But awaiting that cherished event, there is this:
VOX:
Paul Ryan says Conor Lamb, who ran against the GOP tax plan, ran “as a conservative”
I asked Paul Ryan to explain a major contradiction in the GOP’s Pennsylvania spin. He cut me off.
By Tara Golshan Mar 14, 2018
The Pennsylvania special election should be a wakeup call for Republicans, but all House Speaker Paul Ryan has is some excuses.
On Tuesday night, Republican House candidate Rick Saccone failed to secure a win in a special election for a Pennsylvania district that went for Donald Trump by 20 points in 2016. The race stretched into Wednesday afternoon, when Democrat Conor Lamb, a 33-year-old former Marine, officially won the race in a stunning upset. Pennsylvania law does not mandate a recount in district-level elections.
Yet Ryan said he wasn’t surprised by the results. Lamb ran as a “conservative,” he said.
“The candidate who is going to win this race is the candidate who ran as a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-Nancy Pelosi, conservative,” Ryan said at his weekly press conference in the Capitol.
It’s one of a long list of justifications Republicans have rattled off to explain Saccone’s performance: from deriding Saccone’s electability to saying the Pennsylvania 18th was a Democratic district in the first place (it’s not), or that eventually voters would see the benefits of their economic policy.
Pennsylvania uncovered an uncomfortable reality for Republicans, who tried to push their tax cuts in this race, with outside groups spending more than $7 million largely on that message. Lamb, as moderate as he was, didn’t try to mirror Republicans on their agenda.
I tried to ask Ryan about this Wednesday morning: How can it be that tax cuts are a winning message and that Conor Lamb, who ran against the GOP tax law, is winning because he was a “conservative”?
Ryan, apparently growing tired at this line of questioning, cut me off and refused to answer.
[...] Republicans were ready to ward off any insinuation that the Pennsylvania special election was a bad omen for November.
GOP staffers said Saccone was a bad candidate, despite the 60-year-old state legislator and military veteran seemingly having a similar track record to that of many elected Republicans.
Strategists said he was an unorganized campaigner who failed to adequately fundraise.
[...] It’s true that Lamb’s campaign outspent Saccone’s and had a much more robust fundraising effort. But money wasn’t an issue for the Republican candidate, who saw more than $7 million spent in his name from a variety of outside groups.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy noted that the district had more registered Democrats than Republicans. The district has historically trended Republican for many years. Democrats didn’t even challenge the Republican seat in 2014 and 2016.
[Washington Rep. and House Republican conference chair Cathy] McMorris Rodgers made sure to say the country hadn’t yet experienced the “full momentum of tax reform.” Once the voters truly see what the corporate tax cuts could do for them, the tide would change, she said.
As for Lamb, Ryan made his point very clear: He could have been the Republican.
The great contradiction in Republicans’ message
Republicans have hitched their cart to tax cuts.
The GOP tax bill loomed large over Saccone’s campaign. Republican groups spent millions trying to sell the policy to the district’s Republican voters. Trump came to the district early to tout the policy’s successes.
It didn’t stick. In the final weeks, pro-Saccone advertising began focusing largely on immigration, crime, and tying Lamb to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — whom Republicans have long used as the Democratic boogeywoman.
Now, as the party watches Saccone fall behind, Republicans have changed their tune on one front. Lamb is no longer a Pelosi liberal. He might as well have been a “conservative” Republican, Ryan said.
Put together, these Republican messages raise a major contradiction.
There’s no question that Lamb ran on a more moderate Democratic platform. He has shied away from criticizing Trump and said he would not support Pelosi for speaker. He came out against an assault weapons ban but supports stronger background check laws.
He is personally pro-life but supports the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion. He does not support a ban on abortions at 20 weeks. In other words, on policy, Lamb is a pro-choice Democrat.
The clear divisions between Lamb and the Republicans land on the core pillars of the Republican agenda. Lamb is opposed to repealing Obamacare and called the GOP tax bill a “giveaway” to the wealthy.
“We didn’t need to add a penny to our debt to have the tax cut for our working- and middle-class people,” Lamb said at a debate, butting heads with Saccone.
Throwing table scraps off the elite table, to the dogs afoot, might please real dogs, but not working people who see themselves as several cuts above dogs to the rich while the national debt burden on their children and grandchildren will be the Republican tax cut legacy the workers of Pennsylvania, through all the smoke screen, saw all too well.
They saw it while Lamb gave assurances that Social Security was, in fact as sacrosanct as the Gipper gave lip service to it in the '80's with Sir Ryan of the fat table presently and steadily saying, "Not so, not so. Underfunded."
Spinning, no matter how fast and furious, is seen for what it is by those standing aside and watching, and not spinning along.
Ryan's fault is not insufficient trying. It is a clear insufficiency of sincerity when lying through his insipid, forced smile.
Vox, in a separate item, noted:
Along with Wisconsin and Michigan, the Keystone State carried Trump to victory on Election Day 2016. It’s a story he often recounts at rallies, including the one he held for Saccone in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
Voting for Saccone is exactly what the president wanted his supporters to do. Trump cared enough about Saccone winning that he joined him on the campaign trail multiple times and sent Vice President Mike Pence and members of his family, including son Donald Trump Jr. and daughter Ivanka Trump, to stump.
He even pushed a controversial announcement on steel and aluminum import tariffs so it would land a week before the special election.
None of it worked.
How vigorous the putsch was is unclear at a distance in Minnesota, but pulling out all the stops would perhaps have had Ivanka in a kissing booth to raise bucks for Saccone, and that level of dedication appears to have not prevailed. Resuming the report text coverage:
Lamb’s campaign was not against Trump. The former federal prosecutor rarely mentioned the president at his events, instead focusing on issues like protecting entitlements such as Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare and ending Pennsylvania’s opioid crisis, for which Gov. Tom Wolf recently declared a state of emergency — in other words, many of the same themes Trump echoed during his 2016 presidential campaign.
From the beginning of his campaign, Trump vowed not to cut entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. Then when he got into office, his 2019 budget proposed cutting Medicare by $236 billion over 10 years. (Those cuts have not been enacted.)
Trump promised many times to end the opioid crisis that’s ravaging Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and other Rust Belt states. In 2016, it claimed more American lives than the entire Vietnam War.
The president’s response has been to declare the opioid epidemic a public health emergency, but little else. The administration has largely ignored the recommendations of Trump’s opioids commission, Trump has twice tried to strip his Office of National Drug Control Policy of funding and proposed the death penalty for drug dealers. Congress recently appropriated $6 billion for treatment, which experts say falls dramatically short of what’s needed.
[...] Trump was never supposed to win Pennsylvania; the fact that he claimed the state in 2016 became an integral part of his narrative, one that he repeated at Saccone’s Saturday rally.
“On November 8, Pennsylvania is the state that gave us the 45th president of the United States,” Trump said, as the crowd cheered.
“You’re one of us!” one crowd member yelled.
“They said we couldn’t get elected,” Trump continued. “I say we ... because some of you had never voted before, but you love the country. Remember, they said, ‘You cannot win.’ Remember the famous 270? Remember, they said he cannot get to 270. And we didn’t; we got to 306.”
For Republicans, there was a mad dash to pour cash into the race so they didn’t embarrass themselves by losing a district that Democrats were never even supposed to be competitive in. But for Trump, the impetus was much more personal.
Trump’s push wasn’t about Saccone, it was about hanging on to “Trump country” in southwestern Pennsylvania — and with it, the very narrative that put him in the White House. For the president who prizes loyalty, this race was the ultimate test.
Hindsight suggests they should have used the Ivanka kissing booth, but Trump only with ceremony offered his ring.
WaPo offering its report of the spin without a win:
Many Republicans, including Ryan, have sought to isolate the president from the implications of that shift, insisting that his visit to the region Saturday helped turn a relatively easy Democratic win into a narrow one.
On CNN Tuesday night, former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller put it this way:
“Well, I think they’re going to be pointing to the fact of the big Trump bump that Saccone got on the home stretch,” Miller said. “The fact that they closed the five-point gap, and you talk about some of the other things the Trump folks did behind the scenes: There was a robo-call from the president yesterday.”
That argument was reiterated on Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning.
“Last week, it looked like Mr. Lamb was going to win by six points,” host Steve Doocy said. “So something drew it closer together, if you believe in polls. Maybe it was the president’s visit and the visit from the Trump family.”
Maybe! Or maybe these are generous misreads of the polling.
After a diversion on polling presumptions and caveats, the narrative continued, quoting a key pollster:
[..B]ased on the turnout, Monmouth’s poll would have shown a smaller-than-six-point advantage for Lamb. And on top of that, the poll had a margin of error of about five percentage points.
Murray explained that their surge model incorporated assumptions based on those past special elections. Had Monmouth’s model used only individual voter history and data from the survey itself, they would have given Lamb a two-point lead.
But Murray also noted evidence that Trump helped shift things slightly to Saccone. In the more Republican part of the district, the results were close to what Monmouth modeled in its poll’s Democratic-surge scenario. In the more Democratic parts, including in Allegheny County, Lamb underperformed, relative to that scenario.
“Trump’s visit may have countered the extra Dem surge we postulated was possible,” Murray wrote, “but the outcome was pretty close to what we showed using a standard turnout model.” Trump might have had some impact — but he didn’t shift the race by five points.
[...] So the best spin at hand? Saccone at least didn’t get walloped, and maybe Trump’s visit helped tug the final results slightly back to the middle.
But there’s a flip side to that. Democratic enthusiasm in 2018 — enthusiasm which is largely responsible for tugging a 20-point Republican district to the left — is primarily a function of Trump’s unpopularity with everyone besides fervent Republicans.
ABC Eyewitness News noting the spin effort, here. Similarly, CBS News. Additional coverage: The Atlantic. The Hill. Politico. Fence straddling, by DallasNews.
Having at least scanned the linked items, I nonetheless cannot clear my mind of the child's tale of the fox who could not have reached the grapes, diminishing them next, probably sour anyway.