Week in Review: Nancy Pelosi Killed Ossoff’s Chances
Week in Review is a SubOptimal look at the past week’s political and cultural news that comes out every week between Friday and Sunday.
How Did Ossoff Lose????
Jon Ossoff exited the first round of special election voting on April 18 with a clear advantage over his runoff opponent Karen Handel. Ossoff had just missed winning the election without a runoff gathering 48.1% of the vote 1.9% short of the 50% needed to seal a first round victory. Ossoff had a massive fundraising advantage over Handel. Ossoff raised almost $10 million before the first round of voting. He then went on to raise $15 million more before the runoff election swamp the $5 million Handel brought in. He had a clear advantage in volunteers with thousands of excited Democrats going door to door to spread the word about their candidate. His influx of cash afforded Ossoff first rate television ads and social media exposure. So how did Ossoff manage to squander this advantage and lose by almost 4% of the vote? How did his $30 million in spending pull in fewer votes than Tom Price’s 2016 challenger who officially spent $0?
Most of the reasons were not completely on Ossoff’s shoulders. The first and most important reason is that turn out decides who wins elections much more than the voters switching to vote for the other party. This is why the party that is in power almost always wins seats in the midterm elections because their voters are motivated to turnout to vote to put them in power. But once the party is in power those voters are traditionally less motivated and turn out rates drop significantly. Republicans were able to take control of the House in the 2010 midterms and then the Senate in the 2014 midterms because the Democratic base had just come off the high of electing Obama in 2008 and 2012 and were not motivated to turn out to vote. This happened to Reagan, Clinton, and Bush as well, low turnout in non-presidential election years is the main struggle for majority parties.
That is why I think that the national media attention and millions of dollars of television ads actually worked against Jon Ossoff and turned out the Republican base. Ossoff maxed out the Democrat vote in the Georgia 6th district but the key is that he needed a lot of the Republican base not to show up to win. Ossoff turned out almost the same amount of Democrat voters that showed up to vote in the Presidential election in November which is really impressive for a special election. The problem is the method by which Ossoff maximized the Democrat party turnout subsequently turned out Republican party. Ossoff’s campaign was driven by massive amounts of money that were invested in television ads and social media advertisements. This type of campaigning drew national media attention to the race, over-hyped the election, and subsequently motivated enough of the Republican base to turn out for a victory. I think there is a strong possibility that if Ossoff stuck to grassroots campaigning and kept the election under the radar he would’ve won the election. Take the special election in South Carolina to replace Mick Mulvaney for example. The Democrats turned a district that Mulvaney won by a larger margin than Price won the 6th in 2016, into a nail-biting election that was within 2,000 votes of going the other way by keeping it under the radar. Keeping the election under the radar forced caused ultra-low turnouts in the South Carolina special election. In November, almost 162,000 people showed up to vote for Mick Mulvaney carrying him to 60,000 vote victory. The special election on Tuesday saw just 44,889 people turn out to vote for Republican nominee Ralph Norman, 3/4 of the Republican base did not show up. In comparison to the election in Georgia’s 6th, just over 200,000 people voted for Tom Price in November and close to 135,000 voted for Karen Handel, a much higher turnout rate caused by the hype around the election.
Ossoff’s fundraising was almost entirely funded by donors outside of Georgia. This fact enabled to Republicans to easily connect Ossoff to the least popular figure in national politics, Nancy Pelosi. Ossoff thought he had the advantage of being able to run against Trump, who is strongly disliked in the district. But Handel was able to run against Nancy Pelosi who is disliked even more than Donald Trump in the district and among Republicans in general. Almost every television ad that was attacking Ossoff attempted to make the connection between Ossoff and Pelosi. An easy connection to make as Pelosi’s district donated millions to Ossoff’s campaign. Making the connection between Handel and Trump was much harder because Handel attempted to distance herself from Trump where she could. This is a big deal because Trump is unpopular but Pelosi is uniquely unpopular, she sits at 28% favorability according to Huffington Post. Democrats need to ask themselves what congressional leader in modern politics has ever been nationally disliked enough to be the primary attack on their party’s candidates nationwide?
Democrats would be wise to finally give Nancy Pelosi the boot, not only from the helm of House leadership but from the party altogether. Republicans are stuck with Trump whether they like him or not, Democrats ,on the other hand, could easily boot their deadweight leader who drags down potential candidates.
The Senate Healthcare Bill Sucks
The Senate finally released its version of healthcare reform this week. The bill is called the Better Care Reconciliation Act(BCRA) and it is every conservative or libertarian’s worst nightmare of what “Repeal and Replace” would look like.
The politics of this bill are crystal clear when you understand that Republicans only have two goals with this healthcare legislation. The first is to pass a healthcare bill that rolls back enough of Obamacare for Senate Republicans to claim they kept their promise repealing the law. The second being to cut enough spending in the healthcare bill that Republicans can pass tax reform in the fall while not blowing out the budget. The Better Care Reconciliation Act accomplishes both of those goals.
To put the bill in simplified terms: it primarily reforms three parts of Obamacare. First, it repeals the individual mandate that forces individuals to buy health insurance or pay an extra tax. Second, it repeals most of Obamacare’s taxes. Third, it reforms Medicaid to save over $800 billion in spending. The core of Obamacare, the regulations that crash the healthcare market, are left almost completely untouched. The bill also expands Obamacare in certain areas, paying subsidies to insurance companies and expanding premium-assistance tax credits to 2.6 million people. The Medicaid reforms do not begin until 2025, leaving Democrats four chances to take Congress and two chances to take the Presidency before a single penny is cut from Medicaid.
But none of the flaws of the bill matter to Senate Republicans because the BCRA accomplishes their goals. The repeal of the individual mandate and taxes is enough to sell the idea that they kept their “Repeal and Replace” promise and the Medicaid reforms cut enough spending to tee up the passage of tax reform in the fall.
Where does the bill go from here?
Well, currently five senators have said publicly they oppose the current form of the bill. The five that oppose the bill currently are Dean Heller, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Ron Johnson. The makeup of the opposition reveals Mitch McConnell’s strategy for passing the bill as Cruz, Lee, Paul, and Johnson makes up the conservative wing of the Republicans in the Senate. McConnell’s plan is obviously to write the bill to appease the moderate wing and then ram it down the throats of the conservative wing. This is much more politically safe than the approach Nancy Pelosi took when passing Obamacare. Pelosi wrote the ACA to appease the hard leftists in her caucus and then rammed it down the throat of moderates.
Dean Heller faces the toughest reelection bid in 2018 coming from Nevada and will not be voting for any version of this legislation. I cannot see any version of this bill that is conservative enough for Rand Paul to vote for and not lose the support of the entire moderate wing. So McConnell will spend the next week negotiating amendments to the bill with Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Ron Johnson in order to get to 50 votes.
I think they will get to 50 votes and the bill will be better. BUT the bill will still be trash and a complete mockery of the promise that Republicans campaigned on for 7 years. O happy day!
**Those of you who are interested in the wonky details of the policy should check out the explanations from Micheal Cannon of the Cato Institute and Peter Suderman of Reason.**
Major Victory for Free Speech
On Monday, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in the case of Matal vs. Tam. Simon Hao Tam is the lead singer in the rock band called “The Slants” and applied to trademark the name. The US Patent and Trademark Office denied the trademark application claiming it violated a provision of federal law prohibiting registration of trademarks that “disparage or bring into contempt any persons living or dead.” Thus the case held major free speech implications on whether the government could censor speech that it deemed to be disparaging or hateful.
The court’s decision was a beautiful affirmation of the first amendment’s original intent and a major victory for free speech. The court ruled 8–0 to strike down the PTO’s provision. Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion in which he pulled no punches against the idea that the government could censor “hateful speech” or that “hate speech” is not protected by the first amendment.
In the first portion of the majority opinion, Justice Alito addressed the PTO’s defense of the statue. The PTO’s defense of the statue claimed that a government trademark made the private speech into government speech which could be subject to the censorship. The majority opinion rejected this idea wholesale stating, “If private speech could be passed off as government speech by simply affixing a government seal of approval, government could silence or muffle the expression of disfavored viewpoints. For this reason, we must exercise great caution before extending our government-speech precedents.” In an era where government is growing rapidly, it is a very dangerous idea that anything the government touches could be subject to censorship of anything deemed to be hate speech. It is the highlight of my week to know that we have a Supreme Court that unanimously rejects the idea that government related speech can be censored because it is deemed to be hateful.
The best portion of the majority opinion was the portion in which Justice Alito spoke about the hate speech in the First Amendment more broadly. He writes, “The Government has an interest in preventing speech expressing ideas that offend. And, as we have explained, that idea strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.” Alito correctly asserts in this opinion that not only is hate speech protected by the first amendment but it is “the proudest boast of our free speech.” The core of our freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment is the idea that we can expresses ideas that others may find disagreeable or even offensive. If that protection is revoked, we no longer have free speech just speech that is arbitrarily found to be socially acceptable by the government.
The ruling on Matal vs. Tam is important for two reasons. The first is that the ruling was unanimous, which was extremely relieving after some opinions written by certain judges led me to believe there would be some dissenting opinion in this case. One opinion by Justice Breyer in 2014 had me concerned he would favor the idea of an exception in First Amendment for hate speech. Justice Breyer wrote in 2014, “…the First Amendment not only advances the individual’s right to engage in political speech, but also the public’s interest in preserving democratic order in which collective speech matters.” This is a dangerous interpretation of the first amendment that values the collective’s interest in order equally as the individual’s right to free speech. But despite holding this opinion, Breyer joined the majority opinion to agree completely with Justice Alito’s statements about hate speech and the first amendment, it is a puzzling but important victory nonetheless.
The second reason is that it sets a beautiful precedent for hate speech cases in the future involving political speech on college campuses. If you pay attention to the news or follow Ben Shapiro, Milo Yianopolis, or Ann Coulter, you know that leftists on college campuses have begun to shut down conservative speakers at a rapid rate. These young left-wing snowflakes shut down the conservatives attempting to speak on college campuses in the name of stopping the spread of hate speech on their campus. The speech being brought by speakers such a Shapiro and Coulter is not even close to hate speech it is simply normal conservative ideas that melt these snowflakes brains. The protests do not just come out for speakers that can be intentionally provocative such Milo and Gavin Mcinnes. Protesters have shut down quiet, intellectuals such as Charles Murray and Christina Hoff Summers who were invited to campus to discuss issues such as feminism and IQ tests. One can easily see how colleges shutting down free speech from conservatives on campus could become a legal issue in the future and that makes this decision a vitally important precedent.
