Forget message testing. Tune out pollsters, analysts, and politicos. Ignore ideology. The only thing that matters in West Virginia on election night, the thing that’s robbed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., of so much sleep, is a new application of the Rep. Thomas Massie theorem of Republican primaries.
Massie states that when presented with numerous bad candidates, the electorate will vote “for the craziest son of a bitch in the race.”
The Kentucky Republican explained that the phenomena fueled his own libertarian campaigns along with those of former Rep. Ron Paul in Texas and Sen. Rand Paul in Kentucky. It also accounts for the election of President Trump.
“All this time,” Massie told the Washington Examiner almost a year ago, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
After occupying his own prison cell for a year due to his involvement in a mining accident that cost 29 men their lives, Don Blankenship is in a crazy class all his own.
He believes that he was made “an American political prisoner” by the Obama administration. He believes communist authoritarians do a better job improving quality of life than democratic republics. He believes that McConnell is smuggling cocaine into this country and that his wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, has convinced the majority leader to make deals for the benefit of “Chinapeople.”
Crazy? Absolutely. An example of the Massie theorem at work? Possibly.
An important distinction needs to be made. While Massie and his libertarian ilk are unorthodox, they are not unprincipled. And while the president is a populist, he is not a nihilist. Blankenship, however, is unprincipled and nihilistic. His shtick is martyrdom, and his appeal is to the “nothing matters” voter. Where Trump wants to drain the swamp, Blankenship wants to undermine the institutions themselves.
Craziest to be sure, Blankenship strips aside the general agreed-upon belief that government exists for the benefit of the governed. He argues instead that the entire system is rigged and by default needs to be destroyed.
His victory, then, would at once signal a deepening and a departure from the Massie theorem.
