After 4 Special Election Losses, Panic Is Setting In On The Left
vox.com ^ | Jun 22, 2017
Posted on 6/22/2017, 10:27:22 AM by Helicondelta
Jon Ossoff’s loss in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional election on Tuesday isn’t just a disappointment for liberals. It’s a bright red warning sign, a blaring siren that should alert Democrats everywhere that they will not take back Congress without a radical change in direction.
It looked to some like the party could retake at least one branch in Congress in 2018 just by staying the course. “I don’t think Democrats want a new direction,” House Minority Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on CBS Face the Nation the week after the election.
But since then, Democrats have lost four straight special elections in races for Congress. Top party leaders are defending those losses as representing improvements on the party's baseline. But they at least to appear to suggest that winning the House will be harder than it first seemed. And panic is beginning to seep in.
Pelosi is too toxic, Rep. Filemon Vela of Texas, first elected to Congress in 2012, told Vox on Wednesday.
“To me it’s real simple: The perception of leader Pelosi is so negative that we are not going to be able to walk away from that,” Vela said. “In order to take the House majority back you have to be able to win swing districts ... the perceptions of the leader are so entrenched, they’re not going to change, and the Republican Party is going to continue to spend millions and millions of dollars to tie the leader, who is very unpopular, to those areas.”
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...