Candidates Have Consequences
Dan Cox and his clown show are personally responsible for the left-wing policies the General Assembly enacted this session.
Last week, I wrote about the Maryland General Assembly’s Reign of Terror and the long-reaching consequences of the 2023 Assembly Session. I also brought up a simple question: How did Maryland lose its way?
This is the moment that Maryland lost its way.
The second that Dan Cox won the Maryland Republican Gubernatorial Primary, the gig was up for common sense in Maryland. And you can’t say you weren’t warned about it:
….a Dan Cox nomination for Governor would be an extinction-level event for the Maryland Republican Party. It would show crossover Democrats and independents that Republicans aren’t serious about governing. It would be a calamity up and down the ballot. Scores of Republican candidates would lose in November solely because of the anchor that Cox was around their necks. It would be even worse than the 2018 election where Larry Hogan won, but the rest of the ballot was dragged down into the electoral abyss by Trump’s shadow. The bench would be wiped out. Democrats would control every county executive seat in the Baltimore-Washington area. Republicans would be practically reduced overnight to a small, regional party. And Democrats would have carte blanche to run their leftist extremism at full speed.
It would be a post-apocalyptic political hellscape where Democratic priorities will be allowed unfettered access and funds. It will be California on steroids. And this is the world that Cox voters plan to give us.
I wrote that the day before the July 19th primary. And all of it came true.
That primary begat what everybody knew was coming:
Cox’s nomination was the denouement of the slow capture of the Maryland Republican Party by voters sympathetic to Donald Trump. What started with that damn escalator was, as I wrote this morning, the moment Conservatism began to die. Sarah Longwell wrote today that, for Republicans, 2016 should be considered as Year Zero for the moment that Republican voters on aggregate abandoned whatever principles they had to climb aboard the Trump Train:
If you forged your political identity pre-Trump, then you belong to a GOP establishment now loathed by a majority of Republican primary voters. Even if you agree with Trump. Even if you worked for Trump. Even if you were on Trump’s ticket as his vice president.
Sure, you can still get applause on the think tank circuit, and donors will look at your candidacy hopefully, checkbooks out. But the actual voters live in a new world. You’re selling buggy whips to people who are buying cars.
It’s one of the reasons why Ron DeSantis may be peaking too early and why Trump’s asinine attacks on him are working on the Republican electorate. It doesn’t matter that DeSantis is actually beating Biden in swing states that Trump is losing. The electorate would rather go down with losers like Trump and Dan Cox than actually win things.
The data also speak to the fact that Trump and Trumpism is loser think:
Since Trump’s ascension to the Presidency and even since his departure, Republicans have diagnosed leading Democrats with “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a condition that they argue leads those afflicted to view all action by Trump as inherently negative. Our results show that Republicans may be reading the political tea leaves correctly: Democrats are indeed turned off by Trump. If the Republican Party wants to tip the electoral scales back in their favor, our results suggest that they would be better off with Trump on the bench than leading the charge out of the dugout. It may be their best chance to avoid a four-cycle sweep by Democrats.
We have statistical evidence. We have empirical evidence. Now, we have legislative and policy evidence. And all of the evidence points to the inevitable conclusion that Donald Trump and Trumpism produce negative results. Those negative results in Maryland resulted in Dan Cox’s historic defeat, which brought about a far-left Governor1 2 and a majority far-left General Assembly3 where there were none before.
What Democrats did his year thanks to Dan Cox, in most cases, cannot be undone quickly. Let us hope voters have learned that lesson and don’t join yet another political suicide cult in 2024 and beyond.
Martin O’Malley looks like Milton Friedman compared to Wes Moore.
Let us not also forget that Larry Hogan proposed fair General Assembly legislative districts that would have more equitable represented all Marylanders. Those were easily torpedoed by Democrats, in no small part to the Trump drag that hurt legislative candidates in 2018.
Yes, the General Assembly has been far left for at least ten years. But the analogy here is that the General Assembly has never been as far left as it is right now, and most of that has to do with Dan Cox dragging down swing state Republican candidates. Though some of the candidates were terrible (see Reid Novotny) most of them had a good shot of winning.