David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, Political Director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
David Beard:
Well, this week we have a lot of topics that we want to cover. So we're going to do a bit of a super-sized weekly hits, taking up the whole episode. And we're going to start with Jacksonville, which has had their first round elections for their city races. What's going on there?
David Nir:
So the race to be the next mayor of Jacksonville is headed to a runoff on May 16th after no candidate took a majority of the vote on Tuesday night in the first round election, every candidate from both parties ran on a single ballot and the top two are advancing. The lead vote getter was Democrat Donna Deegan, who's a former local TV news anchor. She took 39% of the vote. And her Republican opponent will be Daniel Davis, who is a former member of the city council, also a former state Representative. He won 25% of the vote.
Now, Republicans combined took 51% of the vote and Democrats took 48%. But that's actually the best showing in a first-round election for mayor in Jacksonville for Democrats since 1995. And though the sample size is limited, Democrats have also tended to perform better when these races have gone to runoffs.
Now, that said, Republicans have dominated Jacksonville politics for quite some time. It's the largest city in the country that has a Republican mayor. It has about a million people. It's also the biggest city in Florida, and Democrats have only won one race for mayor in the last three decades. That was in 2011, but Jacksonville is also one of the few areas in the state that's actually moved to the left. We know how disappointing Florida has been for Democrats in recent years, but Joe Biden carried Duval County, which is essentially coterminous with the city of Jacksonville, and he was the first Democratic candidate for president to actually win the county since Jimmy Carter. So there is reason for Democrats to be optimistic. However, Davis has outraised Deegan considerably. Now that we're onto round two, things should probably consolidate on both sides. Hopefully Deagan will be able to pick up her fundraising, but this should be an interesting race on May 16.
David Beard:
And to look at a bigger picture for a second. This is obviously an area where Democratic growth is really important as we've seen Democratic losses in south Florida, where even where Democrats still win, they're winning by less in these areas. If Florida's going to remain a competitive swing state, Democrats need to pick up votes in an area like Jacksonville, which is growing, which as you mentioned has moved to the left, and also potentially build some bench. So if Deegan wins here, definitely a potential future statewide candidate down the road. So that's definitely another thing to keep an eye on.
Next, we want to move on to New Orleans, a city where the lack of an election is actually the big news there, because there was a group trying to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. And they submitted signatures, but they ended up being far, far short of the 45,000 signatures that they needed; they only got 27,000 signatures validated.
And it's really a very strange story when you go through the weeds here. This was a group that was largely funded by a Trump donor, Rick Ferrell, though it was sort of fronted by Democrats and they got this approval from the Secretary of State to lower the required number of signatures from normally 50,000 signatures down to 45,000 signatures. So a 10% decrease. They had a judge sign off on this. So all that's a little strange in the first place.
But then what comes out is that the judge that approved this deal had herself signed the recall petition, which seems to me a pretty huge conflict of interest. Now, Cantrell filed a pair of lawsuits seeking to overturn this agreement, but that's likely going to end up being mooted because the recall failed to get anywhere near the right number of signatures that they needed anyway, and all this is basically just going into the dust bin of a really strange period in New Orleans history (of which there are plenty). Cantrell is going to be able to serve out the remainder of her second term and then due to term limits, there'll be an open seat in 2025 when the seat is next up.
David Nir:
The weird thing about that deal was that it really seemed to be based on nothing at all. The idea here was that you need a certain percentage of registered voters to sign your recall petitions, except they convinced the Secretary of State and this judge—the recall proponents did—to lower that number by subtracting out people who supposedly have inactive voter registrations. But the statute for the recall says nothing about this. I think it would've been very vulnerable to attack on appeal, though of course you never know what conservative appellate judges might actually do here, but like you say, it's all really a moot matter at this point. That said, Cantrell has earned a lot of enemies. There were reasons that this recall had sucked up a lot of energy. It's possible that her enemies will try once again to recall her I guess, but she probably is still going to have a rocky last few years of her second term.
David Beard:
The biggest thing that this whole sort of saga reminded me of is just how Republicans in red states just refuse to accept the idea of Democratic power at any level. The idea that there's a Democratic mayor of New Orleans seems pretty obvious, but you see in these places where there are Republican-dominated state legislatures and judiciaries that they start to push any idea of something that they don't control. It's less about Democratic power and it's more about anything that they don't control. 'Cause they'll go after state boards of education, boards of governors that control, like, universities, any sort of corporate boards that won't sort of bow to their bottom line. They start to go over, and this just felt like another avenue of the Republican apparatus wanting to grind down any avenue of Democratic power in one of these red states.
David Nir:
That is such an interesting point. I was thinking about this just the other day because the Idaho legislature passed and the Republican governor there signed a bill that would remove student IDs from the list of acceptable voter IDs that you can present in order to be able to vote. And it just feels so wild and over the top to me. Of course, they're claiming blah, blah, blah, voter fraud, and there's zero evidence any student has ever used a student ID to commit voter fraud. But this is Idaho. It's one of the absolute ruby-reddest states in the nation. There is very little chance of Democrats winning power at just about any level in the state, and yet Republicans still feel compelled to target left-leaning younger voters, the kind of people who typically vote for Democrats because they can ... like, what are they worried about in Idaho?
David Beard:
It really felt like maybe 10 or 20 years ago, these attacks on voting were really concentrated in more pink states that Republicans felt like they needed to consolidate their hold on power. A state like North Carolina that used to be dominated by Democrats and has moved more Republican during the turn of the century into the modern day. And now because of these Trumpist true believers, it's really spread across the country to every red state that has attacks on voting sort of no matter what, because they believe that there's really some sort of problem, I guess, with the idea of young people just voting at all, and so they go after it. Even in a state like Idaho where there's no need to do this to consolidate Republican power.
David Nir:
It's time to change gears. We’ve got to talk about 2024, and we're going to start with the Senate.
David Beard:
Yeah. There's this wild article in Politico by Ally Mutnick talking about the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the NRSC, whose job it is to get a Senate majority for Republicans, and their real desperate need to recruit rich candidates to solve the massive financial disparities that they've been seeing in all of these Senate races, for the past couple of cycles.
They list a number of candidates here that Republicans are recruiting. A few examples include Eric Hovde, a real estate executive in Wisconsin and West Virginia; Governor Jim Justice, who's a coal mining magnate; as well as David McCormick in Pennsylvania, a hedge fund CEO who ran and lost the primary in the previous cycle in 2022, who is looking at running now in 2024.
And the idea here basically is, Democrats have this massive grassroots fundraising advantage, particularly online. These prominent Senate candidates in these top races are raising huge amounts of money. Republicans can't keep up on the hard money side, and as we've talked about previously, the dark money side where you can raise unlimited funds gets much worse ad rates because candidates get lowest value rates and non-candidates do not.
And so they really need candidates who can self-fund so they can get those low ad rates and keep up with Democrats, which is just wild that they've come to this point where they're just like, “We have to have rich people as our Senate candidates.” And that's the only way it can compete because when I first started following politics, the first decade of the 2000s, Republicans were the ones who always had a financial advantage, both on the hard money and the soft money side. They were the ones who were constantly outspending Democrats.
Democrats were desperate to just try to keep up. And now everything has totally flipped in part because of Trump, in part because of the online fundraising apparatus Democrats have built, in part because of the increase in college-educated voters coming to the Democratic side who tend to have more disposable income. It's wild to have seen this shift happen over the past 20 years. And there's this quote from Republican Senator Kennedy from Louisiana, which says, "Democrats are always going to out-raise us," us meaning Republicans, which I just found absolutely wild considering where we were just 15 or 20 years ago. So it's really interesting, something we're going to have to continue to watch as Republicans desperately focus on the idea of only rich people can run for office.
David Nir:
You know what this reminds me of, and this also connects with what we were talking about a moment ago. Republicans have become obsessed with entrenching minority rule rather than presenting a platform that is going to resonate with voters and win them a majority of the vote. It's why they love the Senate. It's why they love the electoral college. It's why they gerrymandered like hell. And we can list many other things that they do voter suppression in order to lock in minority rule. And this fundraising problem, it's very, very similar. Like you said, Democratic donors have been really enthused for quite a number of years now, and obviously that means they like Democrats. They like these candidates; they like what they stand for. They obviously despise Republicans.
Why can't Republicans energize their own grassroots in the same way? It's really feeble. And they've decided, “You know what? Screw that. We're not even going to try. We're just going to forget all about that and just simply beg rich candidates to run for us." And man, I just feel like you really hollow yourself out if you do that because small dollar donors form an important backbone for any strong campaign. These are the people who spread the word of mouth about your campaign. They turn into volunteers, they provide you with a real backbone, and Republicans are saying, "Nah, we don't want any of that. We're not even going to bother."
David Beard:
Yeah, there's no mathematical equation that you can use where donors equal supporters, equals votes. But it's very true that building a small dollar donor base results in more supporters, more word of mouth, more energy that does tend to result in votes. That is something that you've seen over and over again over the years, and Republicans are really giving this up. Another factor that's very hard to quantify, but I think may have had a real effect in recent years is Trump's extremely scummy fundraising tactics.
David Nir:
Oh yeah.
David Beard:
He will often go to lengths that are basically associated with those scams and those spam emails that you get that Gmail will send away before you even see them. It's that exact types of scams, taking 90-plus percent of emails that are actually sent out for somebody else. All these sorts of tactics, I could imagine turning off a lot of Republican small and mid-dollar donors who are just constantly bombarded with these scamming tactics.
David Nir:
The amazing thing about this piece by Ally Mutnick is the sheer number of states where Republicans are courting these rich donors. And I want to drill down into one of them, which is Ohio. It's going to be the site of one of the most competitive Senate races in 2024. Democrat Sherrod Brown, of course is up for reelection. He said he's going to run again. And there are two potential self funders that the GOP is looking at there. One is former car dealer Bernie Moreno. The other is state Senator Matt Dolan. His family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.
But what's really worrying for the GOP is someone who's not on that list of Richie Riches, and that is Congressman Warren Davidson, who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus. And Axios reported not all that long ago that Republicans are 'concerned' about him running. And I understand why. He is exactly the kind of craptacular candidate who cost Republicans so dearly in so many races including Senate races in 2022.
So Davidson, believe it or not, he got to Congress by winning the special election to replace none other than John Boehner. And what's so amusing about that and really just perfect is that one of the key reasons Boehner decided to bail was because he couldn't deal with the Freedom Congress anymore. And then Davidson won that seat and immediately joined the House Freedom Caucus. But he is a real weapons-grade asshole.
He was one of only 21 House Republicans who voted against awarding the Congressional Gold medal to the Capitol police force for their heroism on January 6th. And he is just one of these disgusting types who doesn't really know how to shut up and present himself to normal voters. CNN asked him a while back, “What happens when a 12-year-old girl falls pregnant after being raped? Are you okay with being forced to carry that fetus to term?”
And his response was, "Let's say someone was raped. You don't know you were raped for two months." I mean, seriously, what kind of a dirt bag is this guy? Anyway, the Club for Growth is extremely well-funded, as we've mentioned many times on this show. They have had a lot of success in getting their candidates through GOP primaries and they have also had a lot of success in completely screwing the GOP. Having done that, I think that Davidson would match up very poorly against Sherrod Brown. And he hasn't said he is going to run yet. It seems like he might though, but he's definitely the kind of candidate the Republicans don't want to be their standard-bearer and the candidate Democrats, quite frankly, probably really do.
David Beard:
And Ohio is particularly important because I personally think it's probably the most important seat up for election in 2024. Democrats have 51 seats. If they hold the presidency, they can afford to lose one seat and keep the majority. I think the most likely seat for them to lose is almost certainly West Virginia where Joe Manchin may run again, but really under any circumstances it is an extremely, extremely hard seat to hold given West Virginia's extremely Republican status nowadays. Which means Democrats can't afford to lose any of their seat. If they do lose West Virginia and they don't pick up any seats, which there's not really an obvious pickup target given how bad the map is. And so you're left with two seats that are tough to hold, Montana and Ohio. And I personally think that Montana is a little bit easier of a hold even though it's slightly more Republican.
I think the fact that it's a small state helps [Jon] Tester a lot. The fact that he's pretty well-liked in that state. The fact that it's shown a willingness to vote for Democrats over the past 10 to 15 years in certain races, while Ohio, we've seen, it's turned right. It hasn't turned very far right, but it's been very consistent in being to the right. And Brown is a great candidate, but it's going to be a tough race. And so I would put that as the tipping point seat in terms of what Democrats need to win to be able to potentially hold the Senate in 2024.
David Nir:
That is a very interesting argument. When you started on this, I admit I was skeptical. I would've said Montana because I agree with you about West Virginia. It's a nice to hold seat if we do hold it, but it's not strictly required for keeping the majority as long as Democrats do hold the White House. I am certain we are going to be revisiting this topic many, many times. I look forward to debating Montana versus Ohio with you, Beard.
David Beard:
Oh yes. We've got a long 18 months to do that. So a little further down the list, but no less important of course is Michigan, where there's an open Democratic seat that Representative Elissa Slotkin has announced for. And it looked for a while that she might be able to clear the field on the Democrat side and sailed to a nomination. But now that might not be happening. Democratic Pamela Pugh, who just won a second eight-year term on Michigan's state Board of Education, says that she's weighing a bid for Senate as well, which would set up a primary battle between the two. Pugh, who is Black, cited the lack of Black members in the State's congressional delegation and noted that there are no Black women in the Senate at all. And she said that she's going to 'make a decision' in the coming months.
There's also actor, Hill Harper, who's African American, who's also reportedly expected to announce, but it's difficult to tell at this point how seriously that candidacy may shape up. But obviously a clear field is always beneficial if you've got a good candidate and they can conserve their resources and really focus on the general election and setting themselves up for success there. But what Pugh says about a lack of particularly Black women in the Senate, i.e., there are none, is also very true. Of course, Michigan has a significant African American population, so I think if she won, she could very well end up being a formidable candidate against Slotkin.
David Nir:
Beard, I think you make a good point, which is an uncontested primary can be beneficial. And that's especially so in a state like Michigan, which has a very late primary, it's usually in August. But sometimes a primary can be really, really important for shaking off the rust, for testing candidates, for requiring them to build up an organization to win statewide, really let them experience the hot flame of the electorate and the media scrutiny and having to raise money. And we have seen on a number of occasions, candidates who don't go through competitive primaries who have the path cleared for them, and then they flounder in the general election.
Now, I will say Slotkin is as battle-tested as they come. She represents a very swingy district. She has had nothing but difficult elections. She got to Congress by beating an incumbent Republican in 2018, so she's not someone that I would worry about, but it really can vary whether or not a primary is a useful opportunity or whether it can just be a pain in the ass.
David Beard:
Yeah, and like you said, Slotkin is as tested as they come. I would probably still put her as the favorite in a primary between these two. But if she was able to overcome Slotkin's advantages, that would prove her as a very strong candidate in her own right.
David Nir:
Absolutely. Most races for Governor take place in midterm years, but there are a bunch that will happen in 2024, and one that is on the top of the watch list is in New Hampshire. And the big question there is, will Republican Governor Chris Sununu run for an unprecedented fifth term? Now, five, that does sound like a lot. In New Hampshire history, it is.
But note that in New Hampshire terms for Governor are only two years. Sununu just won a fourth term last year and he will have served eight years by the time that term is over. No one has ever run for a fifth term in New Hampshire history before. The thing is, Sununu keeps flirting with this idea of a run for President and I find it totally wild. He would be an extreme long shot. Sununu is very conservative, but he has tried to present himself as, for lack of a better term, non-crazy.
In fact, he called Donald Trump "fucking crazy" and that undoubtedly plays well with a lot of media types. It certainly gives Sununu distance from Trump. It explains why he won reelection with 57% of the vote in a state that went for Joe Biden just a few years ago. But saying that kind of thing, doesn't that absolutely torch your chances in a GOP primary? I mean, how do you attack Trump and hope to win the nomination for a party that is completely obsessed with Trump, so much so that in 2020 the GOP decided not to even bother with creating a new platform at its convention and basically reduce their platform to pledging fealty to Donald Trump, the man himself. I don't really know what Sununu is thinking there. The thing is, if he does decide to take a gamble and totally crashes and burns as you'd expect, he could still come back and run for Governor.
And that's because New Hampshire, it's clinging to the first in the nation primary for President, but it actually is one of the last in the nation primaries for state office. So he could test himself out on the campaign trail, go to Iowa, see how poorly he does there, and decide to tuck tail and come home—the filing deadline in New Hampshire is June—and still run for Governor again. Whether he does or doesn't run, it's still an interesting pickup opportunity for Democrats, definitely much more so if he decides to call it quits.
And, in fact, there is a potential candidate waiting in the wings. That's Manchester mayor Joyce Craig, who just said she wouldn't seek reelection to her current post and she's reportedly looking at a bid for Governor. Manchester isn't a big city, but it's the largest one in New Hampshire. It's been used as a stepping stone for other office before. And if Sununu doesn't run and Craig decides to get in, this would definitely be a top gubernatorial flip opportunity for Democrats in '24.
David Beard:
Yeah, and I think the previous races against Sununu, particularly after the first one, have suffered from Democrats largely giving up before things have even started. Sununu has been pretty popular throughout his four terms now and Democrats have had elsewhere to look when they were looking for Governor's races to try and win. I do think even against Sununu, I think a Craig-Sununu race would bring Democratic investment. A presidential year could see a really good Democratic turnout, so I think even that could be a race. But, obviously, if Sununu doesn't run for a fifth term, I think Craig is very well positioned.
David Nir:
So we have a few more items that we want to hit a little further downballot, and we are going to move over to the Midwest and talk about a couple of races in Wisconsin.
David Beard:
It's the end of an era really in Wisconsin as very, very long serving Democrat Doug La Follette resigned as Secretary of State after close to five decades in office. And those five decades have seen his office become weaker and weaker over time. Back in 1986, if you can believe it, the legislature stripped the office of its oversight power over lobbyists and its ability to probe ethics violations, and later sessions have seen more and more responsibilities pulled away. The Associated Press wrote last year that the job's only responsibilities are really issuing travel documents and serving on a timber board. So it's become almost a ceremonial position.
La Follette almost admitted that in his last race in 2022 where he said that he was mostly running to make sure that a Republican didn't win and so then the legislature might start giving that Republican duties over elections, because right now those duties are with a bipartisan board instead of the Secretary of State's Office. So he is mostly running to keep the office ceremonial instead of actually trying to win back some responsibilities for the office. So at this point, obviously, after so long and with so little responsibilities, he has decided to step down. Governor Tony Evers announced that he was going to appoint former state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, who ran for and then dropped out of the 2022 Senate race. But the office again only has a $250,000 annual budget, so she's not going to have a lot to do, but she does have an office to potentially run for something else down the road.
David Nir:
There's another Wisconsin race that I suspect is going to be a lot more important in 2024, at least I hope so, and that is the contest for Wisconsin's Third Congressional District. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported this week that three Democrats who ran in this race last year are considering running again. That includes the nominee, state Senator Brad Pfaff.
The reason why I'm highlighting this race is that in 2022, it turns out Democrats made a huge mistake here. National Democratic groups largely abandoned this race, and it seemed as though they expected this one to be a blowout, that it was totally hopeless, that they had to triage it so that they could focus on more winnable races. And that turned out to be quite wrong. Republican Derrick Van Orden beat Pfaff by just four points, which suggests that this race actually was winnable. And there are a lot of potential reasons why these heavyweight Democratic groups, which include the DCCC and the House Majority PAC, wound up giving up on this race.
We'll never know exactly why, but it was probably a combination of polling that was simply wrong; the fact that it was a midterm and lots of Democrats rightly worried that normal patterns would prevail and that the party in control of the White House, in other words, the Democrats, would do poorly; the fact that this is a large rural district that had been trending away from Democrats; and also the fact that this was an open seat. There was no incumbent to protect for groups like the DCCC. They will always focus on protecting incumbents ahead of open seats. And because veteran Representative Ron Kind decided to retire, that left an open seat and that made it easier for this seat to slide up the triage list. In fairness, Republican polling was probably wrong too. The big outside GOP groups didn't really spend much here, though they did spend more than the DCCC and House Majority PAC, which spent zero, but then Van Orden outraised Pfaff by a wide margin.
Though that probably also had something to do with the fact that the perception was, thanks to these moves by the big Democratic groups, that this wasn't a winnable race. Obviously, it turned out with hindsight that, that wasn't the case. The question is, will these D.C. groups take a different approach next year? According to this report in the Journal Sentinel, Pfaff reportedly has said he wants to see some kind of commitment from these groups before deciding to run again. I think that's a hard thing to really come by, though. It's very easy for these big groups to say, "Oh, yes, yes, yes. This race is absolutely on our list," to put out a press release that lists this race along with its other top targets, but when push comes to shove in the end stage of the game in 2024, will Wisconsin's 3rd still be on that list, if it makes the list now?
It's very, very hard to say and ultimately the trends aren't great here. This district hasn't changed very much. In 2008, Barack Obama actually carried it by 20 points, and, in 2020, Donald Trump won it by four points. So you can see the trends have really been against us here. Like I said, it's a rural seat. It's home to a lot of proverbial white working-class folks, but you never know when a trend's going to bottom out. And, obviously, the fact that Pfaff only lost by four points suggests that it still is potentially in play. Tony Evers, he actually won the district by one point. So maybe this one really should be on the list for next year.
David Beard:
Yeah, I don't think we're ever going to get back to Obama-era big wins here, but this district has also not turned ruby-red like I think people were thinking that it might when those big shifts happened at the end of the Obama era and into the Trump era. I think it's understandable that there's going to be misses anytime these Democratic and Republican groups have a big playing field. They have a certain expectation inevitably about how a cycle is going to go, and the cycle surprised a lot of people at the end of the day. And when that happens, there's going to be misses. This was obviously one.
Michigan 10, Arizona 6 were other races that Democrats didn't spend enough in and then very narrowly lost. That's going to happen in a lot of cycles where the expectations don't quite hit. But like you said, there's no way to guarantee Democratic investment in 2024. They can say all the right things, they can make ad reservations, and the ad reservations can get canceled right up until a week before. So ultimately, if wants to try again, I think he'd be a good candidate. I think he might be able to win if there's a good Democratic year in 2024, but he's probably going to have to do it without any guarantees.
David Nir:
There are always going to be misses, no question about that. But what feels so different about these misses in 2022 is that they came in these races that Democrats either never spent on in the first place or gave up on in the end and triaged them at the end. That feels unusual to me that there were so many of them. I count probably about half a dozen races like that. And what makes it all the more painful is the GOP only has a five seat majority in the house. So I feel like if the polling had been more accurate, then these races wouldn't have been abandoned and maybe we would still be talking about Speaker Pelosi or Speaker Hakeem Jeffries.
David Beard:
Yeah, and I remember hearing before the election, local activists and officials asking for investments in these races and what's so hard there is that you've heard that before in past cycles. Local officials always think that the race is winnable. They're always going to ask for that money, and it's up to the national to make those hard decisions. Clearly they got these wrong, and clearly if they'd had an accurate view of what election day was coming to, they would've spent money there. Maybe things would be different, but given how wide the field is, particularly at the House level, it's hard to think that they were ever going to hit a hundred percent.
Now, to wrap us up, we have a bit of a crazy story from Tennessee, which may remind you a little bit of George Santos. This one hasn't gotten quite as much play, but is arguably just as wild. Now WTFV's Phil Williams first reported back in February that Tennessee Republican Andy Ogles, appeared to have fabricated large portions of his life, including that he claimed to be an economist, an expert in tax policy and healthcare, a trained police officer, an expert in international sex crimes. None of these things apparently were true. His resume was largely created out of thin air.
The seat that he won for his first term in 2022 is a gerrymandered seat that takes in a portion of Nashville and a bunch of very red areas. So no one really dug too far into his background because it was seen as a safe Republican seat. So he was able to win the primary and then win the general without anybody questioning if any of his resume was in fact true. Well, that all happened in February, but now Williams reported this week that Ogles raised close to $25,000 back in 2014 for a children's burial garden that was never actually constructed.
Ogles and his wife raised this money on GoFundMe following the death of their infant son, but then told the Tennesseean the next year that regulations had prevented the garden from getting built. But now, Williams writes that there's no evidence that there was any government regulation that would've prevented this type of burial garden, the purchase of these cemetery plots, et cetera. Ogles, at first, refused to answer any questions from the reporter, but eventually put out a statement saying, "What we raised wasn't enough for our original goal of a more significant memorial, so the purpose evolved from a memorial to direct financial support for families, covering the cost of funeral expenses and other needs for their children as opportunities to help arose." Now that's a reasonable response, you would think, but his team refused to provide any documentation of this money actually being used to cover the cost of funeral expenses or other needs.
So if in fact that statement were somehow true, that, I think, would be a reasonable alternative to a burial garden, but that doesn't seem to be true either. So we're left with this guy, who knows what else in his history is not true. It seems like just like Santos, almost everything that comes up is potentially either a lie or a scandal of some kind. Now, as I mentioned, he won his first term in a gerrymandered district that takes in part of Nashville and a bunch of more Republican territory, but he only won it by 14 points, 56-42. This is definitely a district that you could maybe keep an eye on for later in the decade if Nashville keeps growing, keeps getting bluer. Definitely not 2024, but maybe 2028, 2030, particularly if Ogles keeps being a problem and starts becoming a negative electorally. But really, it's just a question of who's next in this Republican caucus to have these absolutely wild stories come out about them.
David Nir:
When this story broke, I, of course, immediately thought of Santos too, and I thought about how he had this fake GoFundMe for raising money for a sick service dog that belonged to a homeless veteran. And then here's Andy Ogles going, "Hold my beer. I'm going to raise fake money for a fake burial garden for fake children." I mean, what an utter scumbag. But there's one important way in which he differs from George Santos in that he had a very competitive GOP primary to get the nomination.
So why didn't his opponents, why were they just so feeble in terms of digging up any of this opposition research on him? I really feel like there have to be so many more stories like this about other members of Congress these days, and it's a sad commentary on the current state of the local media that there just aren't the resources really to dig in.
Though that said, you got to give a lot of credit to Phil Williams here. Even if he didn't get the story last year, he has it now. Well, other reporters should be following that queue and dig into these candidates, especially these first-time candidates who haven't run for office before. Like Santos, there's going to be stuff about them out there.
David Beard:
Yeah, absolutely. Full credit to Williams and it just goes to show the importance of local and state news reporters who are going to find this type of information out. That's not going to happen from [Washington,] D.C., reporters. D.C. reporters are important too. They do a lot of good work, but it's a different job and we need both of them. The other thing I'll say is Republicans constantly talk about the problems of waste, fraud, and abuse. They seem to be constantly paranoid and concerned that all these people out there are taking advantage of SNAP benefits or Medicaid or whatever, and maybe the reason they're so concerned about fraud is because most of them are committing fraud sometime in their past, and that's why they think everyone's doing it because half the Republican caucus does it.
David Nir:
I couldn't agree more with that. I think it was Sherrilyn Ifill who said this, or something very close to this, that basically from conservatives, every complaint is a confession. We see that in so many ways that the GOP is really just the party of projection, and Andy Ogles is a perfect exemplar of that.
David Beard:
Well, that's all from us this week. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing the downballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the Downballot on Apple Podcast and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya, and editor Trever Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode.