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| Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council gives a deceptive spin of last night's election |
In its attempt to spin the Democrat's election night victory, which saw several transgender Americans become elected officials as well as a wide repudiation of Trumpism, the Family Research Council went to an extreme.
In it's latest Washington Update, FRC president Tony Perkins attempted to distract by pushing the same spin that conservatives have been spinning all day, i.e. claiming that since Virginia was a blue state and therefore governor's race which served as a bellwether in the media of this year's election, really didn't mean much.
We all know that had the Virginia election gone to the Republican candidate Ed Gillespie rather than Democrat Ralph Northam, FRC would have elbowed its way to the head of the line of crows proclaiming how "Americans are embracing Trump."
But what caught my attention was this last part of the Washington Update:
The takeaway from Tuesday's results is this: these two states are an extremely small sample size of mainly blue voters. The real test will come in Alabama, the heart of Trump country, where the special election for Jeff Session's old Senate seat will give us a much better indication of what Americans are thinking. Even now, though, in swing states like Pennsylvania, the support for the president runs deep. Virtually unscathed by the congressional drama, the president still polls well in purple states. In a fascinating article, Politico tries to explain why Trump's base is still rallying around the president, supplying the bulk of his rocky approval ratings.
"Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week," Michael Kruse writes, "I revisited and shook hands with the president's base -- that thirty-something percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a 'witch hunt' that 'has nothing to do with him,' and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus... In spite of unprecedented unpopularity -- nearly all people who voted for Trump would do it again."
As we saw with Clinton, who was abandoned by blue collar voters for her extreme social stance ("the Democratic Party cared more about where someone else went to the restroom than whether they had a good-paying job"), Middle America still embraces Trump's agenda. But they also understand his limitations without a cooperative Congress. "I asked [voter Pam] Schilling what would happen if the next three years go the way the last one has," Kruse shares. "'I'm not going to blame him,'" Schilling said. "'Absolutely not.'"
Aside from the fact that Alabama is a deep red state and a victory by Moore has been predicted for weeks, there are two things worth mentioning about FRC's spin here.
