So last night we got to see what happens when Donald Trump and Joe Biden face off in support of a candidate in a deep red Trumpian District. Admittedly, Biden brought his Pennsylvania roots and the prestige of the Vice Presidency to the table. But was that really enough to walk into a District Trump won by twenty points and generate support for the candidate, as the only high profile Democrat the Party sent in?
I guess it was.
They didn’t send Bernie.
They didn’t send Elizabeth.
They didn’t send Kamala.
They didn’t even send President Barack Obama.
Just sayin. :)
But the other side did send Donald Trump, who gave a ranting and rambling speech mostly about himself, and by the end of the weekend every Russian bot and troll on the Internet was squawking about “Lamb the Sham.”
Didn’t matter.
Trump told them to vote for Saccone. Didn’t matter either.
10 million dollars. Didn't matter.
What happened was people who previously voted for Trump chose not to listen to him.
Instead they listened to Lamb and they listened to Biden.
Nor did the Republicans biggest talking point, their tax giveaway to corporate America and the uberrich, matter in the slightest. Biden neutralized that one right away:
At the events Tuesday, Biden said congressional Republicans want to prevent Lamb from taking office to make it easier to cut funds for Social Security and Medicare to offset tax cuts he called "obscene."
"If we do nothing in terms of cutting programs, if we just keep things as they are, America's gonna go flat bankrupt over the next 10 years. Not a joke," Biden said. "It's because this tax cut is not paid for. But they have a way to pay for it. And he's gonna get in their way, they're afraid."
Biden drew on Lamb's Marine experience to argue that the candidate would not let his district get "left behind."
Biden said: "This district has been left behind — not just labor, it's been left behind ... This guy gets it. This guy gets it."
Of course we had a great candidate and this victory is certainly Conor Lamb’s. And they had a pretty uninspiring, shitty candidate. But that's the thing: all of the Repubs are pretty shitty candidates. By and large they're all smoldering piles of dog vomit who've done nothing to earn their supporters votes. Most have nothing good to say about themselves. Their whole shtick has been reduced to demonizing the Democrat.
So the whole purpose of bringing in outside support like Biden is to align him with the candidate to boost his or her favorables. It takes a quality person to do that, and it takes an exceptional person to do that in a District that voted the other way just seventeen months ago.
In the 18th, their voters were treated to proxies on both sides. But they didn't listen to Saccone and they didn't listen to Trump.
Like it or not, one of the big drivers of the 2016 election results was not pro-Trump but a rabid anti-Hillary sentiment. Now every district is not the 18th, but if former Trump voters in these numbers are willing to cast their lot with a candidate who gets the full-throated support of Joe Biden, what does that suggest about 2020?