the attitude with arnie arnesen the tues edition Feb 3
Arnie Arnesen
I, Too
....On Saturday, Rehmet notched one of the biggest upsets of the Trump era, winning more than 57 percent of the vote in a district that, just last year, voted for Trump by 17 percentage points. He cruised to victory in the low-turnout contest by converting many Republican voters and courting independents.
Legislatively, the victory is essentially meaningless: Rehmet will serve out the remaining eleven months of the term of Kelly Hancock, who resigned last year after he was appointed acting Texas comptroller by Governor Greg Abbott, but the Legislature will not convene again before Rehmet will have to run for the seat again, against Wambsganss in the November general election.
But symbolically, it is stunning—the political equivalent, even some conservatives have acknowledged, of a 9.5 Richter scale earthquake. For most of this century, the northern Tarrant County suburbs have been a crucial hub of the state’s far right. They’re home to many of the state’s most hyperpolitical fundamentalist churches and in many ways are the birthplace of the tea party movement in Texas. And in the fifteen years since, the Tarrant County government has been transformed by a far-right political movement that has openly worked to stamp out Democratic opposition—even as the county itself gets increasingly purple. The goal, recently retired Tarrant County GOP chair Bo French (who is now running for the Railroad Commission) has said, is to make the region “inhospitable” to Democrats.Wambsganss has been a central part of that political project. She is the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, a cellphone-service company with a political action committee (which Wambsganss leads) that funds Christian nationalist candidates in Texas. In the early 2020s, she was on the front lines of right-wing efforts to take over school boards in the region—creating a playbook that was used for similar movements in suburbs across the country. Her campaign for Senate District 9 was aided by roughly $2.3 million in donations—more than half of it coming from three billionaire-funded political action committees, including far-right oil tycoon Tim Dunn’s Texans United for a Conservative Majority. President Donald Trump called on his supporters to rally behind her in a Friday social media post.
Rehmet believed the core message of his campaign—working-class solidarity—could be the glue in a winning coalition of unions, progressives, blue-collar voters, and disaffected Republicans. Early analysis of the outcome indicates just how much that was true:
part one:Dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing – there is a decent documentary to be made about the former model from Slovenia, but this one is unredeemable
D. ARNIE ARNESEN
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