“There was a time when suggesting that your opponents should watch their children die would have automatically cost you an election,” recalls Slate’s Molly Olmstead.
From the left: Now Violence-Wishing Pols Win
“There was a time when suggesting that your opponents should watch their children die would have automatically cost you an election,” recalls Slate’s Molly Olmstead. “That era appears to be over, after Democrat Jay Jones was elected to be Virginia’s next attorney general.” Text messages Jones sent a colleague three years earlier called for Republican Todd Gilbert to get “two bullets to the head”; he also wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so he might reconsider his gun-control views. His words “showed distasteful sides of Jones’ private personality,” but his victory “is a snapshot of a hyperpolarized nation, where voters are willing to look past their own candidates’ failures because they see the alternative as an existential threat.”Iconoclast: It’s Still ‘the Economy, Stupid’
Voters on Tuesday “spoke with one voice: they don’t feel like they can afford the good life,” observes The American Saga’s Zaid Jilani. “Democrats were able to capitalize on that message because they ran campaigns about it” while Republicans “were stuck with the unenviable task of defending the Trump administration” amid a “mediocre economy.” Virginia Republican Winsome Earle-Sears “blanketed the airwaves with ads about transgender sports issues” and suffered a “double digits” defeat.
