These Democrats Are Good, Actually

–JVL

These Democrats Are Good, ActuallyThe candidate gap is real. And it’s spectacular.
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These Democrats Are Good, ActuallyThe candidate gap is real. And it’s spectacular.
Jonathan V. Last • FREE PREVIEW
READ TO ME 
Hey fam:
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Today, I’m going to talk about why good candidates matter. Some of you might be uncomfortable with glass-half-full JVL. Don’t worry, tomorrow’s Triad Mailbag won’t bring the sunshine.
–JVL
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1. Angie
If you haven’t listened to Tim’s conversation with Angie Nixon on yesterday’s Bulwark Daily, you should. Nixon probably won’t win, and she isn’t a generational political talent. But she’s got a chance to flip a Senate seat in Florida. And that’s because she’s a good candidate. She’s smart and passionate. She talks like a normal human being. On paper, she might not blow you away, but in person? She’s darn good.
And that’s a theme uniting Democratic candidates pretty much everywhere this cycle: They’re good candidates.
Nixon and David Jolly in Florida are both good horses. Jon Ossoff is a stud. Sherrod Brown is a workhorse and Amy Acton has a unique value proposition. Josh Shapiro might win re-election by 25 points in a state Trump carried. James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa are extremely different, but are both running energetic, smart campaigns. Maybe Abdul El-Sayed will turn out to be too progressive for Michigan, but that’s an ideological fit question—as a political athlete, he’s A-tier. Roy Cooper is built for North Carolina. Annie Andrews is a longshot in South Carolina, but she’s running a great race. Adam Hamilton has opened a can of whoopass in Kansas. Mary Peltola was engineered in a lab for Alaska voters.
Strip out your personal preferences and tell me, just as a matter of political talent, who are the good Republican candidates this cycle?
Seriously. I’ll wait.
You have any answers? Because from where I sit, the top two are probably Susan Collins and Vivek Ramaswamy. One of them is a 73-year-old who can’t keep her voice from quavering¹ and the other is a guy who got rich scamming Alzheimer’s patients and swings a bat like this:
But at least Collins has a connection with Maine voters and a theory of the case. And at least Vivek is efforting his race. The rest of the Republican field is a mix of weirdos, layabouts, and dilettantes. Darline Graham? Ken Paxton? AYFKM? Are Roger Marshall and Dan Sullivan even trying to win?
All of which brings me to a lesson the Democratic party needs to learn, ASAP:...
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