I think Kevin Drum has stumbled across the latest concerted meme and Republican behavior, discovered as Representative Mimi Walters (CA-R) finally loses her re-election bid to Democrat Katie Porter:
The sad part of this is that a couple of days ago, as it became clear which way the wind was blowing, Mimi Walters pulled a Trump and started claiming that the vote count was corrupt. “I’m currently up by 1 point, but the Democrats are already preparing for a recount to try and steal this Republican seat after the fact,” she wrote in a fundraising email. This is a shameless and reprehensible thing to say. She knows perfectly well that Neal Kelley is a very well regarded Registrar of Voters and that there’s no evidence at all of even the slightest fraud or incompetence in his office.
But I guess that’s how things go in the GOP of the Trump era. If you lose, you lash out. Yesterday I said I had nothing special against Walters other than the usual disagreement of a liberal toward a conservative. Now I do. What a terrible way to go out.
In the Trump Republican Party, you have to go down kicking, screaming, and pointing at imaginary foulness from the Democrats in order to retain the respect of the Leader, otherwise your political career is finished.
Or at least that’s the perception among the losers. The culture is such that there’s no such thing as a graceful loser, at least if it’s close.
But I suppose that’s how you safeguard the royal jewels Holy Tenets of the party from disgrace. It’s not that the voters have rejected faux tax reform, the deadly threat of invaders from the South, and the grace of Trump, it’s cheating by the Democrats.
That’s one way to soothe one’s ruffled feelings.
2020 should be interesting if the Republicans suffer more losses. Every public claim – and this one was in a letter to donors, so it’s private – should be met with polite requests for evidence from the reporters, and, if none is provided, keep noting (as CNN now does) that none was provided and the claim is probably false.
