I went down a bit of a Count Binface rabbit hole yesterday. In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s a space alien running against Nigel Farage in the by-election for Farage’s seat in Clacton. Since it only takes 500 GBP and the signatures of 10 people to run for a seat in the House of Commons, joke candidates are apparently pretty common in England. Here’s the Count’s election video for his last by-election, which was in Makerfield, where Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer’s likely successor, was running:
The Count could possibly beat Farage in the Clacton by-election because Farage resigned his seat in an attempt to elide an investigation into a big donation from a crypto millionaire, so no major party is running a candidate opposing him. If you look at the last election results, the totals from the other candidates are a couple of thousand votes more than Farage’s total. So, a Binface surge could possibly push Farage out of his seat. Rose Judson covered this the other day at Balloon-Juice, if you’re interested in all the details. The Count’s platform includes renaming London Bridge to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and building one affordable house, which he points out will be one more than all the other politicians have managed to build.
The reason I’m bringing up Count Binface, other than him being pretty damn funny, is that his main pitch for voting for him is “I’m not Nigel Farage.” This is perilously close to the current strategy that Schumer and Jeffries are following. This is a recipe for winning one election, but it’s not a recipe for governing long enough to expel MAGA and all the shit that Trumpists have done in the past 18 months.
Let’s take as just one example the Democrats’ response to the death of Lindsey Graham, which Joe wrote about earlier this morning. There’s no reason for a politician to go out of their way to speak ill of the dead, but in addition to tots and pears, one could say something like “We believed in very different policies, but Lindsey would at least work with us once in a while. That’s something very rare in today’s Republican Party.”
The point, as always, is that Republicans are bad. Steve M had a good metaphor for that in his post yesterday:
When I think of the GOP, I think of the old Automat -- you take a piece of apple pie and it's replaced in the slot by a nearly identical piece of apple pie.
Occasionally it matters when one particular Republican is gone, but not very often. This is why I think it's important to attack the GOP as a party, in the hopes of winning over soft supporters who choose the party in elections primarily because it's the default choice where they live. They're the ones keeping the party going, ensuring that zealots replace zealots in perpetuity even though they're not zealots themselves. Only constant attacks on the GOP as a whole can possibly threaten its ongoing dominance of American politics.
Republicans are very capable of talking civilly to, and even working with, their Democratic colleagues, and then going out and shitting on them on Fox or Newsmax. Democrats, with a few exceptions (AOC is one, I’m sure there are others) don’t seem able to pull this off. I think it makes us look weak. Perhaps it’s because Democratic electeds have internalized polling where people say they don’t like political fights, but this doesn’t seem to make those people any less likely to vote for Republicans, who are constantly fighting and shit-talking. Peoples’ responses to generic poll questions should not be taken as seriously as the clear evidence of specific poll questions saying that respondents think that Democrats are weak.
As always, fight is better than not fighting. If Count Binface wins, he’ll probably only serve until the next election. We need better than that.
This is an Automat in case you’ve never heard of one.
