While Democrats spent most of late 2024 and early 2025 wailing, gnashing teeth and (some of them) figuring out which of their vulnerable constituencies should go under the bus first, MAGA’s short period of mourning is over, and they’re doubling down:
Trump making this asshole the face of his administration is great, as far as I’m concerned. And now that he has a real job, he can be brought into endless Congressional hearings about ICE murders on the streets and where he deported all the children.
Lauren Boebert lost her seat, and after a little period of talking about how she’ll accept whatever happens, here we are:
Scott Gessler, an attorney representing Boebert's campaign, said Thursday night that the congresswoman is determined to ensure every legal vote is counted.
"A significant number of votes remain outstanding in the race," Gessler said in a statement obtained by Mediaite. "We are fighting for every vote and will continue to ensure every legal vote is counted. Since election night, ballot returns have been trending in Congresswoman Boebert's direction, consistently lowering the margin under one percentage point."
The campaign also announced it was examining voting patterns that have raised concerns, predicting the closely watched contest could require another count.
"We are investigating some very unusual voting patterns and expect this election to head to a recount, one way or another," Gessler said.
One voting pattern that 9News Kyle Clark reported from Weld County, a Republican stronghold that includes Greeley, reported an undervote in Boebert’s race. This means that Republicans voted in all the other races but left her race blank because they couldn’t stand to vote for either her or a Democrat. At the latest count, Boebert is behind by over 3,300 votes, which is 3X the automatic recount margin in Colorado. So, if there’s going to be a recount, she’ll pay for it. I hope she wastes her money on that before she becomes a third-rate MAGA celebrity.
Moving on to Cindy Hyde-Smith, she wants all the provisional or affadavit ballots separated out while the remaining votes are counted in Mississippi. Most of those were probably filed by the poor black folks she and her party have tried to disenfranchise since Reconstruction. Unlike Colorado, which has pretty reasonable recount rules, there’s no recount rule in Mississippi, so it will all be going to court.
When you have so much political capital invested in hating brown people and disputing any election result you don’t like, your party is going to double down on that stuff rather than giving up. Democrats can make a lot of noise about that if they don’t listen to some useless centrists, like Ezra Klein and David Shor.
Starting with Klein, he’s out with a column bemoaning that Democrats abandoned their “MVP” — Jared Golden. The proof of Golden’s political indispensability is that his seat was lost to Paul LePage even in this huge blue wave. In a whole world of really interesting races, this is the guy that Klein decides to glaze. Old habits die very, very hard. Nobody likes Jared Golden. Paul LePage is an asshole who nevertheless has better favorability numbers than Golden among independents in a pretty conservative district. We won a bunch of those districts with politicians who aren’t as odious as Jared Golden. He, along with Haley Stevens, should be consigned to the dung heap of history, not lauded in a NYT column.
Moving on to Shor, he’s got the same view of the election as JD Vance — it was all about the war. Shor’s take is that people had pretty much decided that Trump was OK and the attitude of his focus panel didn’t change significantly until the war. Below is Nate Silver’s Trump Approve/Disapprove average, and as can be plainly seen, it just kept getting worse. I argued that JD was wrong, and Shor is similarly wrong, plus you can’t trust any of his polls because he clearly cooks the numbers to support his centrist theses. (Josh Marshall has more on this [gift link])
Old habits are hard to break. We can ignore those on our side who refuse to change their habits in the face of new information, and we can make hay from MAGA’s inability to change.
