So this was sent along to me from a woman via e-mail Wednesday. I’m not friends with Bob Brooks on Facebook, but nothing looks inauthentic about it. I also got the sense from the proton mail email address that this person is in opposition research. The woman who sent it to me noted that the folks who posted this are 3%’ers, far right nuts. Sheriff Bieber is definitely a pro-Trump character. I see that last night it got out, so I might as well comment on this.
I’d be fine with prayer in schools if these nut bags didn’t mean their kinda prayers, but our founding fathers were very clear about opposing the establishment of a state religion. I don’t know what Bob Brooks thinks this meme meant about guns, but it meant “no gun control at all.” Zero. If he wants to run as the NRA’s candidate for Congress, I guess he’s welcome to do that. I guess a Ten Commandments in every public building and an AR-15 in every home is the path forward.
I’m sure his handlers will fill him up with the right things to say, that’s their job, but all of this suggests a very “Make America Great Again” world view. As if there was some past time where prayer in schools and a good whooping at home made sure kids grew up right, to be decent Americans. This suggests that our changing society is to blame for our ailments. I guess we could go back to pre-2008, 1972, 1863, 1960, 1954, 1919, or whatever year he’d like. Look, I think the Democratic Party has gone absolutely batshit on plenty of social issues, but I’m really not longing for the backlash of conservatives who long for “yesterday.” All this shows is that the non-candidate Brooks was wildly out of step with Democratic Primary Voters, and this run for Congress is a bait-and-switch.
This is what happens when the DCCC just keeps recruiting more primary candidates, not vetting them, and then wondering why they have massive flaws. They’re already lowering expectations on him, from initially promising the Governor would ask everyone to drop out of the race, endorse him, and raise him money, to he will raise like “$175-200k” in this quarter, and then miraculously every outside group will run here to fund him. By next week they’ll be like Jeb Bush asking you to clap. This is such a bad idea.
I used to live in Vegas. The only betting I did was on sports (If only Pete Rose had said this from the start…). If you ever played the table games in a casino though, you understand the idea of going “all in.” Yesterday, Lamont McClure did that in the PA-7 race. He has a good poll and a lot of advantages in this race, but his fundraising numbers finished third last quarter. So, he loaned himself $200,000 for the campaign. This isn’t money carried over from his County Executive races or anything like that. It’s personal money.
Let’s start with the obvious here- I don’t think $200k assures victory, or anything like that. The reality is that while many of the candidates in this race are struggling to raise cash, someone will spend a lot more than $200k, possibly in this quarter alone. Rumors are that Ryan Crosswell will raise another $350k, almost entirely from outside of Pennsylvania, let alone the district. The truth is that with every additional candidate the DCCC recruits into this race, it’s more and more likely that Crosswell’s out of town Republican donors buy this primary. They don’t care, they’re fine running a Republican as a Democrat, I guess. In fact, they’re claiming their new guy will raise $175-200k, and that will bring in some outside fantasy money. The truth is they’ve not delivered a single promise to this date associated with this candidate, so why should we believe it?
Here’s what $200k does do though. $200k will pay for roughly six pieces of district-wide mail. When you’re the candidate in the lead, and you have the most name recognition, that eases any fall from grace caused by other candidates out spending you. If you’re polling 40% in Northampton County now, it means you probably hold most of that- and that’s about 18% of the total vote. What this means, in moron proof terms, is that there is no physical path to victory for a second Northampton County, labor backed candidate who currently basically polls at zero. You can scream and yell about all the fictional general election polls, all the fictional endorsements from statewide figures, and how your personal negatives actually won’t hurt you- none of that matters. If the existing front-runner spends $200k on paid communications, that’s probably not going to win the race- but I guarantee you, the other person trying to run on the same lane on the track will lose. This isn’t opinion. It’s math. I’m not sure what personal gain some people have with pushing this charade, but they’re not giving honest, decent, good advice.
Ok, I’ve seen enough. Enough posts about how average to below average QB’s are better than Jalen Hurts. Enough posts from the cockroaches Giants fans about how Jaxson Dart looks great in practice. Enough posts about absolutely nothing. It’s time to weigh in with my pre-season NFL QB power rankings.
Bob Brooks will finally enter the PA-7 race for Congress on Friday, and supposedly this time it *will* happen. One would think that would have nothing to do with the timeline of the biggest union in America endorsing a candidate for Congress in PA-7. According to one labor member in the Lehigh Valley though, that may not be the case.
The four existing candidates recently, and somewhat suddenly, were asked to do an interview with local SEIU leaders. Now, it’s important to understand that the SEIU local and state structure is fairly complex, but usually there’s no separation on endorsements. The reason the candidates were hastily asked to do an endorsement meeting, at least according to one person, was that the endorsement needed to be ready for Bob Brooks entry into the race. The Brooks campaign will seek to portray early momentum and inevitability. This is supposed to be a part of that.
Given the overlap of a public sector union doing their endorsement and a public sector union president entering, one could be suspicious. This doesn’t seem like something SEIU would do though. It doesn’t seem like it fits their politics, or recent past endorsement processes. Color me skeptical.
The counter point is pretty clear though- if they are standing with Brooks at a launch on Friday, the process was basically a sham. In fact, if they announce an endorsement in the next couple of weeks, or even before the end of this fundraising quarter, it appears that it was a coordinated hit from the start. I don’t really have a problem with unions knowing who they want on day one and foregoing a formal process to get there, but I do think it’s shitty to make the other candidates march in for a process that was never real.
Again, I’m skeptical this is what’s up. I guess we’re doing full disclosure here though.
The Teamsters under Sean O’Brien are going bipartisan. O’Brien is politically lost. As Trump’s GOP tries to kill labor unions of all kinds, the Teamsters President is aiding him. Somewhere under the Meadowlands, Jimmy Hoffa is not smiling.
According to Politico, the Teamsters are handing out cash to the Republican Party:
For the second year in a row, the labor union’s political arm donated to the Republicans’ House campaign arm after nearly two decades of mostly backing Democrats. The labor union’s D.R.I.V.E political action committee — Democrat, Republican, Independent Voter Education — gave the National Republican Congressional Committee $5,000 in the second quarter.
First off, the Teamsters are broke. They gave the NRCC and DCCC $20,000 combined. They are probably hurting, which makes sense, given that professionals in other trades unions will tell you their leadership has no idea what they’re doing. That union is in trouble. This should be a political earthquake of a story on it’s own, but it’s just overshadowed in the bizarre world we live in.
Second off, the Teamsters love themselves PA Republicans. Check out their list:
In addition to giving to the NRCC, Teamsters doled out a combined $62,000 in contributions to nearly two-dozen GOP congressional candidates, including in significant battleground districts:
Rob Bresnahan, Mike Kelly and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania
Pete Stauber and Tom Emmer of Minnesota
Nicole Malliotakis, Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York
Jefferson Shreve of Indiana
Dave Taylor, Bob Latta, Michael Rulli and Dave Joyce of Ohio
Jeff Van Drew and Chris Smith of New Jersey
David Rouzer of North Carolina
Tom Barrett of Michigan
Blake Moore of Utah
Darin LaHood and Mike Bost of Illinois
Troy Nehls of Texas
Vern Buchanan of Florida
The group also gave this year to GOP Sens. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Jon Husted of Ohio, and Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania.
McCormick, Bresnahan, Fitzpatrick, and Kelly are Republicans who to varying degrees have to stay awake around elections. The two glaring omissions? Scotty “Insurrectionist” Perry and Ryan Mackenzie. It seems kind of obvious that even a poorly run labor union wouldn’t give to Perry. Mackenzie? Well let’s be honest, he’s just not moderate at all on labor issues. He not only opposes the right to organize and protections for labor, he opposes forward thinking solutions on automation and the rise of AI. The omission is glaring here.
Happy Monday! There’s about 45 MLB baseball games left. Time to bust out the old power rankings for the first time and give you my take on how MLB’s best stack up. Here’s this week’s #1-30 list.
The Milwaukee Brewers
The Houston Astros
The Philadelphia Phillies
The Los Angeles Dodgers
The Detroit Tigers
The San Diego Padres
The Toronto Blue Jays
The Chicago Cubs
The Seattle Mariners
The Boston Red Sox
The New York Mets
The Cincinnati Reds
The Cleveland Guardians
The Texas Rangers
The New York Yankees
The San Francisco Giants
The Miami Marlins
The St. Louis Cardinals
The Arizona Diamondbacks
The Tampa Bay Rays
The Kansas City Royals
The Atlanta Braves
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
The Oakland Athletics
The Baltimore Orioles
The Minnesota Twins
The Chicago White Sox
The Washington Nationals
The Pittsburgh Pirates
The Colorado Rockies
The Brewers are, and have been, the best team in the league for a few months, just now the record reflects that. The next five teams join them in having a chance to win this October. From #7 to #15 there is still a chance to displace some of those teams, but for varying reasons it seems less likely. From #16 to #24 there are some reasons to still be watching at this stage. From #25 to #27 there’s reasons to maybe watch a few nights a week. The next two don’t really even have any sort of direction or idea of what they want to do next. As for #30, God bless your soul, what have you done?
If you were hired to run a college sports team tomorrow, one of your most important jobs would be to recruit the players that are going to be on your team. You would identify the ideal players that you could realistically recruit to join you, try to get the best player on your list, and then you would put your resources into helping them win. Sure, you realistically don’t mind some competition for spots on your team, but the idea isn’t to have lots of intersquad battles for spots. The idea is to get the best players and put them in the best position to win.
In an ideal world, party politics is a team sport. Staff at the DSCC, DCCC, PA HDCC, PA SDCC, and any other campaign committee, should be trying to build the strongest slate of general election candidates that they can to win the next election. I have to give the DSCC fairly high marks on that front so far this cycle. It appears that they have found the targets that they wanted in North Carolina and Ohio, and may not be far off in Maine. Only Texas looks messy so far. They’re largely avoiding stupid primaries. That’s a good thing, because primaries cost money, and campaign money is precious.
Things don’t operate quite the same at the DCCC. In PA-10, the committee got their candidate in Janelle Stelson, a candidate who finally made the district as close as it should be based on the political dynamics there. Meanwhile in PA-8, there is no major candidate yet, and according to the streets, several candidates who have track records of winning elections passed on running. The candidate that is reportedly the preferred candidate in PA-8 just had to go through a primary battle to keep her job as Mayor, and now she faces a general election with both Republican and Independent Democratic challengers, making it likely she won’t be getting into the race very soon. Meanwhile across the river in NJ-7 there are three serious candidates that are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars per quarter right now, and reportedly a fourth is about to enter, meaning whoever gets to face Tom Kean Jr. will be starting from scratch after winning a brutal primary. That probably sounds familiar to folks here in PA-7, where we’re about to get our fifth candidate in the primary to face Ryan Mackenzie. All of this while there’s a candidate clearing the field and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in PA-1 (Bucks County), a district that Democrats have literally have no chance of winning unless Brian Fitzpatrick loses a primary (Fitzpatrick voted against Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and has been winning by double digits for several election cycles now). If this sounds bad, don’t take it as isolated to this region- these problems are persisting in other parts of the country too.
Here in PA-7 is a case study in chaotic recruitment. There are four candidates currently in the race. After a false start or cold feet, the fifth is going to enter on Friday, according to the street word. At least three of the existing candidates met with the DCCC before entering, and received help hiring staff and building their paid media consulting team. After getting them all into the same primary, the committee is shocked to see that two of them aren’t raising a half a million dollars every three months. The third candidate they recruited has become problematic to them, because nobody bothered to vet him ahead of time to figure out he had no ties to the district and was a lifelong Republican and union buster. So since they didn’t like the candidates they had, now they’re telling everyone they have the silver bullet candidate. He doesn’t poll well, even after his bio, he’s never run for office before or raised any money, and has no obvious path to the nomination, but reality be damned. They claim the Governor wants him, and will campaign for him and raise him his money. Of course, they claimed the Governor was going to call and ask everyone to drop out a few weeks ago, but now that the call never came, that isn’t important. They’re bad mouthing the existing candidates, claiming their teams are quitting on them and they won’t show any money raised this quarter. There was a supporter of the new guy in Lehigh County claiming the existing candidates lose a non-existent general election poll to Mackenzie, and badly at that. There’s even a public-sector union member that claims they need to get the existing candidates out of the way because I was mean to somebody on this blog. The list of excuses is almost as long as the list of candidates at this point. There’s no reason to believe we won’t be doing this same thing again with a new candidate come October or November either. This is silly and pointless, and really doesn’t produce winning nominees.
Say what you want about the Republican Party, but last cycle when they decided they wanted Ryan Mackenzie to be their candidate in PA-7, they didn’t put him through a ringer to be nominated. Their leadership bought him the primary over the preferred candidate of the conservative grassroots. The God’s honest truth in PA-7, PA-8, and NJ-7 is that the DCCC could (and probably should have from a pure path of least resistance) have simply went to the most recent Democratic Congresspeople in those districts and guaranteed them support if they had run again. If they had begged hard enough, they might have ran. If they said no, fine, then you go recruit the top prospective candidate in the districts, preferably someone with a strong pathway to winning. What we have here is a mess.
The model of just recruiting a bunch of candidates, teaming them up with all-star DC consultant teams, then making them compete for fundraising dollars with each other until they all fail and you have to go find a new candidate makes absolutely no sense. Pick a candidate, skip the competition. Or if you really think they need to compete with each other, maybe don’t make the field so crowded that no one can get any oxygen. There is no silver bullet, no savior coming to save us all from that.
People get caught up in “horserace coverage” during elections, but the reality is that nothing actually happens until money is being spent and votes are being cast. With that said, I told you about a poll a couple of days ago that was out in the field for the PA-7 Democratic Primary. I didn’t know who had actually done it then though. It turns out the poll was done by PPP (Public Policy Polling). For who? I don’t know. I managed to get the results though. McClure holds a 16% lead in the initial ballot, with Pinsley and Obando-Derstine tied for second. Brooks and Crosswell are within the margin of error of zero initially. After bios McClure and Obando-Derstine are the only serious candidates, with McClure’s lead only mildly changed. Crosswell gets out of being within the margin of error of zero, but only up to 7%. Even after bio, Brooks is only at 5%. The concept of a candidate like Brooks does better with the public than the actual candidate does. Pinsley actually goes down after people heard his bio. When informed that Crosswell is a lifelong Republican, with a union buster past, and no ties to the community, 88% of Democratic voters said they had very serious or somewhat serious concerns.
Only the Pinsley part of this shocks me. Lamont McClure has a base of support that he built up winning races over the past 15+ years, there’s probably no way to really drive him down in Northampton County. While Carol Obando-Derstine is a relative unknown, Democratic voters like voting for an educated woman who is an immigrant to this country. There’s a rationalization for these candidates running. I would think the same for Pinsley, as he’s occupying the political “left lane” in this race, but the polling didn’t bare that out. Crosswell is the creation of some Beltway consultants who want to just pour money into creating a fictional story that didn’t really happen. As for Brooks, while people say they want to vote for a blue-collar bio, fire fighter, and little league coach, that’s not what they end up selecting when push comes to shove.
Again, this isn’t votes being cast. Polling assumes everyone can get their message out at equal levels, which they can’t. On top of this, almost 40% are undecided at the end of the poll, which I’m sure some Carvillian Geniuses in DC and the Valley will say shows this race is going to change. This race is starting to shows shades of the 2018 primary though, in which Susan Wild won by 2.4% with 33.5%. There are five candidates this time instead of six, but were Roger Ruggles or David Clark running to actually win in that race? Carol, by way of bio, is probably going to grow into a candidate who gets close to 30% simply by staying viable. I don’t see how or why she would do better than Congresswoman Wild did in that race though, seeing as how the district is more conservative than it was then. McClure’s positives are very high, like Morganelli in that race, but he isn’t out of step with the party on Trump, immigration, or abortion, like Morganelli was. In this race it will be Crosswell answering for negatives. Brooks kind of looks like the Ruggles in this race. Pinsley wants to be the Edwards. At least right now, this race looks like maybe it’s a two dog hunt. Maybe.
Apocalypse Vibes 