What Happened in the Arizona Senate race?
The 2022 Arizona Senate Election essentially started a year and a half early, a big disadvantage due to the primary being in early August, which allowed for candidates to attack each other and not have much time to make ground in the general. In this artic...
Even with this, I don't really see some of your other arguments.
This looks mostly like people didn't know who Blake Masters was, and he didn't campaign hard enough locally to get the votes he needed. It sounds like voters are less trusting of an endorsement than directly interacting with people themselves: which is where the lack of funding really hurt him. He had no ability to counter-message, and he had no ability to really introduce himself.
Looks like: poor, maybe amagurish, ground game.
It really does seem more like this was a strong effort by the GOPe to throw the election. It's not like Republicans don't know what political ground game is, they've done it for decades. It seems more like they just didn't do it.
The numbers almost don't even matter. If the GOPe isn't prepared to share the actual personnel necessary to go door-to-door, then they are purposely throwing the election in both 2022 and 2024.
This actually makes me think that Lee Zeldin running for the RNC head is probably one of the most important political conflicts right now. He'd probably force the GOP into supporting populist candidates, and wouldn't approve of intentionally loosing the house, senate, and presidency in 2024, unlike Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are looking to do.
Lee Zeldin is unfortunately not running for RNC head anymore.
https://twitter.com/leezeldin/status/1600475213027606530?cxt=HHwWhICghcDug7YsAAAA
The only other candidate running against Ronna is Harmeet Dhillon.
Dhillon would be a major upgrade from Ronna as she is from the CA GOP who know how to ballot harvest competently. Harmeet is very qualified for the position and she openly supported populist candidates like Kari Lake.
https://twitter.com/MortonBlackwell/status/1601678562062655488
The problem is that Ronna McDaniel is still likely to keep her post. Based on what Lee Zeldin says, it looks like Ronna has secured the votes to remain RNC chair by making back room deals with enough of the 168 who decide.
Fuck.
What does he mean by "new leadership" when he's unable to run?
Honestly, this shit smells like a fucking inside job to kill the populist movement, maybe at the cost of the Republican Party in 2024. Trump or DeSantis simply may not matter. Why would there be donations? Why would there be volunteers? It really looks like the GOP is trying to throw the election.
Crazily enough, I'm starting to think DeSantis shouldn't run so that he survives the fallout of the Republicans losing almost every single race.
Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters was like 95%. His approval rating among Republican politicians was probably 10%. That’s about the proportion we saw publicly supporting him. The leadership of the Republican Party is clearly and wildly out of step with its voters. Of course this manifested as widespread sabotage of populist and nationalist candidates by their “own party”.
What we are seeing now is the considerable downside that comes with refusing to start a third party. Would doing such a thing all but guarantee defeat in the short term? Yes - but how would that differ from what’s happening now? We knowingly went to war with traitors everywhere. How could we win?
I have no idea what the actual approval was. I'm still fine with the Mises Caucus taking over the NH Libertarian Party, so that's what a genuine political third party looks like. But, as is the point, you kinda have to take over a full state to make the point. I think the MAGA movement has that in a few states, like Florida, Ohio, and Texas.
What all of this shows to me is that getting your guy into a keystone position of power isn't enough without significant structural support or sympathy. We just gotta keep beatin' up the ground game at the local level.
I think Harmeet Dhillon is who Zeldin is talking about as new leadership.
Also no need to get this blackpilled.
2024 is not going to end up that terrible for the GOP overall.
The 2024 Senate map is heavily favorable to Republicans. There are three Senate seat pickup opportunities in third solid red states with good election integrity measures: West Virginia, Ohio and Montana.
Governor Jim Justice might be running for Senate in WV and he will be heavily favored against Manchin in a presidential year.
Ohio in a presidential year makes it feasible to beat Sherrod Brown with a good candidate like Frank LaRose.
As long as they don't nominate Zinke in Montana, Tester is definitely beatable. I think Knudsen their state AG might be the best pick here.
So was 2022. The question is whether or not the Republican Party is prepared to kill itself, rather than tolerate populists, and I think the answer is yes. The remaining question is whether or not the populists will counter both betrayal and fraud in the 2 short years we will have for it.
First of all Blake Masters was my favorite Senate candidate this cycle. It was a tragedy to see him lose this race by a whole 5 points. The gap between Lake and Hobbs was only .6.
Unfortunately it wasn't just McConnell withholding funding that sunk Blake Masters.
Masters faced three challenges in this race
We may hate Mark Kelly but he has great optics as a fake "moderate Democrat". Many McCain Republicans in Maricopa voted for Mark Kelly because he was seen as more moderate than Blake Masters who was tying himself to Trump in a state that doesn't like Trump that much. Masters made an ad in the primary saying Trump won 2020. That certainly hurt him in Maricopa.
McConnell deprived him of funding. More funding would have certainly helped Blake Masters but scumbag McConnell clearly fucked him.
Blake made comments about social security that hurt him.
Blake made comments about reforming social security in the primary which played terribly in the general election since Arizona is a state that has a lot of retirees.
Overall Blake Masters was amazing on policy but the way that he ran his campaign was unfortunately not amazing.
The Sunbelt electorate is aggravating for a populist Republican candidate.
The suburban voters in the sunbelt unfortunately vote more on optics and vibes. Masters could have a better shot at winning this race had he gotten the funding from McConnell and if he ran a campaign that avoided the social security reform comments and if he just focused less on tying himself to Trump.
Generic Republicans do well in the Sunbelt and populists struggle there.
I know this pisses off people here but that is the truth.
Candidates with good optics like Abbott, DeSantis and Kemp will do well in the Sunbelt. A populist candidate in the sunbelt really needs to play the optics game better and campaign more like a generic R. You cannot be a fire breather in the Sunbelt and expect to win comfortably.
Obviously, things were relatively bad for the GOP across the board, and people blaming it on Trump or McConnell are deflecting and trying to play politics. That said, I haven't checked personally, but if it's true that he spent money on Murkowski (against a proper GOP) and Joe O'Dea, that is a huge waste.
I doubt that very much, at least that incident specifically.
Rick Scott as well, except that he hurt other Republicans. They learned nothing from Trump 2016, or they don't want to learn.
Is that true though? The sample size is not great. Who are the 'generic Republicans' who won this time? Sure, you can point to way back when McCain won, but those were different years as well.
They were all incumbents, and one is very different from the other two (or you would not be supporting him). In fact, if DeSantis had lost, the anti-populists (and I'm not saying you are one) would be citing him as proof that his populism was poison.
As for the people who claim that DeSantis is some sort of electoral juggernaut: Marco Rubio won by about the same margin. Both ran against terrible candidates, so that probably played no role. Does that mean that nominating Rubio in 2016 would have been electoral gold? I part from the pro-populists in arguing, as I have always done, that any Republican would likely had won in 2016. But I don't see Rubio as having some sort of special appeal, and by extension, DeSantis probably does not have that either.
DeSantis is definitely worlds better than Kemp and Abbott on actual policy but my point is that all three incumbent sunbelt governors have managed to keep good optics even when pushing controversial policies.
Ron DeSantis sent illegal aliens to Marthas' Vineyard and still managed to outright win the Hispanic vote. That is seriously an impressive feat in Florida.
Abbott and Kemp pushed stringent abortion bans and still won re-election by a decent margin against opponents who had a actual Dem cult behind them: Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams. That takes some skill to pull off.
The lesson here is that populist candidates don't need to water down all of their policies to win. They just need to learn to not foster terrible optics.
Maricopa county is the home of what we call squishy RINOs. A lot of McCain fans in that county. Blake definitely lost some of them over the ad about Trump being the real winner of 2020. Some of these voters might have even voted for Biden in 2020. Him talking about social security spooked much of the elderly to vote Mark Kelly.
In terms of 2016, I think Rubio could have maybe won 2016 with a different electoral map than Trump. I think Rubio could win Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Nevada but lose Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Rubio was not as hated as Cruz and he didn't have Jeb Bush's GWB baggage and he wasn't a boring loser like Kasich. Rubio might have pulled it off if he was the R nominee.
Rubio has become a populist lite Senator these days. It has been a surprise how much he has changed for the better from 2013 when he was part of the Gang of 8 disaster amnesty bill in the Senate.
He recently said that amnesty is a terrible idea. Rubio might actually be learning what policies works for the base and what keeps him employed.
Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and John Kasich would all have definitively lost 2016 to Hillary Clinton.
Trump pulled it off in 2016 and Rubio might have done it. But no one else besides these two had any hope of winning against Hillary.
Sure, but we're not clear on what "good optics" means exactly. Apparently that someone is popular. But there is no magic formula for that, and it's not Trump/populism related as you say.
Maybe Hispanics are not as fond of illegals as Democrats assume.
I doubt anyone cares about that specifically.
You're not out of the woodworks yet, especially as it comes to immigration. Although both he and Cruz have become less doctrinaire conservatives, which is very good - e.g. voting for railroad workers to have sick days. Clearly, that is the future.
Not sure about Jeb Bush, but I'm positive Cruz and Kasich would both have won.
You are very confident about these counterfactuals, even though you have no reason to be. Truth of the matter is that it is impossible to say. However, there are very reliable PolSci models that make predictions without any regard to candidates or quality, which is not to say that the Q Shaman would have won in 2016.
Good optics as a Republican means avoiding gaffes and behaving like a reasonably "normal person". That means not saying unnecessarily incendiary comments about random topics. This is sadly what people like Trump, Cruz and Masters struggle with. They have good policy but saying certain things hurts you electorally.
In terms of amnesty, the Tillis Sinema bill in this lameduck session must be stopped. Based on what Senators Cornyn, Graham, Rubio and Cotton have said about it, the bill should likely fail.
In terms of 2016, of course we don't really know for certain, my opinion is that I think Cruz and Kasich both would have both lost for different reasons.
Cruz and his religious conservative rhetoric alienates the secular voters in the midwest necessary to win states like Wisconsin and Ohio.
Kasich on the other hand massively depresses the Republican base. Kasich was a bigger rino than McCain and Romney. Kasich would win Ohio but he might have even lost Florida. Forget about Kasich winning Wisconsin or Iowa.
We know Trump won 2016 and I think Rubio would have had a shot but I still think Cruz and Kasich would have struggled heavily even against Hillary.
Never trust such people.
But George W. Bush also had religious conservative rhetoric. I think it is specific policies that alienate people, not rhetoric per se, at least on this issue. And I don't think Cruz said anything that would alienate as many people as "grab 'em by the pussy" or birtherism.
Which is not to say that Cruz is the best candidate. Just saying that we should have the proper diagnosis.
He wasn't as big of a RINO back then, AFAIK. He had a union-busting proposal which failed. In terms of pure policy adherence to Republican dogma, Trump was probably the bigger "RINO". (But a lot of Republican dogma is simply wrong.)
Here’s why this makes no sense: optics are controlled by media, and the media did plenty to smear every Republican including Desantis. All of the leftists I know despise him, and their only window into his behavior is leftist media. So it really has to be something other than “muh optics”.
Heck, he was pretty much the only one I actually liked. I wanted the Republicans to win, even if I didn't like them, because they were better than their opponents, but Masters stood out as someone actually interesting, who seemed to share at least enough of my values where I thought he'd be a good fit.
GOPe did us fucking dirty this time, that's for sure.
John McCain, who never became President, who in fact ran a toothless campaign against Obama as though he never intended on winning to begin with. As senator, he campaigned on repealing Obamacare, and when finally given the opportunity, voted no, to spite the man who was capable of becoming President. John McCain is rotting in Hell and his fat daughter should be reminded of this fact whenever she opens her pig mouth.
Correct. No money to close races in swing states and, what, like nine million to campaign for Murkowski in Alaska...who was running against another Republican. Some of these traitors were even open about not wanting "MAGA" winners.
I think treason really is a pretty accurate description.