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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKS-03: Republican group runs ads to promote Our Revolution's Brent Welder
A group largely funded by a major conservative donor is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in a swing seat Democratic congressional primary in Kansas, hoping to persuade voters to nominate a progressive candidate supported by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The ads, from the conservative group Ending Spending, aim to boost Brent Welder, a former Obama and Sanders campaign official who is running in the Democratic primary for the right to challenge GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder in Kansas 3rd Congressional District, which covers Kansas City and its suburbs.
Ending Spending is largely funded by billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, who donated $1 million to boost President Donald Trumps election. Ricketts son, Todd, is the finance chair of the Republican National Committee. Other major conservative donors have also backed the group. While it sometimes attacks Republicans, it has focused the majority of its firepower on Democrats in recent cycles. Its attacks on Welder are designed to appeal to Democrats ahead of Tuesdays primary, potentially creating a clash between Welder and Yoder in November.
Meet progressive Brent Welder, community organizer, friend to Barack Obama and ally of Bernie Sanders. Welder wants to bring Obama-Sanders progressivism to Kansas, a cheery female narrator says at the beginning of the 30-second ad. Hed raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, wipe out tax breaks for big corporations, make college completely free. And he supports single-payer Medicare for All.
Only then does the narrator get to the rub: We dont need more Obama-Sanders progressivism. Brent Welder. Too progressive for Kansas.
Ending Spending has put about $150,000 behind the television ad buy, according to a media-tracking source.
Welder is one of the three leading candidates in the district, which Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton narrowly won in 2016 and is full of the highly-educated white voters who have turned against Republicans in the era of Trump. Hes facing Tom Niermann, a moderate history teacher whos running a campaign focused on gun control and education, and Sharice Davids, a Native American former MMA fighter and Obama administration official who has the backing of EMILYs List.
Niermann and Davids condemned the Ending Spending ads, and said they showed Yoder was desperate to save his re-election bid.
Yoder decided a long time ago to vote with party leaders instead of his community, counting on billionaires to bail out his campaign when he faces tough challengers, as he does now, the pair said in a joint statement. He has now gone yet another bridge too far ― calling in Republican dark money to elevate an opponent of his choosing, rather than answer to his constituents for his egregious votes.
Welder is the only Democrat beating Congressman Yoder in public polling and has raised more money than any Democratic challenger in the history of our district, campaign manager Shawn Borich wrote in an email. Brent is proud to have worked for President Obama, who took on Wall Street bankers behind this Super PAC.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/joe-ricketts-kansas-brent-welder-gop-donor_us_5b6472d2e4b0fd5c73d9113d
msongs
(67,433 posts)JCanete
(5,272 posts)nothing over the years? It has been the very effective tactic of Republican and big-money institutions to entirely ignore the left and to frame relatively moderate candidates by comparison, like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi as the furthest edge of the left that has ever existed in modern politics....effectively making any more populist messaging invisible. The old adage "first they ignore you..." is typically as far as it ever needs to go.
then they laugh at you has also been going on for years, any time something has cracked the surface...
...and then they fight you seems to be the stage we're at now, with all of the panicked talking points being regurgitated over and over by the right about Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
Its possible that this is the fight this dude wants in the GE, but I don't understand it.
Alternatively its possible that the most effective shit-stirring action he could take was to do a non-attack ad and gin up animosity and suspicion within the Democratic Party against Welder.
I'm sure people here will have their own interpretations, but the bottom line is why give a megaphone to populist ideas that have typically been buried down deep in American politics, especially when you are giving that megaphone to the front-runner in the primary? That is never done. The only time left-wing progressives get a platform from the right wing is during the GE when such a platform might damage the democrat in the race.
Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)SkyDancer
(561 posts)GaryCnf
(1,399 posts)But anything goes when attacking the front runner, huh?
The ad ATTACKS Welder.
This stuff is so old.