By DEXTER DUGGAN
Just before the mid-March special election in western Pennsylvania where Democratic congressional candidate Conor Lamb had desperately distanced himself from his left-wing national political party, Hillary Clinton dug up the ghosts of her 2016 presidential loss all over again, once again illustrating what helped to defeat her and leftists like her.
During a trip to India, Hillary said the parts of the country that voted for her opponent Donald Trump were backward and bigoted, where even women’s sons tell Mom how she should vote, while Hillary’s areas were vibrant and productive places attuned to the future.
“I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” Hillary boasted — leaving even her own operatives cringing. Hillary still was echoing her appalling comments during the 2016 campaign that those not favoring her belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”
Or, for that matter, recall Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s own condescending comments in the comfy hills of San Francisco back in 2008, where he told liberals that small-town Pennsylvanians and Midwesterners were “bitter clingers” clutching their guns and religion and bigotry.
Just keep telling your own traditional supporters that they’re stupid, superstitious, and selfish, then don’t be surprised if they elope with the other guy, even if they didn’t bother to go through with a formal divorce from you first.
Although Pennsylvania’s CD 18 has a comfortable majority-Democratic registration, it increasingly has voted for Republicans, with Trump having crushed Hillary in the 2016 election by about 20 points.
While much media chatter focused on the March 13 special election as being a referendum on Trump, and asking whether Trump would get its message, the more important point was that local Democrat leaders, already understanding the message that their national party is poison, thrust forth the deceptive Conor Lamb as their candidate.
National radio host Rush Limbaugh said the morning after, on March 14, that the election showed “the power of the Trump effect,” with Lamb having to run as “a quasi-conservative.”
With around 228,000 votes having been cast, Lamb finished only a few hundred ballots ahead of the GOP’s Rick Saccone. As this story was written on March 14, Republicans alleged voting irregularities and planned to go to court to request impounding the voting machines, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A recount was a possibility.
No victor was officially declared as the hours of March 14 passed.
Citing a tilted Reuters news service story that said the vote was a warning to the president, Limbaugh countered that “Lamb ran as a Trump Republican.”
Limbaugh asked if this race was a clue to the Democrats’ November election strategy, to campaign at odds with official Democrat stands.
If candidates have to start routinely repudiating their own party in order to win, where will that leave them and their political home if they do seize victory? Won’t they be expected to overhaul it? Why, that might even win back the voters in future elections whom they’d driven away in recent decades.
On the other hand, the left-trending secular radicals who’d increasingly captured control of the Democratic Party could hardly be expected to passively accept seeing it being returned to a friendly vehicle for moral traditionalists, faithful religious practitioners, pro-lifers, and the street-level working class.
But if voters see that they’ve ended up with a Congress of deceptive Conor Lambs still actually toeing the Dems’ leftist line, won’t that send them off to the polls again with a Trump-like anger against doing business the failed old way?
Despite the party’s icons of gender and race, Limbaugh said, Lamb said that in the U.S. House he’d vote against California’s Nancy Pelosi as leader, even though she’s a female and Lamb is a “Ken doll white male.”
Why, Lamb even claimed that he opposed abortion — but only “personally,” of course, which should have raised the question of why he found mass slaughter offensive to his own delicate self, but not bad enough to require that he fight against it.
Still, the fact remained that Trump simply delivering his blessing to a GOP candidate hasn’t been a guarantee of victory.
In a move that many conservatives questioned, the president endorsed Republican Luther Strange last fall in an election for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ old Senate seat, contributing to discord that delivered the seat to radical Dem pro-abortionist Doug Jones.
And while Trump’s support for Saccone may have reminded voters that opponent Lamb wasn’t actually a Republican, the president failed to provide a comfortable margin for Saccone.
While Lamb possibly narrowly won the race, the fact remained that Republican Saccone lost the big margin that had carried GOP candidates to victories in this Democratic district.
National radio host Laura Ingraham said the morning of March 14 that Lamb had a telegenic and energetic image that Saccone lacked. And Hugh Hewitt told his national radio audience the same morning that a GOP candidate can’t lose a 20-point edge in his district without raising foreboding for Republicans in November.
Meanwhile, a Washington Examiner article on March 14 noted that Pennsylvania Democrats had a candidate who wasn’t at war with his district, unlike Democrat loser Jon Ossoff last year in Georgia. Ossoff lost his race for an open congressional seat to the GOP’s Karen Handel after Ossoff made a point of playing to the Dems’ left wing.
Ossoff proclaimed himself a Resistance opponent of Trump and accordingly was resisted by Georgia voters.
Candidates Matter
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on March 14 that regardless of who wins the Pennsylvania seat, “we can draw several conclusions that we probably knew already but got reconfirmed.
“Candidates matter, and the Republican candidate did a lousy job of raising money and campaigning. On the other hand, the Democrats ran a candidate who was a great fit for the district,” Querard said.
“Pelosi matters — and in this case the Democrat made it very clear he would not support her. If other Democrats clearly separate from Pelosi, it will make it more difficult for Republicans to tie them to perhaps the most unpopular Democrat in the country.
“Trump matters — and opposition to Trump is a greater source of voter participation than support for Trump,” said Querard, who had headed Sen. Ted Cruz’s effort for the 2016 Arizona GOP presidential primary selection, but subsequently said that Trump as president was doing much pleasing to conservatives.
“Republicans are still largely not enthusiastic, and that will not change unless and until Congress actually does things to give them a reason to be enthusiastic,” Querard said. “As the clock ticks down, that appears less and less likely.
“2018 still looks like a rough year for House Republicans,” he said. “Senate Republicans may still make gains because of the nature of the seats that are up and the quality of some of the GOP challengers.”
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