Until last month’s news about the legal difficulties of onetime Delaware GOP nuisance Mike Protack, I had no idea he had decamped to San Diego, which got me to wondering — whatever happened to some of the deluded fools who did so much to make the Delaware GOP a laughingstock throughout this century?
A few are right where we left them. David Anderson, for example, still serves on Dover City Council. But his partner in the rightwing blogosphere, Don Ayotte, has kept a low public profile since their Midlantic Dispatch, itself devolved from the defunct Delaware Politics blog, withered into a Facebook page. Ayotte and Wolfgang von Baumgart are still listed among the officers of the irrelevant Independent Party of Delaware.
Others apparently have moved on. Dave Burris, who founded Delaware Politics, wasn’t actually a wingnut — he fought a losing battle to keep the Republican Party relevant as it succumbed to Christine O’Donnell — but he apparently saw no future in Republican politics. As the Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported, he’s now making and selling sea salt at the Delaware beaches. Evan Queitsch, who fancied himself O’Donnell’s bodyguard and then ran for office unsuccessfully as a Tea Party conservative in 2012, seems to have become an apostate to the wingnut cause, judging by his authorship of this anti-racism essay posted to LinkedIn.
There’s an interesting commonality to all these once worrisome Republicans who rose up with the Tea Party — they disappeared with the arrival of Donald Trump. O’Donnell actually spoke out against Trump as he was rising to the top of the Republican nomination cesspool. She hasn’t been heard from since.
One other noticeable trend: Ever since William Swain Lee retired to the sidelines, the GOP has struggled to find statewide candidates with staying power. Formerly coveted positions on the statewide ticket started going to self-funding newbies, and post-Trump to anyone who’ll step forward. That means we should expect more grifters like Lauren Witzke. A high-profile performance artist can bring in more national wingnut bux than any local can raise from the state’s business community, which wants nothing to do with the off-putting behavior of such buffoons.
The party’s lack of success in even lower statewide offices, combined with the inability of extremism downstate pols to appeal even to swing voters, pretty much guarantees that this trend will continue, regardless of slight gains in downstate representation as the population shifts. The inability to elect
Here’s the ask: I’m sure I’m forgetting a few of the goobers, and I couldn’t any information on O’Donnell’s whereabouts, though she’s rumored to be living in New Jersey. Help me fill in the blanks — who am I forgetting, and where have these people gone? Leave anything you’ve got in the comments, or if you prefer, in the tip file.