Democrats pass the popcorn in Maryland
Dan Cox is the Republican nominee for governor of Maryland. He won the nomination by defeating Kelly Schulz, a protégé of incumbent Larry Hogan.
Cox prevailed in the primary despite doing virtually no advertising. The Democrats did his advertising for him.
They did it by running ostensibly negative ads against Cox that highlighted Donald Trump’s endorsement of him. The ads mobilized support for Cox among Republicans, as they were intended to do, and that support carried Cox to victory.
Cox earned Trump’s endorsement by insisting that the former president won the 2020 election. He even called Mike Pence a traitor, although he later took down that absurd statement.
Following the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, Cox, by now the nominee, went so far as to promise that if elected he will call on Maryland troopers and the national guard to resist rogue actions of the Biden administration. At this point, Democrats were getting even more than they had hoped for when they ran those ads designed to help Cox secure the nomination.
But Cox recently stopped singing the hardline Trumpist tune. He deleted his account on the social media platform Gab where he often sang that tune.
In addition, his campaign website no longer mentions his fight against certifying the 2000 election result. It no longer calls for an audit of the 2000 election. And it no longer contains references to a “natural right” to gun ownership.
An endorsement from Trump and a photo of the ex-president have also gone missing from the campaign site, according to this report.
It’s normal for candidates in both parties to move towards the center after winning a primary in which they ran strongly from the right or left. But in Cox’s case, this is an exercise in futility. Cox has no hope of altering his image as a die-hard Trump supporter — an image both he and the Democrats have brandished non-stop for many months.
And Cox has no chance of winning in Maryland, where Democrats hold a 2-1 advantage over Republicans in voter registration. A June poll showed that only 9 percent of registered Democrats would even consider voting for Cox (23 percent said they would consider voting for Schulz, his opponent in the primary.)
What does Cox think he’ll accomplish by deemphasizing his endorsement by Trump? Get 12 percent of Democrats to consider voting for him? In his position, I think I’d rather stick to my guns.
Conservatives enjoy pointing to friction on the liberal left — the friction, for example, between members/followers of the Squad and more traditional Democratic libs. “Pass the popcorn” is what some like to say as they watch the squabbling.
The friction is real, but it hasn’t stopped Democrats from passing about as much legislation in Congress as could reasonably be expected given their razor-thin majorities in both chambers. Nor has it stopped them from nominating viable candidates, and in some cases optimal ones, for key Senate races.
I hate to admit it, but these days most of the “pass the popcorn” stuff seems to be happening on the Republican/conservative side. In Maryland, where the GOP has held the governorship for eight years and had an outside shot at holding it for four more, Democrats have plenty of reason to pass the popcorn as they watch Dan Cox.