2022 Crookie Good Guy Award: Democratic Strategists

[Above, never-Trumper Tim Miller from The Bulwark cries foul as Dems invest ads in Republican primaries. -- eds].

Congratulations to those Democratic Strategists who put the panties of everyone to the right of Tim Miller into a twist.

For this Good Guy Crookie award, let's you and I turn our attention to a very specific subset of that species of media pundit who specializes in “Scolding Democrats for Not Being Republican-Lite."

As some of you probably remember, earlier this year, many Savvy Pundits got all the way up on their high horses to savage a small number of Democrats for running ads in Republican primaries.

Ads that were perfectly truthful and said, more or less, “So and so believes crazy things. Forced birth. Everyone should own a bazooka. Etc. And so and so is too conservative for our state.”

This was a strategy Claire McCaskill successfully used in Missouri to bring the late Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin to the attention of Missouri Republican primary voters, who loved the madness coming out of his mouth and nominated him, after which McCaskill beat him in the general election.

Well, this time around, the idea that a tiny number of Democrats would deploy exactly this strategy for exactly the same reason drove the Savvy Pundits crazy. Which was objectively hilarious, because literally all these ads did was accurately describe Darren Bailey, for example, as the nut job he is.

read more