Politics: It’s the Candidates

There is something that I’m coming to realize with elections. While there are plenty of ways that the Democrats do good, there are also other ways where I just shake my head at them and wonder how they can be so stupid. One of those ways is not having any candidates in the races that they need to win.

 

How can you win without any candidates in the race? It’s simple, really: you can’t. I forget who said this quote, but “you miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.” While the analogy is flawed as people who don’t play basketball don’t have to take shots, this is a different world that still needs to be taken into account.

 

When the Democrats lost the House in 2022, one of the key reasons why that you don’t hear mentioned is that many Democrats weren’t running in the races at all. It doesn’t matter just how red you think a state is, you need to at least run one candidate to have any hopes of winning. Look at the state of Arizonia. It was largely a laughing stock for Republicans in 2022 where any and all of their candidates would have been better comedians because of how hard it is to take them seriously, Republicans didn’t do badly in the House in that state because there weren’t any Democrats running at all. How did Paul fucking Gosar not have an opponent?

 

If this seems like a missed opportunity like not mentioning the government shutdown in 2020 or other issues that Democrats should be focusing on, but aren’t, then it seems that with at least this one issue, Democrats are learning. There are a lot of candidates in the races that lead to a certain Republican victory, especially against the members of the sedition caucus. Maybe the Democrats could actually win the House back, even if the prospects of the senate currently look a bit grim. Let’s hope that the Democrats know better in the future than to not do something as basic as running candidates in the races they need to win.