GET OUT AND VOTE!!! We can make this happen!
Fantastic news. To borrow a phrase - yes we can.
Watch out Goopers. we’re coming for you…
ETA: OT, but the Gates/van der Zwaan type of flippiing going on in Israel right now. One of Netananyahu’s closest aides will testify against him… Tweets from Oval Office incoming in 3…2…1…
Jengo politics!
RUN FOR OFFICE!!
Hey TPM:
I hate to pick nits, but shouldn’t this article have a picture of the candidate?
I mean, the article is about Linda Belcher…NOT DJT. Just sayin’…
A few thoughts:
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While I’m thrilled to pieces Belcher won, I wouldn’t read too much into it. Rebecca Johnson, her opponent, is absolutely freaking nuts. She announced her candidacy less than 24 hours after her husband killed himself, and did so while doing the local version of the full Ginsburg. In every media appearance she blamed liberals, the media, and the Republican establishment for her husband’s suicide. Really, she was like Kayla Moore unplugged.
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One thing Belcher did that we’ve been told is so untoward is she leaned into getting out the black vote. She was up with ads on all the black radio stations asking for our vote. I don’t know how big of an impact the minority vote is in Bullitt County, but I don’t imagine she cut that ad for shits and giggles.
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Another thing she did that too many liberals are just sleeping on was to cast herself as a true Christian who cares most about the least of these. When I first heard one ad I got confused and thought she was the Republican because she was proudly touting her faith. Nope, she managed to out-Christian the pastor’s widow. That’s saying A LOT in Bullitt County.
Yeah. Not to be overly crass, but “widow of kiddy-diddler” is not a factor we can count on in every election.
Me three. It’s great to pick up the seat but the circumstances won’t repeat themselves exactly too often. (Although with the kind of freaks the GOP is running lately, who knows.)
I agree.
But it does seem like kiddy diddling is popping up in more and more republican races, doesn’t it? And now kiddy killing.
I think the dynamics of this race goes a bit beyond that, however. Belcher is a known commodity in that district, she used to be the rep. And while there may have been some sympathy for the widow…I would guess a sizable amount of people were more like “very sorry for your loss, but you don’t know a thing about government. I am going with the lady with experience”.
Still, it was a pretty big win. I just think its easy to get sucked into the 80+ point shift, when there was a lot more going on beneath the surface. Belcher was actually up by about 17 points from her last election I believe, which is more in keeping with what we are seeing elsewhere.
Thanks for the local report and insights. I wish Belcher the best.
The wave needs to be bigger and a bluish dark pink!!
How’s this?
I hate to disagree with the experts, but I think the results of these special elections are far more indicative of what will happen in November than the polls are. In other words, November could very well be a blowout for the Dems the likes of which haven’t been seen since FDR was in office.
The Dems have been flipping districts that went for Trump by double digit margins in nearly every case. Special elections normally favor Republicans. Those two factors alone indicate that the RCP average of eight points for the Dems in the generic ballot way underestimates what might happen this fall. We’ll see.
Absolutely- you delivered it perfectly, my friend!
There’s also this:
Belcher previously held the seat from 2008 to 2012 and from 2014 to 2016, when she lost to Dan Johnson.
The Democrat had lost her seat in 2016 by just 150 votes, or less than 1 percentage point, even as Trump carried the district with 72 percent of the vote there compared to Hillary Clinton’s 23 percent.
This is not a great surprise that she’d win taking everything into consideration.
The 36 point win is a little outside the norm because of local factors, but I think she would’ve won by 10-20 points even without the odd factors that opened up this seat. I’d highlight a few things about this race.
Democrats can win anywhere in Red America if they focus on GOP corruption, GOP inflexibility, and the Dems’ willingness to help people. Patty Schachter won her race in WI on those themes. Doug Jones won his race in AL on those ideas. Belcher won in KY as well. I saw Conor Lamb run an impressive debate against a decently prepared and functional GOP opponent on similar themes in the soon to be extinct PA-18.
So a Dem campaign that focuses on helping people, ending GOP corruption and demonstrating flexibility to listen to voters on a range of ideas an issues can win big.
Your points are valid but they fail to explain the magnitude of this blowout. Consider this:
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Rebeca Johnson may be flat out nuts, but when has that discouraged Republicans from voting for their candidate in the past. Most Republican voters are pretty much mindless automatons who vote “R” without any consideration of who’s running.
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Special elections normally favor Republicans because Democrats don’t often show up for them.
Given those two factors, I wouldn’t expect a Republican to lose a special election in a deep red district like that even if they came out as a cannibal serial killer and ate a live baby on national TV. That Republicans are staying home and Democrats are showing up for elections like these shows a monumental shift in voting behavior this year which implies (at the very least) that the polls are way underestimating the margins for Dems this November. We’ll see.
It was more like, “Sorry for your loss, certifiable crazy person. I am going with the lady that doesn’t terrify me.”
It occurs to me that while Democrats won’t be running against as many Rebecca Johnsons as we might like, there will most likely be a not small number of them on ballots across the country. PP has brought out the GOP crazy in a way that even Sarah Palin couldn’t. Republican primaries in various locations will be a fight to see who can hug PP the tightest and who loves him the most. The kinds of people who want to engage in a fight to see who can be the Trumpiest of them are necessarily crazy people. That’s going to be a big problem for the GOP as much as it was with Akin, Angle, O’Donnell, and a host of others.