Patterico's Pontifications

10/22/2016

Ayotte Set to Lose Senate Race for Saying Donald Trump is a Good Role Model

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 11:00 am



Steve Berman at The Resurgent has dire news about the Senate race in New Hampshire — and I don’t want to say it’s all Donald Trump’s fault . . . but it’s all Donald Trump’s fault:

[Democrat challenger and sitting Governor Maggie] Hassan is now up between 1 and 7 points in the last two polls. FiveThirtyEight gives Hassan a 65.8 percent chance of winning what should have been a safe senate seat from a popular Republican.

As New Hampshire goes, so goes the nation. If the highly elastic presidential polling has moved the down ballot race in the Granite State, imagine what it’s doing in other key senate races that are more positively correlated to the top of the ticket.

The highest probability event based on FiveThirtyEight’s model is that Democrats take control 51 to 49.

And what is Gov. Hassan’s strategy? Running this ad, which is airing all over the state:

All you have to do, as this video effectively does, is take Sen. Ayotte’s claim that she would “absolutely” see Donald Trump as a role model, and contrast that with his own piggish statements over the years. Voila! A seat the GOP should keep is in severe jeopardy.

Donald Trump is the greatest gift the GOP could give the Democrats. We told you this. We told you, over and over. Some of you didn’t listen — and your “reward” may well be worse than losing the presidency.

If you’re a fervent Trump supporter, please: go into a closet and don’t come out again until never.

This ends the public service announcement.

Thanks to DRJ.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

David French Terrorized by Alt-Right for Opposing Trump

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:00 am



At National Review, David French describes the treatment he received from thuggish scumbag alt-right Trumpers for the terrible offense of opposing Donald Trump:

I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with “black bucks.” People sent her pornographic images of black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like me, watching.

When we both publicized some of the racist attacks — I in National Review and Nancy in the Washington Post — things took a far more ominous turn. Late the next evening — while Nancy was, fortunately, offline attending a veterans’ charity event in D.C. — the darker quarters of the alt-right found her Patheos blog. Several different accounts began posting images and GIFs of extreme violence in her comments section. Click on a post and scroll down and you’ll see pictures of black men shooting other black men, close-up images of suicides, GIFs of grisly executions — the kinds of psyche-scarring things that one can’t “unsee.” Had I not deployed to Iraq and witnessed death up close, the images would have shocked me. I quickly got on the phone with Nancy, told her not to look at her website, and got busy deleting comments and blocking IP addresses, but in the meantime a few friends and neighbors had seen the posts.

This is apparently as far as Byron York read the article. Hey, you can’t expect a Trumper to read past the third or fourth paragraph. Here’s York, telling his readers that “it’s mostly about tweets”:

And yet, it seems like the harassment went beyond tweets:

Of course, no story would be complete without a truly ominous threat. The moment we landed back at home after I declined to run for president, she turned on her phone to see an e-mail from a Trump fan, a veteran who informed her that he knew the business end of a gun and told her directly that she should shut her mouth or he’d take action. Every campaign attracts its share of fools, cranks, and crazies. But Trump’s candidacy has weaponized them.

We contacted law enforcement, she got her handgun-carry permit, and life returned to the new normal of daily Twitter harassment, until the day this month when an angry voice actually broke into a phone conversation between my wife and her elderly father, screaming about Trump and spewing profanities. My wife was on her iPhone. Her father was on a landline. That launched a brief, anxious search inside my father-in-law’s home for a potential intruder and yet another call to law enforcement.

French’s piece also talks about Erick Erickson having people show up at his house, and yell at his children in a store. (Is this “mostly about tweets”?) He also mentions the doxing and sliming of Bethany Mandel for the crime of being Jewish and anti-Trump.

There has always been a contingent of “conseravtives” I knew I hated. Now, thanks to Donald Trump, I can easily identify them. They’re the ardent Trumpers — and they’re incredible jerks.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]


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