Sunday, October 21, 2018

Democrats in this cycle are clearly lacking the wave leadership like Rahm Emanuel once provided in 2006

Case in point, TX-23, discussed here at length by The Other McCain:

The Republican incumbent there scarcely fits the stereotype of a right-winger. Will Hurd is the only black member of the Texas GOP congressional delegation, a former CIA officer who has held the seat since 2014. The largely rural district, which stretches all the way from the suburbs of San Antonio in the east to El Paso in the west, is majority Hispanic and the congressional seat has changed hands five times between Republicans and Democrats since the 1990s. Hurd won re-election two years ago by a margin of barely 3,000 votes and was obviously a vulnerable target in this year’s midterms, but Democrats appear to have fumbled away their chance of winning in TX23 by nominating a pro-abortion Filipina lesbian as their candidate.

Gina Ortiz Jones was recruited into this campaign by Democrats at a time when feminist rage over Trump’s 2016 election was a fresh wound in the Left’s collective psyche, and it appears they didn’t bother asking whether she was a good match for the district. Jones has made a point of using her mother’s maiden name with the slogan “One of Us, Fighting For Us” in her campaign. However, she’s not Hispanic. Her mother immigrated from the Philippines and her white father (who never married her mother) was a drug addict. While she used “Ortiz” to play the identity-politics game with Texas voters, she used a similar message to solicit support nationally from Trump-haters, promising to become the “first Filipina-American and first out-lesbian to represent Texas in Congress, and she’ll be the first woman to represent her district.” She was endorsed by all the usual suspects of left-wing extremism, including pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, pro-homosexual groups like Equality PAC, Human Rights Campaign and the LGBT Victory Fund, and the anti-Israel JStreetPAC, as well as the Feminist Majority, People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO. She is campaigning on an agenda that includes socialized medicine, taxpayer funding for abortion, gun control, and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Well, good luck selling that to voters in rural Texas, ma’am. Anyone with a lick of common sense could see the problem with trying to run such a campaign in TX23, but Democrat voters in the five-way March primary paid no heed to common sense and, after she defeated Rick Trevino in a May runoff, Ms. Jones became a darling of her party’s liberal donor base. By the end of September, she had raised more than $4 million, but it now seems all that money has gone to waste.