Headline: Incoming GOP Rep Cops to Major Campaign Lies.
So what?
Apparently candidate George Santos made up a bunch of stuff. His education. His work history. His source of income. His religion. Whether he made major contributions to a nonprofit or whether he pocketed the money other people gave to that nonprofit. Maybe his sexual orientation.
It doesn't matter. He will be seated in the House of Representatives on January 3. He doesn't owe his colleagues an apology or even an explanation. He won, and that makes him a U.S. Representative. Enough voters in New York were tired of the Democrats and they wanted a Republican so they got one. That's it. Candidate quality didn't matter that much in the campaign, and it likely won't matter in a future re-election. If he is a good Republican vote, and people in that New York district want a Republican, they will vote for him again. Maybe in 2024 there will be a few Republican voters who will think him a weak general election candidate and they will replace him in the primary. They would likely vote for him in the general election. He is a Republican. Possibly his scamming the nonprofit will cost him a few votes in a general election. Who really cares if he graduated from college or if he got promotions at Citibank and Goldman Sachs or whether he is Jewish, or as he explains, Jew-ish, because maybe he has a Jewish relative. He isn't sure.
People voted for the party, not the candidate's resume.
I recognize that this assertion contains an insult to candidates all across the country who won their elections because they did a good job It is also an insult to campaign managers, to campaign volunteers, and to campaign donors. It insults voters who take time to read campaign material. It even disparages political observers like myself who write with know-it-all self confidence about the importance of message and branding. What matters is party. Everything else is irrelevant.
Or almost irrelevant. In close races--and there are some states and districts that are closely balanced--candidate quality matters on the margin. Herschel Walker lost. Kari Lake lost. Blake Masters lost. Dr. Oz lost. Those races were winnable. A better candidate or smarter campaign moves the needle a couple of points, and that is the margin of victory or loss. College classmate Jeff Golden won re-election to the Oregon state senate as a Democrat. He takes pride in his job in office. He ran an energetic campaign of door-to-door meetings with voters. He won. I have written here that the real dynamic in the campaign was that his Republican opponent lost. Randy Sparacino threw away the two or three percentage points with a million-dollar campaign message was that he was a loyal Republican and Trump-compliant caboose on the Republican train. A potentially strong candidate ran a stupid campaign. That message would have won in a Republican district, or even a 50-50 district in this red-wave election for downstate Oregon voters. But Golden's district is the portion of my county with a small Democratic voting edge. Having flooded the media to prove he represented the wrong party, Sparacino lost 48-52.
In 2022 people voted their party. In a U.S. Senate race, centrist Democrat Ron Wyden, the very powerful chair of the Senate Finance Committee, lost Jackson County to Republican Jo Rey Perkins 51-46%. Perkins ran no campaign at all, so voters had no idea that she was a Q-Anon supporting kook. Widen campaigned hard and spent millions on ads showing him fighting inflation and working on pocketbook issues. Meanwhile a newcomer Democrat, Joe Yetter, ran for Congress against the incumbent Republican Congressman, Cliff Bentz. I know Joe Yetter and held a fundraiser for him, but realistically, in a campaign with no real money, he was essentially unknown District-wide. Yetter got the baseline Democratic vote. He lost in Jackson county 43-57%. Wyden, unquestionably Oregon's most popular and generally acceptable officeholder, running against the weakest imaginable candidate, ran exactly three percent better than Yetter.
That's it-- the margin of candidate and campaign influence: three percent.
New York's new U.S. Representative will likely be an unusually weak candidate in 2024. In a partisan oscillation that brings that district back to partisan parity, his weakness may be dispositive. I think candidate quality matters a great deal. I think the future of our country depends on it. Apparently, though, it matters little toward electability. What matters a lot is political party.
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2022/10/republican-mike-erickson-oregon-candidate-for-congress-files-lawsuit-over-democratic-opponent-andrea-salinas-negative-campaign-ad.html?outputType=amp
It sadly happens with both parties :( But I totally agree with you. It should be about the candidate, not the party. I just became “unaffiliated” after being a lifelong Democrat. I planned on leaving the Democrats after the DNC 2016 Clinton/Wasserman Schultz scandal, but It’s hard not voting in the primaries.