We begin today’s roundup with Michael Tomasky and his piece at The Daily Beast on the West Virginia GOP Senate primary. Tomasky grew up in West Virginia and offers his perspective:
West Virginia has been beaten and battered. There’s not much life in the southern part of the state. I have a friend who told me that he’d heard of people moving out of the state who were unable to sell their houses, just left them. [...] So Blankenship, who’s been out of the game since the 2010 disaster, “has successfully pointed out that he created jobs and that in his absence these jobs have ceased to exist,” McAteer says. “It’s not true, but it doesn’t matter. If you’re a guy who’s out of work and you hear that, maybe it makes a certain sense to you.”
I suppose so. But there’s more to it than that. McAteer ascribes to Blankenship voters a rational motive, as if they’re reasoning this through. Maybe they are to some extent. But I think it’s more emotional. We’ve seen it before. What made Alabama Republicans nominate an accused pederast? Anger at the establishment. You call Roy Moore a perv? Well, if you hate him, that’s good enough for me, they said. I’m for him. Same with Blankenship. Same, for that matter, with Trump.
If Blankenship wins tonight, where does this stop? Because this is not a West Virginia thing. This is a GOP thing. Who’s next, an actual murderer? As long as he just killed a liberal, and not a “real” American, why not?
Here’s Dana Milbank’s analysis The Washington Post:
Whether or not the president stops Blankenship, the West Virginia GOP primary confirms that this sort of vulgar demagoguery is becoming routine. Trump’s election was no aberration. Rather, he exploited deep problems in American politics that had been building for years — and others, following his example, will exploit those same problems after he’s gone.