If Democrats hold on to power in 2024, they’ll be able to thank abortion and 2020 for their victory. For Republicans, abortion politics are a self-inflicted wound. 2020 is something else.
Biden’s Covid Basement Campaign taught Democrats that not only do they not need to campaign to win, but that campaigning actually hurts their chances. After all, the reality is Democrat policies are tearing the hearts out of our cities, making people poorer, and fomenting racial and class division, without any apparent successes or benefits from their ideology to point to. So, they stopped telling people about what they’re doing. With the help of a willing media establishment, Democrat silence is working.
The news media hounds Republican candidates zealously, desperate to dig into any position and frame it in the worst light possible. They screech bloody murder when a Republican front-runner with a big lead turns down a primary debate. They meticulously track public appearances, and launch attacks the moment any Republican dares turn down a campaign event. Meanwhile, Democrats eschew competitive primaries in favor of a game of musical chairs with assigned seating, never debate, duck every public appearance, refuse to divulge their policy aims, and….nothing, nada, zip, zero. The press is silent.
Here in my home state of Arizona, Congressman Ruben Gallego is running for the U.S. Senate against (presumptive) GOP front-runner Kari Lake. Gallego is one of the most radical members of Congress, a dedicated Squad-style Marxist with a track record that if most voters knew about it would decimate his chances to win in November. Gallego has long supported an open border, even calling for the violent targeting of Border Patrol agents. He cheered on BLM’s Defund the Police campaign. He’s never met a tax he didn’t want to raise, or a wasteful spending program he doesn’t want to throw more money at. Gallego is exactly the kind of Democrat whose policies are turning our great coastal cities into dystopian hellscapes. But he runs great TV ads.
Other than abortion, where he carefully avoids mentioning that he supports on-demand abortion all the way through the Third Trimester, his ads have zero substance. They tout his time in the military, throw in a bunch of aspirational buzzwords, and…that’s it.
This is the playbook now for Dems from coast to coast: don’t campaign, run a bunch of flowery but meaningless ads, hide behind corporate media (and if trouble pops up, immediately and explicitly direct said media to mop up for them, which they will dutifully do). In a world where the major “news” outlets treated both sides fairly, it wouldn’t be possible, but that’s not the world we live in.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
