Kerry Elevand has a great article up Jason Caffetz flips middle finger to American people. No he won't hold Trump accountable.
I commented that:
I think we need to blow it up on the phones. Call Chaffetz, call the ethics committee, call Ryan (he has to take your calls if youre out of district since he's Speaker I believe). We should also start targeting his district with ads. Inform his constituents in letters to the editor and full page ads in their local papers (should only run a few hundred $$ for full page ads, I'm sure we could raise it).
which was said at the time but then I really started wondering if we could pull it off.
Deseret News had a piece up last year discussing Chaffetzs’ desire to run for governor.
"I'm not going to be here forever. I would take a serious, serious look at running for governor," the Utah Republican told the Deseret News. "I want to go as hard and fast as I can in the House and then go home."
But not until 2020. That's when Chaffetz will have reached the maximum six years he can serve as chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee under congressional rules.
It goes on to basically state what a beloved candidate he is and how he’s untouchable in Utah. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that which is why I think we need to develop a new way of targeting these traditionally safe Republicans. Our goal can’t be to go after him and expect him to act like a democrat.
My thoughts are more geared towards one issue at a time and press it daily through multiple means of targeting. He’s not used to having any pressure on him at all. Writing letters to the editor at the Deseret News might be one avenue as well as taking out both print and online advertising. I didn’t see the costs though.
With the governorship in mind, hitting ALL of Utah with Deseret could be another bonus.
DeseretNews.com is Utah's largest newspaper site with over 3.5 million unique visitors and 30 million page views per month.
~San Juan county only has about about 15,000 residents
~Grand county has about 9,200 residents.
~Emery has about 11,000 residents.
~Carbon county has about 25,000 residents
~Wasatch county has about 23,500 residents
So Chaffetz represents about 85,000 constituents outside of the Salt Lake City area. Looking at the last few election results there were 285,305 residents who voted in the 2016 election of which 75,716 voted democratic. So there are some democrats there. We have a chance to help them be more effective with a national nudge. There aren’t going to be as many people voting in 2 years if we compare the 2016 numbers to the 2014 when Chaffetz only won with 100,000 votes to the democrats 31,000. There were at least 100,000 fewer voters during the mid-terms which is expected.
So where am I getting with all of this. Basically, we could try to do mailers to smaller counties. Most cities seem really small but they probably have local papers that would be really cheap to advertise in. We can hit the larger cities with more democrats for a bigger bang for the buck.
However, this might be an area where progressives could work with Evan McMullin since he is also a son of Utah. He’s been vocal about Trump and especially the ethics and Russia issues. Could we, for sake of country, get his help. Surely he can get on the news there and has a voice. He also has the ability to hit him on upholding Mormon values on honesty and integrity. It wouldn’t be an outside group, it would be an insider independent who might be able to have a stronger voice than just us liberals, I mean he did receive 21% of the vote in the election. He can also use his experience in the CIA to lend credibility to why this is a concern with Russia, etc.
I think the issue simply needs to be that House Republicans spent over two years and $8 million dollars investigating Hillary Clinton which produced nothing. We now have serious reason to question whether any link exists between Trump and Russia and Chaffetz is refusing to investigate. We might want to include the timeline of Chaffetzs’ support for Trump, repudiation of trump after pussy-gate, then how he mysteriously supported Chaffetz days before Comey released his letter. Maybe that’s too partisan.
It might be best to simply keep it about holding Trump accountable to his promise to clean out the swamp and bring ethics back to Washington. Chaffetz should be helping Trump keep his campaign promises rather than refuse to do his duty.
We could point out the Constitution and Emoluments Clause issue. We could bring up bulling Shaub.
Anyway, I’m no political strategist and don’t have perfect working for the ads but I think we could come up with something that we could use soon.
If we can turn up the heat at home, Chaffetz and his desire to be governor could be at jeopardy. Maybe it will help to add a check to trump. Thoughts?