There is no doubt that Herschel Walker is absolutely the worst candidate for state and national office that I can think of, at least in my lifetime, someone who is utterly unsuited for any responsible position. And that is against stiff competition from Sarah Palin, Doug Mastriano, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mark Finchem, Lauren Boebert, Louis Gohmert, Paul Gosar, and the list goes on. In an earlier post, I expressed my amazement that he had got over 1.7 million votes and came within 100,000 votes of defeating Raphael Warnock, and wondered how so many people could for for such a cartoon candidate. Is it just that they were going to vote for the party however bad the candidate was? Was there no bottom to what they were willing to ignore as long as the candidate had an R after their name?
In response, commenter billseymour made a good point that I would like to explore further. The comment was:
I, too, am mystified by almost half of the folks who showed up at the polls voting for a stupid celebrity who has exhibited some rather awful behavior. My current guess is that they weren’t voting for the candidate, but for a reliable Republican vote in the Senate.
But I must confess that I see my own image on the other side of that coin: I’ve voted a straight Democratic ticket in all general elections for a decade or more, even when the Democratic candidates didn’t appeal to me much. Am I just projecting? Or is it that the current state of electoral politics in the US has all of us trapped in some zero-sum game?
I too cannot recall ever voting for a Republican, though I have voted third party. Is it because I too am ideologically rigid, like the Walker voters? In my defense, I have always lived in areas where the Democrats were reasonable candidates, even if they were not as left wing as I would have liked. I was never personally confronted with the choice between a nutso Democrat versus a reasonable Republican. But then I started wondering if I could think of any Democratic candidate for a major office anywhere in the country who was anywhere close to being as awful as the set of Republicans I named above.
I do not mean people that I disagree with ideologically. I deeply disliked both Clintons for their politics but they were not ignorant or stupid or crazy conspiracists. There have been Democrats who had skeletons that were exposed (like Gary Hart and John Edwards) but those were about extra-marital affairs (transgressions that seem quaint in these days of Trump and Walker whose personal histories were far more scandalous) and they were both eliminated from the race for higher office once the scandals were revealed.
Can any readers think of any Democratic candidate who was truly appalling and yet reached the stage of being the party’s candidate for high office and continued to be backed by the party establishment? Offhand, I cannot. But, like billseymour, I wonder if that is because I am too blinkered to notice the flaws of Democrats.
About 20 years ago, there was a Congressional race east of San Diego, in a Republican district, where no serious Democrat thought they could win, so none entered the race. With no known names running, the Dem primary was won (if I’m recalling this correctly) by a sort of fringe neo-Nazi guy who ran as a Dem. But the local Democratic Party immediately disavowed him and told everyone NOT to vote for him.
Sorry I forgot the name and year,
And so this is NOT one of the cases that you were asking for, as no party leaders ever supported him.
The only other adjacent cases I can vaguely recall were all from racist Southerners who had not yet switched over to running as Republicans.
So overall, no relevant cases come to my mind.
Marianne Williamson -- not elected to any office, but enough support to be included in debates.
Tulsi “Russian Asset” Gabbard.
Mano,
Like you, I can’t think of any truly wackaloon Democratic candidates, at least not ones who got nominated for anything. There are some goofballs who regularly run in Democratic primaries and get 0% of the vote (to two significant digits).
I can think of weak candidates, most recently a wealthy heiress, Trudy Busch Valentine (that’s Busch as in Anheuser-Busch), who was the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Roy Blunt (R-obviously). She didn’t strike me as the brightest light in the harbor, but she had a real job (nurse) so she wasn’t only a rentier, and her website checked off all the “social justice” issues that progressives and (relative to the current position of the Overton window) “moderates” have in common (pro choice, pro LGBTQ+, etc.). She probably would have been a reliable Democratic neo-lib vote had she won, but the chances of that were slim to none.
But I can’t say that I’ve never voted for a Republican. We have open primaries in Missouri, I live in Missouri’s Second Congressional District which is gerrymandered Republican, and there’s an argument that primaries in gerrymandered districts are the only elections that actually matter for down-ballot races. I must confess that I’m partly responsible, in my one-vote way, for our disgraced former Governor, Eric Greitens. (I most definitely did not vote for him in the general election.)
President Woodrow Wilson was a racist and creationist who betrayed his own 14 peace proposals at the Conference of Versailles.
In the Washington DC mayoral race of 1994, I wasn’t able to bring myself to vote for Marion Barry. He’d been elected mayor before, but the administration was rife with scandal and his term was cut short in 1990 when arrested for crack possession, quoted as saying “B**** set me up”. He was convicted, albeit on charges that didn’t prevent him from subsequent runs for the city council and mayor. The Republican opponent (Swartz?) was a woman that seemed reasonable. But she stood no chance.
One more race comes to mind as well. I’m glad I wasn’t a resident of Massachusetts yet for the 1990 gubernatorial race, which pitted notorious homophobe John Silber (D) against William Weld (R). I won’t knowingly vote for a homophobe, and while Massachusetts is a deep blue state, we have a penchant for electing Republican governors. Weld won, and seemed reasonable (AFAIK, I wasn’t a resident, so didn’t follow the state politics closely).
Whether or not a candidate is a “wackaloon” depends in part on where you are standing relative to them. Having said that, the US Democratic Party is a centrist party based on comparisons with our peer nations. Thus, it would be difficult for someone who is left of center (myself certainly included) to find almost any Dem to be a wackaloon. If anything, it is easier for us to find Dems who we are deem are not left enough or are self-seeking (Manchin, Sinema). I can certainly point to a number of local politicians who are registered Dems but who are reliably conservative (so much so that they receive the endorsement of the local Conservative Party). I cannot bring myself to vote for them but I wouldn’t call them wackaloons. I prefer to think of them of them as being dishonest- essentially finding a way of using the local (and weak) Dem party to get elected. In contrast, there are some local Repubs that I would be willing to vote for if I was in their district, or if they came back from the dead (former Congressman Boehlert comes to mind, as he was a strong enivronmentalist).
But in general, I have a hard time coming up with Dems who are truly on the fringe of reality (conspiracies, dogmatic devotion to outmoded economic or social principles, Christian nationalism, etc,) No, many Dems are just reliable servants in the military-industrial-congressional complex.
And finally, let’s flip the logic. Are there any Repubs who are equivalent to a Katie Porter or a Sheldon Whitehouse (I am purposely skipping over the more famous names)?
I don’t see somebody as a “wackaloon” just because I disagree with them about something and certainly not because we use some words in different ways. For example, I often get a bit of a jolt what an FtBlogger talks about the horrors of “capitalism”, but I quickly realize that, by “capitalism”, they mean what I see as the zero-sum game played by oligarchs—pretty much exactly what Adam Smith was railing against in The Wealth of Nations. I most definitely do not consider them wackaloons, and indeed I agree about the awfulness perpetrated by all those feudal lord wannabees.
Probably the sole consideration many of his voters had was: when there is legislation to be voted on, will he reliably vote the Republican way? If the answer is yes (and I believe it is), then he is the ideal candidate. The right tends to ignore all other considerations.
And it is a highly effective voting strategy, key to the continued success of the right despite it not having the majority on most issues. If the left would only hold its nose and vote for legislative success rather than purity, it may actually gets its way more often.
Lyndon Larouche a far left, then far right conspiracy nut, always running for president.
In the 1980s, there were a few neo-nazis and LaRouchies running in Democratic primaries for various House and Senate seats, and sometimes getting nominated, mostly because the Party establishment didn’t do enough due diligence in advance. There was a nazi named Covington in Illinois, who won the primary because the voters had heard there was a nazi running, and assumed it was the other guy with the German-sounding name of Snyder. There was also LaRouchie Nancy Spannaus running in the 10th House district of Northern Virginia in (IIRC) 1990. (The LaRouchies seem to have faded away since then, or maybe just got out-crazied by Republicans. I recently saw a LaRouche bumper sticker that said “right then, right now.” So maybe they’re coming back as the relatively sane techno-fascists?)
Now, another angle on that question is “given the size of the populations involved, is the particular slate of candidates even close to the best we could find?”
The republicans, from that perspective, are not merely scraping the bottom of the barrel, they are actively searching for the very worst outliers. The democrats are not necessarily searching for good people either. Slightly less corrupt and sociopathic than republicans seems to be the order of the day. But anti-intellectualism remains a trend even there. Americans have never seemed to confront the issue that pugnacious chads (Theodore Roosevelt) are perhaps inspirational leaders to the violent thug sector of the population, but someone with a doctorate in foreign relations and economics, with minors in history and philosophy and some experience with nonviolent leadership might be better. Given the size of our population I’m going to guess there are at least 100,000 people like that, studiously avoiding politics.
As Isaac Asimov once suggested -- find the best people who don’t want to be politicians, elect them, and tell them that if they do a good job they’ll get time off their sentence.
Make a note in your calendar, what follows doesn’t happen very often:
Holms @9 is absolutely right.
Including and especially the masterpiece final sentence, which I shall Quote For Truth:
Also, jimf @7 makes a good point:
If you’re in the USA, you could look at a candidate and regard them something like acceptably left of centre, when to anyone from a civilised country they’d be practically a far-right pariah who even that countries conservatives would regard as dangerously fringe and too rich/violent/stupid even compared to the other conservatives in that country to put on a polling card. US attitudes on things like healthcare funding, gun control and capital punishment are Overton-windowed out of sight of most non-shitholes.
@ 13 sonofrojblake
So do what’s expedient rather than what’s right. Yes. When has that ever gone wrong?
X-D
Or, do what actually works over feeling pure.
@14 sonofrojblake
Overdramatic much? How about you refrain from offering your hateful opinions on what constitutes civilized countries? Your government is equally filled with greedy corporate schills and Brexit fools.
The USA has elected quite a few progressive lefty members in the last six years. Remember the ‘Blue Wave’ and the enormous amount of sexist backlash to the women that in fact WON their election that cycle? AOC, Katie Porter, Ilyan Omar? You just don’t hear about them because unlike the putrid blonde from Georgia, they are not spending their energy trying to be media celebrities, just quietly doing congressional lefty things like student loan relief and passing bills investing in new infrastructure and green energy.
The US Constitution only includes the second amendment allowing guns because of some damn English king being a right arsehole in the first place.
Pots -- kettles, both are black.