
friendly with the current authoritarian government of Turkey, and he is not a
conservative by any stretch of the imagination.
Herschel Walker is an extremely likeable
figure, but he needs to take some time to do
his homework so he can avoid future statements like:
One of the
first thing they did — and I think people need to know this — is they decided
that they were going to give up our energy. By him going out giving up our
energy, and now we’re not energy-independent anymore, which started the whole
downfall. Right now, gas prices going out of the roof, you, know right now you
see there’s no food on the shelf, and I think people need to know that. And
they’re blaming everyone else except themselves.
Yes, you and I know what he meant, but if
you’re going to argue about Biden’s energy policy, you’ve got to flesh it out
with details — the cancellation of the Keystone
Pipeline, the limitations on drilling in federally controlled land, Biden’s
off-the-cuff campaign-trail pledges to end fracking, etc. Just two or three
memorized bullet points on each of the top issues, at minimum, would make
Walker a much stronger candidate, and someday a better U.S. senator. If you
want the job of representing your state, you must do the required work on what
you’ll be voting to pass or reject. “What policies do you support on energy?”
is not a gotcha question.
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