Posts Tagged → US senate
Pitfalls and pratfalls of primary elections for candidates and volunteers alike
While digging through old stuff in my office recently, I encountered a bag in a corner with a bunch of campaign tee shirts made for volunteers who had helped me run in the 2010 primary race for congress here in central PA. Seeing the pinned-on names on each shirt, I felt embarrassed that somehow I had neglected to get these tokens of appreciation into the hands of those dedicated volunteers. They had donated their time to me, to a campaign they believed in, and it is absolutely incumbent upon all candidates to express appreciation, and show it if they can, to their volunteers, win or lose. Here was evidence that I had failed to do that fully with these several people whose names appeared on the tee shirts, and it made me feel badly.
Fast forward fourteen years, and I have just learned by doing an internet search that a political candidate I had contributed real time and effort to had dropped out of the race last Thursday. This person and I had exchanged many emails and texts for the past month, I had drafted a press release for her, and gotten her about forty ballot petition signatures to help get her on the April 23 ballot. Despite all my time and effort on her behalf, I did not qualify for the email the media says she sent to her supporters, announcing her bowing out of the race. I felt like all my time and effort dedicated to this person was not appreciated or valued, which makes one feel badly.
Dear political candidates, you have to express your appreciation to your volunteers! Volunteers are how every campaign runs, whether it succeeds or fails, and showing your appreciation to the people who make up the campaign is your duty to those people who take time away from their families, their businesses, jobs, etc to help you get ahead. Failing to express appreciation hurts not just your own reputation, but it also leaves your volunteers wondering if they should ever volunteer on a campaign again for anyone else.
I have seen other candidates cold-drop their volunteers when the campaign ends, and even drop their campaign staff. This is usually due to the exhaustion a candidate feels at the end of the race. Campaigns are all brutal exercises, all-out sprints over a relatively short amount of time, and at their end usually everyone involved is feeling tapped out and emotionally drained. It is tough to sustain that high energy after the race ends, but again, dear candidates, you absolutely owe it to your volunteers to say Thank You. An email, some text messages, some cards to the people who put in the most work and hours. Tee shirts if you made them.
What took out this latest candidate I was helping was Pennsylvania’s archaic ballot petition process. Depending upon the office sought (state house, dog catcher, US senate, congress etc) candidates for office in Pennsylvania are required to collect hundreds or even thousands of registered voter signatures on complicated forms where the slightest mistake, mis-spelling, or poorly written word can result in a disqualification. There is an entire arcane process surrounding the screening, challenging, and defending of the ballot petition signatures. The only people who benefit from this are the attorneys who specialize in this arcana, and the two main political parties.
If enough of the candidate’s ballot signatures get disqualified, then the candidate does not achieve the minimal threshold of signatures, and does not qualify to be on the ballot. A lot of hard work and volunteer hours can get flushed down the drain if insufficient signatures are obtained to keep the candidate on the ballot.
PA’s complicated ballot petition process is designed by and for the political parties, which have the experienced volunteers, lawyers, and updated voter lists necessary to get far more signatures than are needed. It is designed to keep political outsiders out of office, and political insiders in.
According to this now un-candidate’s statement in the news article, the attorney who challenged her ballot petition signatures had also threatened to bury her campaign in a pile of legal costs if she tried to fight her way through all the nit-picky challenges. All indications are that US Senate candidate David McCormick is behind this challenge and threat. This is really about a billionaire bully booting pesky candidates out of his way on his path to self-serving elected office.
Yuck.
Pennsylvania voters want choice, and we do not benefit from the current ballot petition process, which was once described to me by a Dauphin County Republican Committee Woman as a necessary precaution to prevent “unqualified people” from running for office.
Said I, “Why don’t we just let anyone run who wants to run? Shouldn’t all citizens have a right to run, aren’t we all qualified? Isn’t that the heart and soul of the democratic process, to keep it as open and accessible to The People as possible?”
Said she, “That sounds like too much democracy to me.”
And so we see yet another victim of this ridiculous gatekeeper process, which both political parties can agree must be kept intact so they can retain maximum control of who gets to run, and who does not. It is really about control, not democracy.
Yuck.
These are some of the pitfalls of running for political office here in Pennsylvania, and while some are unavoidable, it is best to work hard to avoid the pratfalls: Campaign volunteers and supporters will always appreciate and fondly remember a kind word, a nice email or text message saying thanks. And also will they remember that their hard work went unnoticed and unremarked in the end, and so they will feel used.
Double yuck.
Kathy Barnette in tie for #1 in US Senate race
As it is said, even a blind pig can find an acorn, and while I am not one to brag a whole lot, I did predict from the beginning of this primary race for US Senate that candidate Kathy Barnette stood a very high likelihood of finishing at the very top. Whether I am a lucky blind pig, or just an old political hand who was due for a decent crystal ball moment of his own, it is a fact that Kathy Barnette is presently in a statistical dead heat for number one with the two predicted winners, Dave McCormick and Dr. Mehmet Oz.
As more accurate information has gotten out about Dave McCormick, his status has fallen and his supporters have been dwindling. McCormick is nothing like what he claims to be. He is a poser, a fraud even, because as much as he sells himself as some sort of down-home country boy from rural PA, the fact is he made his hundreds of millions of dollars in partnership with China. At your expense, at my expense, at America’s expense. And his policy positions over the years have been pretty liberal. Why would anyone be surprised that a rich high society guy like Dave McCormick, who is FROM CONNECTICUT and not Pennsylvania, is liberal?
The same goes for Oz, too. He is a rich Hollywood personality, whose positions on the Second Amendment have ranged from F- Minus to C-Minus, but who now suddenly disavows everything anti-gun he has said over the years. Nope, we ain’t buyin’ it, Oz. You, too, will just say anything to fool Pennsylvanians into voting for you.
So is it any surprise that Kathy Barnette’s own standing among Pennsylvania voters has been rising? I mean, where else would a smart voter put their one vote? Barnette is honest, earnest, truthful, and representative of working people and putting America First. As of last week, Barnette was in a statistical tie with Oz and McCormick for first place. See the poll results below.
Vote for and support America First candidate Kathy Barnette!
Kathy Barnette campaign files over 10,000* signatures!
The campaign for Kathy Barnette for US Senate has filed over 10,000* ballot petition signatures from registered Republican voters in Pennsylvania, well beyond any other candidate.
*UPDATE March 21st, 2022: Final ballot petition signature count for Kathy Barnette’s campaign is over 12,000! HOLY COW! This is serious grass roots support!
Pennsylvania requires 2,000 ballot petition signatures to qualify for a place on the ballot as an official candidate for US Senate. Although a candidate’s campaign may file the requisite number of signatures, there is a small but serious cottage industry in disqualifying both voter signatures off of ballot petitions, and in DQing entire ballot petitions altogether. So, having a large (in Barnette’s case it’s huge) buffer of extra signatures and petitions means that opponent candidates will have a much harder job knocking a candidate off the ballot altogether. In this case I believe it is impossible for Barnette to be knocked off the ballot, because her signature margin is so large.
What an enormous indication this is of Barnette’s grass roots popularity. While her campaign may not yet have the zillionaire funding of Bartos or McCormick, Barnette does have the support of the voters. And if there is a lesson that establishment candidates have been taught more and more since 2008, it is that the voters don’t care about fancy campaigns or flashy candidates with impossible promises. What the voters want more than anything is a real candidate, an authentic American, which Kathy Barnette is.
Candidates Dave McCormick, Carla Sands, and Dr. Oz all recently “moved” to Pennsylvania to run for this senate seat. Only Kathy Barnette and Jeff Bartos are actually from Pennsylvania, and of these two only Barnette is a conservative working person. Bartos is a flashy RINO…yuck.
It is quite clear that Barnette is the voter favorite. Her polling is already ahead of Bartos and Sands, even though Barnette is starting fresh with no name recognition. Barnette’s public support is only going to grow.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing for the other candidates to set aside their egos and their big financial dreams, drop out of this race, and start supporting Kathy Barnette now, so that she is in her best possible position to win when the November election arrives? Why are they putting us all through this charade? Kathy Barnette already has this primary race won!
Kathy Barnette, honest to goodness all-American candidate for US Senate
Why Kathy Barnette has my support for US Senate
Kathy Barnette is an all-American lady, with personal roots all working people can relate to. Unlike her opponents (Dr. Oz, Dave McCormick, Carla Sands, Jeff Bartos), she is not false, or misleading. Her candor and earnestness are refreshing, because most politics today is a sea of garbage through which voters must carefully pick and swim.
Three of the four candidates opposing Kathy Barnette are from out of state (Carla Sands, Dave McCormick, and Dr. Oz), and they only recently discovered/ manufactured their Pennsylvania connection when they had an opportunity to run for senate. Each has a history of promoting far-Left policies (e.g. red flag laws that place law-abiding gun owners at risk of politically motivated SWAT teams kicking in their doors) that are exactly what America is dying from right now, so their sudden embracing of conservative policies that Republican Party primary voters want is waaaaayyyyy suspect.
Jeff Bartos is a proud, unabashed RINO (Republican In Name Only liberal) who changes his positions with the wind. He says he was pro-Trump when he was not pro-Trump. He says little about the blatantly stolen election of November 2020. Bartos only appeals to GOPe insiders who have zero contact with the Republican/America-First voting base.
Bartos would be a disaster as a US senator, probably following exactly in the footsteps of outgoing RINO Senator Patricia Toomey, whose 55% conservative/ 45% leftist voting record hardly represents what Americans want and need. Guys like Bartos and Toomey are overly sensitive to the Democrat Party’s Media-Big Tech industrial complex, whose anti-America partisanship knows no limits. And so Bartos would vote like former senator Arlen Specter used to vote and how Toomey has voted. I am positive Bartos will be no friend or ally to law abiding gun owners.
So away from the swampy quagmire of Bartos/McCormick/ Sands/Oz stands Kathy Barnette, a US Army veteran, working mom and wife. She is also black, which means she knows first-hand how destructive the liberal policies are that her opponents promote. And her policy positions reflect her down-to-earth life experiences.
I am proud to circulate ballot petitions for Kathy Barnette, to help her get onto the primary election ballot coming up for your vote in May.
I hope my fellow America-First voters will support Kathy Barnette for the US Senate.
PA’s ballot petitions are a Jurassic-era holdover from the days of political party collusion for control of the voters. Anyone should be able to run for office with minimal hurdles. But until we reach that pro-democracy point, I am proud to circulate petitions for outstanding candidates like Kathy Barnette
Kathy Barnette for US Senate. A pro-gun, pro-freedom candidate with beauty and brains
A culture of protest, a culture of animosity
If you desire to see the raw underbelly of an overly tolerant democracy, then watch or listen to today’s US Senate hearings on Judge Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh is a smart, friendly, humble, kind of nerdy, bookish federal judge who had the audacity to be nominated to the US Supreme Court.
Why audacity? Because he is not super liberal. Because he does not walk in lock-step with the media arm of the Democrat Party. Because he has a judicial philosophy that is directly connected to how America was founded. He does not run around making legal judgments that are contrary to the US Constitution.
All this makes him audacious in the eyes of people who would use the US Supreme Court to achieve de facto legislative results they cannot get in the US Congress. Kavanaugh is audacious in some people’s eyes because he dares to fill a vacant seat on the Court, and play a constructive role in administering US law and jurisprudence.
To me, it looks like the most boring job in the world. Though at one time, in the heat of my youth, I aspired to be a constitutional scholar and actually studied a lot of constitutional law at Penn State and in graduate school (Vanderbilt) in preparation for it. My uncle has argued twice in front of the US Supreme Court, and on his second trip I was honored to help draft an Amicus brief and sit in the audience while the justices grilled both sides.
But now, look at how even Kavanaugh, The Most Boring Man In The World, is attacked and dragged through the mud by opponents of a lawful society. A shameless howling mob greeted him and the entire world today in one of the world’s most hallowed democratic chambers, the US Senate. To watch and listen to Kavanaugh’s opponents today in The People’s chamber, you would not know that we live in the most civilized nation.
From the 1960s to present, a culture of protest has developed to the point where the ends justify the means. That is, if someone opposes a political issue or a political person, they can go batshit crazy in front of everyone and put on the most foolish antics, with the craziest accusations, and the most violent and destructive behavior, because they are simply protesting.
And because they are protesting, they must be correct, is how they think. And if people oppose them, or have a majority in a legislative chamber or on a court, then every possible brick must be thrown in order to stop them…is how they think.
Where protest has its healthy roots in the First Amendment’s guarantee of peaceable assembly and petitioning the government, today’s protests are anything but constitutional. They are violent and hate filled, lawless and vile, cruel and destructive of people and property.
A very real culture of animosity has resulted out of the 1960s, and it is a bad thing, a toxic thing, corrosive and uncivilized. Its practitioners do not wish to live and let live; they desire control above all, and the use of angry mobs and threats to intimidate their opponents into acquiescence.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hungary fell the same way. Slowly but surely the Communists there used a combination of violent mobs and corrupted police and courts to eliminate their political opponents. The Hungarian Communists used democratic processes and institutions to achieve non-democratic, tyrannical ends. Hungary went from one of Europe’s great nations to completely oppressed under the Communist boot. Only through uprising and great sacrifice were the Hungarian people freed once again, long after many horrible repressive crimes had been committed.
That same thing is now happening today with the national Democrat Party, whose hatred for the common person, the working person, the taxpayer and citizen, America’s “normal” and boring people, like Judge Kavanaugh, is so overwhelming that it can no longer be controlled.
If you love America, if you enjoy your simple pleasures and the basic freedoms we have here, then tell your US senators you support Kavanaugh, and do not vote for Democrats. The national Democrats do not have your interests at heart. Democrats care much more for illegal aliens (purported “victims”) who murder and rape our children than they care for you or me, taxpaying citizens who have worked hard to build this nation.
A good, decent man, a Justice Kavanaugh will restore some semblance of lawful and constitutional behavior to America, and the howling mob opposes that. Don’t let them win. They are not “protestors,” they are angry, lawless destroyers who pretend they are under the protection of the First Amendment.
Thor & Moore: Media-Entertainment Complex On Defense
What does the new Hollywood “Thor: Ragnarok” movie have to do with the NFL and Judge Roy Moore’s US Senate campaign?
A lot.
Besides both being part of the Media-Academia-Entertainment Industry complex, both Hollywood movies and the NFL have been on the decline. A freefall might better capture these downward slopes.
Hollywood managed to combine insipid and pedantic movies appealing to very few people for a long time, and watched its profits end by simple market forces of supply and demand.
But Hollywood also has a preponderance of sanctimonious fools, professional actors and producers living life so far removed from the great deplorable unwashed that they openly mock the very people who spend their money on Hollywood products, and then wonder why their “art” goes unappreciated. And unprofitable.
Ditto for the NFL, where guys who get paid millions of dollars for simply running up and down a field decided they knew better than their fans what their fans wanted. And so they, too, became sanctimonious fools, hectoring people in the bleachers about phony political issues. Only to wonder why the stands are now so empty.
Enter politics! Whoda thunkit, but yes, politics is now heavily laced throughout everything in America, whether you want it, or not.
The same newspaper that endorsed a far-left candidate in Alabama for the US Senate three weeks ago suddenly publishes fake sex accusations against that candidate’s opponent. The accusations are so wild and out of character that voters would just have to believe them. I mean, that bad, that crazy, they gotta be true, right?
And that is how the Washington Post tries to shoehorn in a blue candidate into a red state. Just make stuff up. Like they did with our current president, when they couldn’t defeat him with facts, too. Lots of fake news. Fake news defines the Washington Post, and for good reason.
The Washington Post is simply one communication arm of one political party. It is not a news organization in the sense that it reports actual, factual news. Rather, the Washington Post creates news, suppresses news, edits news, and interprets news to support a political narrative conducive to its political favorites winning and its political opponents losing.
So it should come as no surprise that this same newspaper is trying to discredit destroy Judge Roy Moore, the conservative candidate in Alabama who sure looks like he is going to win that US Senate race. A charismatic, principled guy like Judge Roy Moore in the US Senate is a huge threat to the two-party career political hack dominance of the DC swamp, of which the Washington Post is the written record of record.
And in the same Washington Post this week there are scads of sugary sweet write-ups and promotional “reviews” of the new “Thor: Ragnarok” movie.
This is a movie carefully designed to have enough violence, unvarnished manliness, and traditional iconic weapons that red-blooded Americans just might be enticed back into an evening with Hollywood, even if just for a couple hours. In a way this movie is a last gasp from an industry that is fast taking on water and looking like it is about to go under from the one-two punch of having bad products and bad people.
The Media-Academia-Entertainment Industry complex that has for so long softly, gently held America by its throat is now struggling to maintain its grip. America has slowly awakened, sat up, and recognized what has been done to her while she slept. NFL players slapping Americans across the face, Hollywood actors spitting in America’s face, newspapers and media personalities laughing in America’s face…at some point America was going to wake up from it all.
If “Thor: Ragnarok” is as much of a financial disaster as it deserves to be, and if Judge Roy Moore wins his special election the way he deserves to, the evil Media-Academia-Entertainment Industry empire will have taken two hard blows. Not fatal, but enough to stagger an opponent backwards.
So this weekend I WILL be mailing a donation to Judge Roy Moore’s campaign, and I will NOT be watching the silly Thor movie.
Take that, swamp critters.