Comment by tzs
4 years ago
> She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
Tribalism and reactions to attacks from outside might explain why she won the general election.
But before she got to the general election she had to win the primary. That was Republican only and there were 8 other candidates.
I haven't been able to find biographies on all of them, but the 7 I did find seemed to be normal Republicans, several of which had held state elected or appointed offices in the past, rather than promoters of QAnon and various antisemitic, white supremacist, and 9/11 (and many other) false conspiracy theories.
Getting to the runoff could be explained by all the reasonable candidates splitting the vote, but how to you explain her winning the runoff?
When a community is attacked from the outside, they will put aside their internal disagreements and coalesce around someone who promises to "fight," as opposed to reasonable folks who take a conciliatory approach.
But they picked someone to "fight" who doesn't fight to show that the outsiders were wrong about the community. They instead picked someone who illustrates the outsider's points.
It's like if the fraternities at a college are asked to send a representative to a committee that is addressing accusations that the frats are rife with excessive drinking and sexual harassment, and the frats pick someone from Animal House, or like if Clowns of America International needed a spokesman to fight the image many people have that clowns are creepy and scary and dangerous, and they picked John Wayne Gacy.
Maybe there is a Pied Piper strategy where influence is being used to promote the worst in ones enemies so they’re easy to beat later on. Sometimes it can backfire though.