After losing the House special election in Georgia on Tuesday, frustrated Democrats have responded in one of two divergent ways – insisting the party lean further left and bash President Trump more, or acknowledging that the Dems’ leading liberal, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, has become a liability.
The left-wingers argue that the Democratic nominee in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, Jon Ossoff, ran a milquetoast campaign in the runoff, rather than promoting progressive issues and belittling Trump.
At the same time, the Republicans, especially the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, went on the attack, linking Ossoff to Pelosi in a $5 million effort. Beginning with the initial April 18 primary vote, numerous pieces of campaign literature, bolstered by TV ads, attached Ossoff – the “California liberals Golden Boy” — to the House Democratic leader, sometimes in crude ways.
The argument can certainly be made that Pelosi, as a convenient target in a Southern state, along with the backlash to the millions of California dollars she raised for the Dem nominee, cost Ossoff the election.
After all, the super PAC campaign never made the case for the GOP nominee, Karen Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state. She hadn’t won an election in 11 years and she went into the House race on a high-profile losing streak after failing in primary election bids for U.S. Senate and governor.
Some congressional Democrats have concluded it’s time – maybe not now, but in the next several months – to replace Pelosi as leader with a fresh face. Republican operatives, with a smirk, have urged Democrats not to dump Pelosi. They know how valuable she is to the GOP as a punching bag on the campaign trail.
Republican consultant Dennis Lennox, in an Op-Ed column for The Detroit News, points out that the 77-year-old Pelosi, has presided over a numerical and geographic shrinking of the Democratic Party during her 14 years in leadership.
Consider this: A third of Democrats in Congress come from just three states — California, Massachusetts and New York. Meanwhile, Lennox notes that the party’s diminishing support among the white working class in Blue States like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin became apparent in the 2016 elections.
Here’s Lennox’s view on the emerging path taken by the Dems:
The far-left isn’t just ascendant, as it was when 2000 vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman lost the party’s re-nomination for U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 2006. Today, it controls the party.
Worse yet, many of these voices are so militantly left-wing that they exhibit utter contempt for God-fearing, hard-working, patriotic Americans in flyover country. You know, the voters Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables.”
The loss by Ossoff, who tried portraying himself as a Diet Liberal, despite raising millions from Pelosi’s patrons in San Francisco and Hollywood, will only embolden the acolytes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to become more unabashed in pushing Democrats further to the far-left.
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, a former Obama cabinet secretary, confirmed as much when he said there’s no place for pro-life voters, many of whom are Catholics, a traditional Democratic voting bloc, in the party’s tent.
