AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
As control of Congress hangs in the balance with just over two weeks to go until Election Day, candidates are preparing to make their final pitches to the American people before they head to the ballot box. Of course, two weeks is both no time at all and an eternity in American politics. As GOP candidates enter into the home stretch of the campaign, here are four closing arguments they should use to win back the majority.
Voters Must Understand Why Their Congressperson Went Crazy: Fear of a Primary Challenge from the Progressive Left
D.C. consultants who work for Republican candidates seldom understand that ordinary people and regular voters find it hard to believe their senator or congressional representative—who they may like personally—has voted like a left-wing extremist.
But imagine if voters hear GOP House and Senate candidates putting this phenomenon in simple terms in the closing weeks of the campaign: “My opponent was terrified of a primary from the left,” a candidate might say, “and so he or she voted the way the Democrat Party extremists demanded and put the interests of their constituents second.”
This is precisely the tact that has been taken in one TV spot that has appeared in New York, Arizona, and New Hampshire, which charges that endangered Senators Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH), as well as other Democrat incumbents, toed the liberal extremist line because of the primary threat made by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her billionaire allies. The TV spot features the headline “CORRUPT BARGAIN WITH EXTREMISTS” over an image of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other members of the group of far-left representatives dubbed “The Squad.”
This race to the left is true not only of Kelly and Hassan, but also of other Senate Democrats like Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV). Even Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has his own fears of primary challenges—in fact, Schumer was so frightened of a primary challenge from Ocasio-Cortez that his legislative agenda took a stark turn to the left.
The outsized influence of figures such as Ocasio-Cortez has also extended to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who—despite initial hesitancy—ultimately caved to the most extreme voices in her party and went through with filing articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Schumer’s and Pelosi’s capitulation to the progressive left opened the floodgates to widespread radicalism and endangered most Senate Democrats currently seeking reelection, as noted in a previous column. The series of ads also asks members of the local press to defy the “corrupt national media” and hold candidates who have never been asked to disavow their extremism accountable.
“Every single Senate Democrat is imperiled by their Biden identification, and especially by their corrupt bargain with the leftists that have taken over their party,” said George Landrith, president Frontiers of Freedom Action, in a press release coinciding with the release of a series of swing state advertisements. “It’s very important to control the word ‘extremist.’”
If candidates themselves adopt these charges on the campaign trail (as Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters has already begun to do), the “extremist” accusation can help average voters understand the truth that their own congressional representatives elevated the wishes of the far left above those of their own constituents. Although most Washington political consultants don’t yet understand this, there could be perhaps no more politically potent accusation.
After all, when voters do receive an explanation about the threat of a well-financed primary challenge, they find it far easier to understand why their local member of Congress could be intimidated into voting for the far-left policies of Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden.
History Shows a GOP Congress Would Stave Off Recession
Based on almost every available historical indication, electing a Republican majority to Congress will help to stave off recession and ease inflationary concerns. The most notable instance of this pattern in recent American politics can be traced to the 1990s: after Bill Clinton passed the largest tax hike in United States history and aggressively pushed a federal takeover of healthcare—both of which threw the economy into a tailspin—the GOP’s 1994 midterm victory allowed the nation to reverse course. “Once Newt Gingrich and Congressional Republicans won in 1994,” as Andrew Abbott noted last May, “all of that began to change—and quickly. First, Gingrich’s Republican Revolution transformed the morale and the culture of the country. Businesses and consumers relaxed because they recognized there would be no more taxes and little new regulation—and as a result, they were willing to invest and spend once again. That was the first big step in rebuilding the economy Clinton had destroyed.” Republican candidates today, Abbott continued, “should explicitly remind Americans of this history, and point out to voters that they have a similar opportunity before them.” With Election Day near on the horizon, the GOP must not waver in reminding the American voter of this crucial point.
Crime, Border Crisis, Inflation, and Energy Shortage Were Intentional: Part of the Left-Wing Agenda, Not Bugs In It
Although most Republicans have appropriately made issues like the crime wave, the border crisis, inflation, and the energy shortage centerpieces of their campaigns, nearly every GOP candidate is leaving out one crucial element: each of these catastrophes is deliberate on the part of Democrats. As easy as it may be to ascribe this series of national afflictions to left-wing political incompetence, in reality, they are each a direct result of Democrats’ far-left ideology.
Throughout the summer 2020 riots, the left notably called for defunding police departments across the country—and to this day, continues to call for abolishing cash bail and other soft-on-crime policies. Furthermore, as many on the political right have been eager to note, Democrats’ refusal to secure the border is part and parcel of their longstanding effort to maximize illegal immigration and delegitimize the very concept of national borders. America’s 40-year-high inflation is also far from an accident: inflation has been supercharged by Democrats’ gargantuan multi-trillion-dollar spending bills, which have largely gone towards far-left social and economic policies that are of no benefit to ordinary Americans. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) essentially admitted this in an interview on MSNBC, in which he made the astounding claim that “all of us knew this would be the case”—referring specifically to rising costs as a result of Democrats’ spending bills.
Finally, as we have previously observed, the growing number of policies aimed at phasing out the use of gas-powered automobiles and wiping out America’s suburbs should prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the nation’s skyrocketing gas prices are a feature—not a bug—of the left’s broader progressive platform (something many Democrats, including Joe Biden, have tacitly admitted in their talk of an energy “transition”). Despite the fact that owning a car and raising one’s family in the suburbs have long been recognized as essential parts of the American Dream, the left’s worldview requires higher priced energy to shift people from suburbs to cities and from cars to incredibly costly ideas like high-speed rail systems.
For Hispanic Voters, Left-Wing Gender Lunacy and Anti-Catholicism Could Be the Last Straw
Though Hispanic voters are of course troubled by the faltering state of the American economy, there are signs that the left’s radical social and cultural attitudes could shift them towards the GOP in unprecedented numbers this November. According to a recent AMAC/Trafalgar poll, a staggering 93.2 percent of Hispanic voters reject new Biden administration guidelines to force schoolchildren to attend mandatory “counseling” sessions without parental consent if they refuse to use the “preferred pronouns” of classmates identifying as “transgender.” And for Democrat consultants who have raised red flags about Hispanic voters flocking toward the GOP, these numbers should emphasize just how toxic the Biden administration’s hard-left approach is among the party’s traditional voting base.
Additionally, in recent months and years, Democrats have adopted an attitude of incredible hostility toward the Catholic faith, which could mobilize voters of faith—particularly Hispanic Catholics, many of whom have recollections of anti-Catholic persecutions in Latin American countries—and solidify the party’s prospects for a red wave in November.
Most Catholic voters would, in all likelihood, be astonished to learn of Democrats’ militant anti-Catholicism, which in recent years has become increasingly blatant. One Catholic group has already spelled this out in a powerful advertisement pressing then-Georgia senatorial candidate Jon Ossoff to condemn the left’s anti-Catholic political and rhetorical streaks. Democrat Senators Schumer (D-NY), Feinstein (D-CA), and Durbin (D-IL), as well as other high-profile Democrats, engaged in hostile questioning pertaining to the rights of Catholics to hold federal office, which prompted objections from the presidents of the University of Notre Dame and Princeton University, as well as the Anti-Defamation League.
For whatever reason, D.C. consultants have been reluctant to acknowledge that Catholics would respond to hearing that Democrats are actively seeking to exclude Catholics from public service.
The ad was reportedly offered to a Karl Rove-led advertisement campaign in the weeks leading up to the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs as part of an effort to mobilize the state’s 1.2 million Catholics, yet was turned down by Rove. Following Ossoff’s victory, Rove and other establishment Republicans predictably resorted to blaming Trump for the lost seat rather than acknowledging the missed opportunity of campaigning against the Democrats’ anti-Catholicism.
Whether or not GOP candidates choose to embrace these arguments in the final stretch of the campaign ultimately remains to be seen—but if they do, they may soon find that the American people will reward them at the ballot box.