On the menu today: A liberal New York Times columnist laments that Republicans in Ohio and Pennsylvania can choose between the President Trump-endorsed J. D. Vance and Mehmet Oz “or a half-dozen alternatives without reality-TV careers.” It seems like a particularly disingenuous complaint, since I figure if you were really troubled by celebrity candidates, you would bother to learn the names of at least one or two of the alternatives. For more on all the GOP Senate candidates in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Georgia as well, read on.
The Media’s Not-So-Secret Love for GOP Celebrity Candidates
I guess we should move on to politics for a bit. Next month there’ll be big Senate primaries in places like Ohio — where Republicans will have to choose between the newly anointed Trump favorite J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame and a bunch of noncelebrities — and Pennsylvania, where they’ll have the option of selecting Trump’s man, Dr. Oz of Oprah fame, or a half-dozen alternatives without reality-TV careers.
Those non-celebrity, and non-reality-TV-star Republican senatorial candidates may be a lot better or more qualified, but Collins can’t be bothered to learn any of their names. She chuckles that “the Republican Party is going to become the Home for Unwillingly Retired Entertainers” but doesn’t bother to tell readers anything about any of the other options. Too much work! Too much effort!
And these two states don’t lack for other options: In Ohio’s GOP Senate primary, there are state senator Matt Dolan, businessman and Trump campaign state-finance co-chair Mike Gibbons, former state treasurer Josh Mandel, Ohio GOP chair Jane Timken, and two candidates running well behind, Mark Pukita and Neil Patel. All of them are running against the better-known, and now Trump-endorsed, J. D. Vance. Vance is in the odd position of being the now-Trump-endorsed candidate in a crowded primary, after allegedly saying Trump might be “America’s Hitler” back in 2016.
While Trump’s endorsement is likely to help, Collins couldn’t even be bothered to mention the polling frontrunner, at least for now. According to RealClearPolitics, only the Trafalgar Group has released a poll this month, and it shows Mandel at 28 percent, Vance at 23 percent, Gibbons at 14 percent, and Dolan at 12 percent. Back in early March, Fox News showed Gibbons leading the pack at 28 percent, Mandel at 20 percent, Vance at 11 percent, and Timken at 9 percent.
There is no threshold for a runoff; all a nominee must do is get the most votes when they’re all counted after the May 3 primary. Note that Ohio has an open-primary system, so a voter does not have to register with the Ohio Republican Party beforehand to vote in that party’s primary. The Ohio Democratic Senate primary is not expected to be competitive, with congressman and short-lived presidential candidate Tim Ryan likely to win easily.
Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary is relatively crowded, too, with Oz; veteran, former Treasury Department official, and Bridgewater Associates CEO Dave McCormick; African-American conservative commentator and former Army reservist Kathy Barnette; President Trump’s ambassador to Denmark and Greenland, Carla Sands; former GOP lieutenant-governor nominee Jeff Bartos; and former Pennsylvania State Boxing Commissioner and attorney George Bochetto and attorney Sean Gale seemingly well behind.
McCormick enjoyed a small but fairly consistent lead in the relatively sparse polling, but the latest Trafalgar Group survey put Oz ahead by three points.
In Pennsylvania, only registered party members can participate in a political party’s primary election. The Democrats have a Senate primary that once looked like it might have been competitive among lieutenant governor John Fetterman, U.S. congressman Conor Lamb, state representative Malcolm Kenyatta, and progressive activist Alexandria Khalil, but Fetterman now appears to have a substantial lead in the polls.
(Notice that I’m providing links to all the candidates’ campaign sites, so if you want to know more about them, I’m enabling you to do that!)
Collins didn’t mention Georgia GOP senate candidate and football legend Herschel Walker, but she would probably lump him in with the other celebrity candidates. And no doubt about it, Walker is way ahead in polling of the primary and enjoys a small (within the margin of error) lead against incumbent Democrat Rafael Warnock in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. (When you are arguably the greatest college football player of all time, lead the University of Georgia Bulldogs to the national championship in 1980, and win the Heisman Trophy in 1982, a lot of Georgians will remain eternally grateful.)
But other GOP Senate candidates do exist in Georgia, in the form of state agriculture commissioner Gary Black, former state representative Josh Clark, U.S. Air Force captain and entrepreneur Kelvin King, and former U.S. Navy SEAL and director of Intelligence Programs on the National Security Council, Latham Saddler.
Lots of people in the left-of-center mainstream media fume about shallow, uninformed celebrity candidates and how these fame addicts aren’t truly committed to doing the work of being a legislator, and then give all their attention and airtime to shallow, uninformed celebrity candidates.
All these non-celebrity candidates have a story to tell, and a lot of them have some significant accomplishments outside of the world of politics and government. Yes, newspaper pages and television airtime are finite resources and not every polling-at-5-percent-or-less longshot candidate can get, or deserves, a lot of earned media. But this is why you see these longshot candidates making YouTube videos of themselves giving away AR-15 rifles. Maybe some of these candidates are genuine clowns who belong in a circus, or maybe they’re responding to the incentive structure of a media environment that prioritizes and celebrates circus clowns. When’s the last time anyone called your attention to candidates who have published a detailed and realistic series of policy white papers, spelling out their specific legislative agenda with clarity and an astute understanding of how the government works?
Collins sure as heck isn’t going to do that. She isn’t genuinely concerned that the Republican Party is too enamored with celebrity candidates. She has just heard about Vance and Oz, and that’s what’s shaping her perception of the party. For all her complaining about celebrity Republicans, she likes that their names are easy to remember.
Few Democrats or left-of-center media voices have any genuine preferences among competing Republicans; most left-of-center media voices just want every Republican primary to turn into a demolition derby. (Collins also refers to the “the pro-choice faction of the Republican Party,” and . . . I’m sure there are a bunch of openly pro-choice Republicans still around, but “the faction” has not been a major factor in GOP politics in a long, long time.)
As it stands, I’m generally not a fan of celebrity candidates, because they tend to dramatically underestimate the difficulty of campaigning, governing, or both. I don’t live in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Georgia, and the decision of who to nominate in those states will be decided by Republicans who live there.
But from where I sit, the Yale-educated, Peter Thiel-backed J. D. Vance is chasing the populist/nationalist vote with all of the grace and precision of an ostrich on crack cocaine:
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“Honored to have Marjorie [Taylor Greene]’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags,”
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“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
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“I’d like to hear zero about Afghan refugees until we get every single American out first.”
Vance looks and sounds like a man who’s terrified of being attacked over his Ivy League education and Silicon Valley friends, so he is out to prove no one can ever out-populist him, going to absurd lengths. Maybe it won’t matter; it’s a good year for Republicans, and Ohio leans heavily toward the GOP these days. But Ryan is probably the best candidate the Democrats can run there this cycle.
Mehmet Oz has been a Republican for about 20 minutes, there’s considerable evidence he is a quack, he’s uncomfortably friendly with the current authoritarian government of Turkey, and he is not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination.
Herschel Walker is an extremely likeable figure, but he needs to take some time to do his homework so he can avoid future statements like:
One of the first thing they did — and I think people need to know this — is they decided that they were going to give up our energy. By him going out giving up our energy, and now we’re not energy-independent anymore, which started the whole downfall. Right now, gas prices going out of the roof, you, know right now you see there’s no food on the shelf, and I think people need to know that. And they’re blaming everyone else except themselves.
Yes, you and I know what he meant, but if you’re going to argue about Biden’s energy policy, you’ve got to flesh it out with details — the cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline, the limitations on drilling in federally controlled land, Biden’s off-the-cuff campaign-trail pledges to end fracking, etc. Just two or three memorized bullet points on each of the top issues, at minimum, would make Walker a much stronger candidate, and someday a better U.S. senator. If you want the job of representing your state, you must do the required work on what you’ll be voting to pass or reject. “What policies do you support on energy?” is not a gotcha question.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday on the Three Martini Lunch podcast, Greg and I discussed a new study showing that — surprise! — criminals steer clear of people they suspect may have guns. You don’t see a lot of attempted robberies at coffee shops where cops hang out.