Whatever got into the rising star Democrats who won big by losing in 2018?
No one who won was half as impressive as Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas and Stacey Abrams of Georgia.
O’Rourke outperformed expectations when he lost by only 2 points to incumbent Ted Cruz in Texas. Abrams was actually favored to win but lost an open-seat race for governor in Georgia to Brian Kemp by just 55,000 votes. She nearly got enough support to force a runoff, but not quite.
These two had until recently been little-known legislators — he in the U.S. House and she in the Georgia state Senate. Party leaders longed to have them run for state office again, but failure went to their heads. Each one saw national office as the natural next step.
O’Rourke jumped at once into the crowded primary field for his party’s presidential nomination. He found that it was a lot easier to perform well against Cruz than it was to fight 15 Democratic rivals who sounded pretty much just like him.
Once he was in, the interest groups beat the quirkiness that made him interesting out of him in fairly short order. He spouted whatever cliches he knew were expected of him and dropped out of the race with less than 2% in the polls. And as he bowed out, he warned Hispanics that a race war was coming and white people were coming with guns.
The path taken by Abrams, although just as eccentric, was perhaps a bit stranger. Giddy with failure, she dismissed the idea of another run for state office as an affront to her hard-earned success as a close second. She said she would settle for being drafted as president but refused to go out and campaign.
When no draft developed, she toned down her demands and seemed willing to settle for being tapped as someone’s running mate. Joe Biden, who was in his late 70s and unlikely to serve two full terms if only due to his age, could have left her to succeed to the world’s highest office while doing nothing to win it at all.
At the same time, Abrams insisted she was Georgia’s rightful governor, having lost in the end only due to “voter suppression.” She created and encouraged an entire mythology around the idea that she had been swindled out of the election. But it wasn’t so. In 2019, the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler quoted an expert saying, “I have seen no good social science evidence that efforts to make it harder to register and vote were responsible for Kemp’s victory over Abrams in the Georgia race.”
Many people repeated Abrams’s myth, despite knowing better. And that has created a problem going into the fall for Biden. He has to indulge her fantasies and keep her fans happy, without scaring swing voters who think she and her backers are all nuts. Another problem for the sane people trying to get control of the party, from one of their two fallen stars.
