Ted Budd (R-N.C.), the GOP nominee, voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and has falsely suggested electronic voting machines might have ties to liberal billionaire George Soros, one of the right’s favorite boogeymen. In the race for North Carolina’s open Senate seat, Rep.
#TRUMP CONSIDERING SPY NETWORK TV#
Mehmet Oz about Oz being a carpetbagger who actually lives in New Jersey - in spite of the fact that Oz is himself a reality TV star of sorts endorsed by Trump. John Fetterman, another tattooed lieutenant governor, has made his race against Dr. And if they want to flip GOP seats in 2022, they’ll need to abandon the Trump-centric playbook that failed them in 2020.Ĭommence the retreat from Trump’s fever swamp.īarnes’ approach repeats itself across Democrats’ top 2022 Senate targets. It’s a lesson Democrats learned the hard way: Biden’s agenda wouldn’t belong to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema if a few of its “rising star” MSNBC candidates hadn’t flamed out miserably with the voters. Then there’s Kentucky’s Amy McGrath, the fighter pilot who catapulted her 2018 congressional loss into a 2020 Senate loss to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell - while spending more than $90 million in the process. Maine’s Sara Gideon failed to convince voters that Susan Collins truly had changed under Trump, and ended up leaving $15 million unspent even as Collins won by nearly nine points. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) a flip-flopper for hitting his fortunes to Trump…and barely performed better than a generic Democrat. South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison set fundraising records calling Sen. Last cycle, Democratic Senate candidates failed to translate their hundreds of millions into victories, even with the wind of anti-Trump sentiment at their backs. (Not to say his messaging is entirely conventional: Barnes and Katie Rosenberg, the mayor of Wausau, got matching “endorsement tattoos” - designs chosen at random from the parlor’s gumball machine - and broadcast the antics on TikTok.) Instead, he’s attacking Johnson the way Obama beat Mitt Romney: by saying he’s an out-of-touch plutocrat working for the wealthy against everyone else, and contrasting that with his own Milwaukee-based middle-class upbringing.
In doing so, he hopes to avoid Democrats’ mistakes of 2020 - when the party, high on its #Resistance supply, lost winnable races, overplayed in unwinnable ones, and made everything about Trump.īarnes doesn’t put a lot of effort into tying Johnson to former president Donald Trump (even though he’s arguably the Trumpiest senator) or belaboring his wild conspiracies (even though they’re some of the wildest uttered by a sitting lawmaker). But he’s rejecting that route in favor of one that typifies how his party is approaching 2022. Republicans Promise Endless Stupid Bullshit if They Retake Senateīarnes has every opportunity to run like 2020’s highest profile Democrats: A legendarily must-win state a high-profile, loathsome opponent a “rising star” quality that’s long earned him comparisons to Barack Obama. “It’s important that I spend as much time as I can just talking to people here.” There’s a time to get the message out on the “MSNBC loudspeaker,” as he calls it, but “the focus is here on Wisconsin,” he says. But he’s appeared on the liberal cable network only a handful of times since declaring his candidacy. Fast-forward two years, and Barnes is now a Democratic Senate candidate himself. It was an era when Democratic Senate candidates were fixtures on MSNBC, preaching soundbites to the liberal choir and hoovering up millions of dollars’ worth of donations, a reward for taking on a reviled Trump toady.
“If we have the accountability we deserve … we wouldn’t be in the place that we are with this racial reckoning.” ”We’re being told not to believe our eyes,” he said on the network. Those appearances left a strong impression, as Barnes - young, Black, equal measures charismatic and unapologetic - condemned law enforcement’s accounts of how one of their own shot Jacob Blake, a Black man. His hits peaked in late summer 2020, when Wisconsin’s 33-year-old lieutenant governor took to the liberal airwaves to register his outrage over a police shooting in Kenosha. There was a time when one could often find Mandela Barnes on MSNBC.