Last night, the Republican Party avoided a massive potential embarrassment thanks to Don Blankenship’s resounding defeat in the West Virginia Senate primary. Despite Blankenship’s claims that he was “Trumpier than Trump,” he finished a distant third in the Republican primary in the country’s Trumpiest state. And that’s great news for Republicans who are eyeing the Senate as a potential bright spot in the 2018 midterm elections.
There have been many pretenders to the Trumpist throne in the last eighteen months. Roy Moore received the blessing of Steve Bannon and attempted to overcome credible allegations of sexual activity with minors by turning up the Trump-style anti-establishment rage machine to maximum power. He failed. In Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, Rick Saccone’s claim that he was “Trump before Trump was Trump” did not yield Trump-like results in his Pittsburgh-area district.
And now, Don Blankenship is yet another example of the non-transferability of Trump’s appeal, and the futility of trying to out-Trump Trump.
West Virginia is one of the ten states where a Democratic Senate seat is up for grabs on Trump turf. Though incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has tried to cozy up to the President, it remains a ripe target for Republicans eager to hang onto or expand their Senate majority. And with questionable races emerging for GOP-held seats in Arizona and Tennessee, it is places like West Virginia where Trump may be more a benefit than a detriment to Republicans on the ballot. Nonetheless, a candidate like Don Blankenship could have effectively given Manchin safe passage to re-election and set Republicans up for yet another protracted round of Roy Moore-esque embarrassments.
But if West Virginia is Trump Country, how could a candidate who claims to be “Trumpier than Trump” fail in a Republican primary? Put simply, Republicans voters may like Trump, but a deeply flawed knock-off won’t cut it.
One of the things that mystified political consultants about Trump’s rise and victory in 2016 was the ways in which troubling attributes that would have disqualified anyone else simply didn’t hurt him. Negatives weren’t just neutralized or dismissed, the way a normal campaign would try to manage them. They became the very backbone of his appeal. His business record could be scrutinized, but bankruptcies and debt were instead held up by supporters as proof of his business acumen.
He kicked off his campaign insulting captured POWs and nonetheless became branded as the candidate who cared most about the vets. He was the candidate whose name-brand ties were literally made in China, and yet was viewed by supporters as the one most likely to be tough on trade and outsourcing.
He became the candidate of the little guy in rural America, all from a massive gilded apartment atop a tower in Manhattan.
Sorry, dear reader, but though the normal rules of politics did not always apply to Donald Trump in the last election, they still probably apply to you.
Don Blankenship sure tried to defy them. Blankenship surged into the national news media in recent weeks with a series of ads that were jaw-dropping, even given the current standards of our political discourse. Even as someone well aware of absurdity that is possible in campaign advertising (I always enjoy introducing political neophytes to the glories of “Demon Sheep“), it took me many viewings to absorb that Blankenship’s ads were neither a prank nor outtakes from a Christopher Guest film. “I will beat Joe Manchin, and Ditch Cocaine Mitch, for the sake of the kids,” said Blankenship at the conclusion of one ad, trying to swipe a Trump tactic of assigning an enemy — in this case, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — a cutesy insulting nickname.
Blankenship’s strategy tried to take a “turn your negatives into positives” game plan to an unbelievable extreme. It’s one thing to run on a message of being tough on China when you do manufacture goods there, it’s another to engage in flagrantly racist anti-China attacks on a prominent politician’s family, especially when your own fiancee is of the same heritage. It’s one thing to run as the champion of coal miners when you’re a rich New Yorker, it’s another when you got rich off a mining operation where 29 miners were killed, an incident that led, by a winding road, to your conviction.
There was a brief time when it seemed Blankenship was surging in the polls, but a well-timed tweet from President Trump on the eve of election day made clear there would be limits to how much Blankenship could claim to be the true heir to the Trump message. (If there’s one thing President Trump has shown time and again, it’s that he has no appetite for others taking credit for Trumpism.) But as Republicans across the country head into primary season and assume that the path to victory is to put on as outrageous a Trump costume as possible: beware.
