Not literally, she needs to embrace their cause though.
Over at talking points memo, Cameron Joseph writes about how the protests in St. Louis have put Claire McCaskill in a bind.
She has been rather quiet about the verdict and the protests, because she is trying to thread the needle between the protesters, and the (let’s be honest here) racist suburbanites who want police to be able to shoot black people with impunity.
That leaves McCaskill, already facing a difficult reelection race, in a tough position. She needs strong black turnout to win reelection next year in a state that’s trended hard towards Republicans over the last decade, but also needs to do well with the type of suburban and rural white voters who are at least as upset about the broken windows and injured police officers as the verdict itself.
“She’s in a tough spot,” said one Missouri Democrat. “The left is going to want her to be stronger on the fact that this guy got killed. The right is going to want her to be ‘’blue lives matter.'”
Here’s a solution (not snark): She should issue a full throated condemnation of the FBI’s designation of the Juggalos as a criminal gang.
She needs white voters, these are white voters.
What’s more they are all acutely aware of abuse of power by law enforcement, with many of their members losing jobs and the like because of their taste in music.
What’s more, if attendance at last weeks protests in Washington, DC are any indication, their numbers and their motivation far outstrip those of Trump supporters.
Juggalos outnumbered the both the pro- and Trump demonstrators combined that day.
I’m not suggesting that McCaskill don facepaint, that’s best left to a congressional intern, but it’s a way of finding common ground with a group of people see themselves as ignored by the elites.
When they say stuff like this, how can you not support them?
It’s easy to make fun of Juggalos, the oft-misunderstood fans of clown-painted rappers Insane Clown Posse, but some on the left are embracing them as a line of defense against white supremacy in the U.S. The Juggalo March on Washington, a protest against the government’s classification of Juggalos as a gang, will take place at the National Mall on Sept. 16, the same day as the pro-Trump “Mother of All Rallies.” There’s no love lost between the two sides.
“Let’s make sure we make more noise than those bitch Neo-Nazies, am I right? whoop whoop,” one poster wrote on the Juggalo March event page, which is full of communist and working-class Juggalo memes. It’s possible that internet socialists are the ones pushing the meme that Juggalos are the new communist vanguard, but the response on the page is mostly positive.
And, to some, Juggalos have always been “woke,” so it comes as no surprise that they would take a stand against the alt-right, the loosely affiliated conservative wing that harbors white supremacists.
This would be a political masterstroke.