Pointing and Laughing at Crazy QOP Candidates Isn’t a Winning Strategy for Dems

If laughing and/or ignoring crazy Republicans worked, why did Trump win?

A panel discussion Thursday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe raised the prospect that far-right candidates winning Republican primaries could guarantee Democratic victories in the midterm elections. The problem with such an assurance is that there really is no such guarantee, because of the mainstream media track record of normalizing those candidates in the general election.

After all, media outlets held Donald Trump to a lower standard than Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then spent the next four years downplaying his outrageous behavior and publishing sympathetic profiles of his voters. There is no reason to think far-right candidates will be treated any differently in 2022.

Much of the MSNBC discussion centered on next week’s primary elections in Pennsylvania, where state Sen. Doug Mastriano — a QAnon conspiracy theorist who participated in the January 6 insurrection and has close ties to antisemites — now appears to be the front-runner in the race for governor. Also in the discussion was Senate candidate Kathy Barnette, who has also built her campaign on 2020 election denial and now has Republican insiders worried about her surge in the polls. (Barnette has also claimed that her 19-point loss in 2020 for a safely Democratic U.S. House seat was really the result of fraud.)

“You look at who the Republicans may be electing in Pennsylvania,” host Joe Scarborough said, “Democrats, they may just go to France for the next six months and win.”