The other day, some babbling idiot on twitter, was whining about how dare anyone-- basically me, I assume-- think someone further left than Jon Tester could ever get elected in Montana. He wasn't worth responding to but why don't we take a glance back into Montana's ancient history to a time when someone considerably to the left of Jon Tester did get elected. And that person was...
How many candidates want to pose for a photo with Trump?When former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson-- then a Republican, now a Libertarian-- jumped into the state's Senate race last week, Ed Kilgore called him a cranky professional spoiler in New York Magazine.
I still have some wealthy friends from when I was, as Andy Paley always called me, Corporate Howie. These friends are rich but progressive. I had lunch with 4 of them the other day and they said they'd like to do a fundraiser for Beto O'Rourke. Running in Texas-- with all those media markets-- costs a fortune. When Ted Cruz ran in 2012, he spent $14,031,864-- mostly in the Republican primary. Democrat Paul Sadler spent $510,439.
Last week, Señor Trumpanzee schlepped his fat ass to upstate New York to campaign for Congresswomen Elise Stefanik (NY-21) and Claudia Tenney (NY-22). Stepfanik didn't want one of his raucus, hate-filled. red-meat rallies so they orchestrated a bill signing ceremony at Fort Drum. Trump managed to make a spectacle of himself anyway, signing the John S.
But he did-- in the Arizona Senate race. Polling consistently shows that quasi-Democrat Kyrsten Sinema would beat any of the Republican Senate candidates. As you see from the graphic below, the only Republican who even gets close to Sinema in a head-to-head match-up is the one mainstream candidate, Martha McSally. McSally is also the choice of the NRSC and the DC and Phoenix establishments.
Martha McSally is widely considered a sane, mainstream Republican, especially in comparison with her two rivals for the Republican Senate nomination to replace Jeff Flake. Of course, compared to those two-- Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio-- even Sarah Palin and Nero would be considered sane people... by some. But don't be fooled; Martha McSally is a Trump enabling rubber-stamp. Just look at her record, 97.8, on the Trump affinity tracker.
These 2 probably hurt Black's chancesAccording to the Trump Affinity tracker House Budget Committee chair and far right extremist Diane Black (R-TN) scores a 93.2%. The times she didn't vote with Trump it because she supported a position that was more right-wing and more extreme than his, like when she opposed raising the debt limit to extend government funding for victims of Hurricane Harvey last year.
Gary Johnson was a Republican in 1995 when he was elected-- and then reelected in in 1999-- governor of New Mexico, a swing state at the time. With a D+3 PVI, the state is pretty reliably Democratic now. Obama beat McCain 56.1% to 41.8%; Obama beat Romney 53% to 42.8% and even Hillary won, beating Trump 48.3% to 40.0%. In 2016, Johnson ran for president as a Libertarian and won 4,489,235 votes (3.27%) nationally.
