Yesterday I mentioned California’s Republican embarrassment, but now it’s back to the other coast, specifically New Jersey, as WaPo’s Dave Weigel reports:
The National Republican Congressional Committee has withdrawn its endorsement of a congressional candidate in New Jersey after reporters dug up offensive comments he’d made about black and Hispanic people.
“Bigotry has no place in society — let alone the U.S. House of Representatives,” NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers said in a statement Monday night. “The NRCC withdraws our support of Seth Grossman and calls on him to reconsider his candidacy.”
Grossman, a former elected official in Atlantic County, was not the party’s first choice to run in New Jersey’s 2nd District. Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo (R-N.J.) announced his retirement late last year, and the local party scrambled to find a contender in a district that backed President Trump in 2016 but was high on Democrats’ target list.
No strong candidate emerged, and Grossman won the four-way June 5 primary with 39 percent of the vote. Almost immediately, Democratic and liberal groups began digging through his social media and through videos from candidate forums.
And what did he say?
In one video, Grossman answered a question about how Republicans could reach more diverse groups of voters by saying “the whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap, and un-American,” having “become an excuse by Democrats, communists, and socialists, to say that we’re not all created equal.” In a Facebook post, first uncovered by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, Grossman linked approvingly to an article at a white nationalist website that argued African Americans “are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.”
“Oy vay!” wrote Grossman. “What so many people, black, white and Hispanic, whisper to me privately but never dare say out loud publicly.”
And he managed to win a plurality in the primary. This speaks either to the relative ignorance of the current Republican voter, their tolerance for extremism, or their mental state, which appears to find anything outside of their social circle to be frightening.
In any case, it’s not conducive to a productive American society.
I have yet to see similar cases for the Democrats, although they’ve tried to chase away a few candidates on various tactical grounds.
