(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Democrats campaign on 'rights and freedoms' while Republicans look for more to take away [1]

['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-08-24  

Republicans didn’t just celebrate the Dobbs decision, they talked about doubling down with a federal abortion ban. Candidates like Molinaro might claim they wouldn’t support that, but if their party controls the House, it would likely come up for a vote, and they’d be under pressure to support it.

And candidates like Molinaro—people who are by no means centrist but have spent decades as part of the institutional Republican Party in a swing area—would definitely not be setting the agenda. The same night he lost his special election, Republicans narrowly avoided nominating two of the worst of the worst of their party. In Buffalo, Carl Paladino came close to winning the Republican nomination for the House despite positive comments about Hitler and claiming that Democrats are holding Black people “hungry and dumb so as to provide a base for the Democratic Party.”

In Florida, vile alt-right activist Laura Loomer came close to defeating incumbent Rep. Daniel Webster in a deep red district. With a few more points for Loomer in the primary, someone so extreme she has been banned from CPAC would have been headed to Congress. Loomer has also been banned from Twitter, which she hilariously protested by chaining herself to a door at Twitter headquarters. She even got banned from Uber Eats. But around 44% of Republican primary voters in her district looked at that and said, “I want to send her to Congress.”

It’s true, Republicans dodged the Loomer and Paladino bullets. But in a party that hadn’t spent recent years moving from dog whistle racism to regular whistle racism and trying to overturn elections, those would not have been bullets that needed dodging because Loomer and Paladino would have been seen as the fringe of the fringe. Now they are really close to being mainstream Republicans in the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.

That fact gives added resonance when Democrats like Pat Ryan, who defeated Molinaro, talk about defending our freedoms, including the freedom to choose abortion. After years of pundits dismissing Democratic warnings about the Republican threat to abortion rights, voters watched abortion bans slam into place thanks to Republicans.

“When rights and freedoms are being taken away from people,” Ryan told Greg Sargent, they “stand up and fight.” And beyond that, they might start to believe that Republicans aren’t going to stop at taking away the rights and freedoms they’ve already taken, that extremism on one thing might translate to extremism on other things.

So yeah, Republicans should look at Tuesday’s special election—following on other special elections in which Democrats have outperformed expectations, following on the Kansas abortion vote—and they should be worried. But this November, they’ll be heading to Election Day with a lot of extremist candidates who are giving voters very good reasons to view them with alarm.

RELATED STORIES:

Democrats are hammering Republicans as 'too extreme' on abortion in state after state

NY Republican says Hitler is ‘the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational’

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/24/2118472/-Democrats-campaign-on-rights-and-freedoms-while-Republicans-look-for-more-to-take-away

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/