New York Times: Sneaky Democrats Made Donald Trump Back Whackjob Losers

A Doktor of Rhetoric debunks some silly bunk.

In the never ending quest for a Fresh Take, New York Times politics newsletter guy Blake Hounsell offered a truly batshit thesis this week:  One reason Democrats managed to hold on to the Senate in this year's midterms was that in 2021, they ran what amounted to a covert operation to ensure Democratic incumbents would run against the weakest possible challengers for four potentially vulnerable seats, in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire. According to Hounsell, the campaign of "skulduggery" by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

had two main components: deterring potentially strong Republicans from entering races against those “core four” Democratic incumbents, and “maximizing the chaos” within Republican primaries.

Oh no! As the headline promises, the Democrats "Quietly Meddled" in the selection process for Republican candidates. In the column, Hounsell focuses on two supposed examples of Nixonian ratfucking: New Hampshire, where relatively moderate Gov. Chris Sununu decided not to run, and Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey, a definite conservative but not a MAGA loon, also decided against even getting into the primary. Egads! What did all that skulduggery involve?

Hounsell's notion that Democrats added to the chaotic candidate selection process in those races starts falling apart right in the sixth paragraph, with the observation that

In this, Democrats had an unwitting ally in Donald Trump, who insisted on supporting only candidates who would back his stolen-election lies.

We're going to have to demand video evidence that Hounsell wrote that with a straight face. We're supposed to believe that Donald Trump was "unwittingly" playing into Democrats' hands by insisting only on candidates who would push his Big Lie that the 2020 election had been stolen? Gee, how subtle of them.

The whole piece is like that, and Hounsell acknowledges up front that it's "hard to say how much of a difference the Democrats’ meddling ultimately made." We'd go a step further, and say none, because there wasn't any damn meddling at all. Hounsell is desperate to suggest that plain old politics amounts to "meddling," as if Republicans wouldn't lie in their own badly made beds without a nudge from Democrats.

Friend of Wonkette Scott Lemieux, of Lawyers, Guns and Money, put it quite plainly on Twitter:  "'Republicans have no agency' is the hardest of hard pundit laws." If Republicans choose a bunch of extremist, unqualified idiots for the Senate, that can't possibly be because the GOP primary process rewards extremists who appeal to the far-Right base but not to normal voters. Heavens no! It has to be that Democrats cleverly shunted aside the more moderate Republicans the pundit thinks would have had a better chance.

In Chris Sununu's case, Hounsell points out that while Sununu always said he's basically "pro-choice," in alignment with most New Hampshire voters, Republicans in the state Legislature passed an abortion ban he couldn't refuse by adding it to a must-pass 2021 budget bill. If Sununu vetoed it, the state government would have shut down.

OK, are you ready for the Democrats' skulduggery and meddling? Here's Hounsell:

Democrats sensed an opportunity. They had picked up on gossip that some in Sununu’s inner circle were worried about the abortion attacks. True or not, they began ginning up news coverage on the topic.

“Targeting Sununu over abortion will be a key part of the Democrat’s playbook,” read one article in The Concord Monitor , referring to the incumbent senator up for re-election, Maggie Hassan. “It’s easy to imagine ads and commercials blasting Sununu over abortion flooding the TV and radio airwaves and on digital.”

You may have missed the shady underhanded scheming there: It consisted of Dems saying Sununu's waffling on abortion would be a major campaign issue. That's literally it — as if Sununu couldn't have figured that out himself. Ultimately, despite being recruited by Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott, Sununu decided against running; Hounsell notes that Sununu allies said that abortion hadn't entered into the decision. but maybe he was simply intimidated by those sneaky Dems saying the obvious!

Egad, what Machiavellian mischief those Democrats got up to In 2021! Knowing full well the Supreme Court was likely to overturn Roe, they told reporters they'd go after Sununu's record. Truly, a ratfuck equal to Richard Nixon's campaign of forgery and psychological warfare against Ed Muskie in 1972.

As for Ducey's decision not to run, as Lemieux points out, "Democrats somehow did even less." From the get-go, Ducey made clear he wasn't about to jump into the 2022 Senate primary, because Donald Trump had been attacking him for not helping Trump out with a little light treason. Following the 2020 election, Ducey fairly pointedly let Trump's phone calls go to voicemail , and Trump, as Hounsell says, spent much of 2021 making clear that "he would not endorse Ducey if he ran for Senate, and other Republican candidates in Arizona began competing for the former president’s affections."

Ah, but GOP leaders tried to persuade Ducey to run anyway, so here's the Democrats' chance to interfere!!!

Democrats tried to force those quiet conversations into the open by passing word of the talks to reporters in Washington, hoping that Trump would see the stories and tee off on Ducey. The Arizona governor, meanwhile, would get an inkling of what he could expect if he entered the primary.

At a rally in Arizona on Jan. 15, 2022, Trump duly obliged, trashing Ducey as “a terrible, terrible representative of your state.”

By then, Ducey had already made up his mind — but he left McConnell and Scott hanging for two more months. “If you’re going to run for public office, you have to really want the job,” he finally wrote in a letter to donors in March. “Right now I have the job I want.”

If only Democrats hadn't let reporters know that Ducey was being recruited to run for Senate, maybe he would have! Hounsell seems to blithely dismiss the tiny detail that if Ducey had run, he still would have been incinerated by Trump and the MAGA backlash anyway. Gosh, those dastardly Democrats!

And there you have it; Hounsell doesn't even bother suggesting that Democrats foisted the glitchy Chuck E. Cheese animatronic Herschel Walker on Georgia, or that they whispered to reporters to make Adam Laxalt run against Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. In any case, we just wish Democrats would let Republicans win and not ever say anything bad about Republicans' terrible positions. It's so unfair.

[ NYT / Lawyers, Guns and Money / Image generated using DreamStudio Lite AI ]

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