The primaries on Tuesday proved two things.
First, the GOP is now Donald Trump’s party, and those who oppose him — mostly establishment figures who don’t seem to know the president has wrested the party from their iron grip — are very likely to get beat.
And second, the Democrats continue their march to the Left by electing candidates that include a Muslim immigrant and a “transgender” woman.
If that isn’t the takeaway from yesterday, one wonders what would be.
Pawlenty Beaten Like a Rented Mule
In Minnesota, former GOP Governor Tim Pawlenty attempted a comeback. He was governor of the state from 2003 to 2011, succeeding actor, pro wrestler, and libertarian conspiracy theorist Jesse Ventura.
But Pawlenty, who also co-chaired Mitt Romney’s losing presidential campaign in 2012 before becoming a highly paid lobbyist in Washington, D.C., couldn’t overcome Jeff Johnson, who openly sought Trump’s support and backs his immigration policies.
As the Star Tribune in Minneapolis reported, Pawlenty was the hands-down favorite given his former governorship and name recognition. But the failed presidential candidate couldn’t pull it off. A county commissioner handily beat him.
Pawlenty, who spent three times as much money as Johnson, “failed to connect with an electorate that has shifted in the years since he last held office.”
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What hurt Pawlenty? Perhaps calling Trump “unhinged and unfit for the presidency.”
“I think it is just further indication that the rules have changed, not just in Minnesota, not just in our party,” Johnson said, according to the Star-Tribune. “People are expecting something different from candidates.”
Indeed they are. Johnson beat Pawlenty badly, 168,240 to 140,283, or 52.61 percent of the vote to 43.87 percent.
Johnson will face Democrat Tim Walz, who handily defeated his closest opponent by nine points.
Victory for Kobach
Another sign of Trump’s control of the GOP? The victory of immigration restrictionist Kris Kobach in Kansas.
Yesterday, a week after voters went to the polls, incumbent Governor Jeff Colyer conceded the race to the Kansas secretary of state, who led by 345 votes, the Kansas City Star reported.
Endorsed by Trump, Kobach was the architect of voter-ID and immigration laws that have proven popular with Kansas voters, even as leftist lawyers and courts fought to have them overturned.
Muslims in Minnesota
Elsewhere in Minnesota, a Somali Muslim immigrant will run in the Fifth District to replace outgoing Muslim Representative Keith Ellison, who won his primary for attorney general.
Ilhan Omar, who once called Israel an “apartheid state,” is a radical leftist endorsed by none other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist whose endorsements haven’t been all that helpful to some candidates.
As the Star-Tribune noted, Omar supports “Medicare for all, stronger gun control and the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Omar is closely tied to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), raising money for an organization that has ties to some of the most notorious terrorists in the world, not least the Hamas terror organization in the Middle East.
But beyond that, she allegedly married her brother and lied about it, according to PJ Media, which followed up on credible allegations at the Powerline blog. The major media did not pursue the story vigorously.
Then there’s Ellison, an apologist for Louis Farrakhan, the virulent anti-Semite who runs the Nation of Islam. Like Omar, Ellison strongly supports CAIR, and is, to put it mildly, a radical Islamist himself, as his profile at Discover the Networks shows.
Beyond that, Ellison survived two recent allegations of domestic abuse to easily win his primary with nearly 50 percent of the vote against his opponent’s 20 percent.
Cross Dressing in Vermont
The state that sent an apologist for communist and mass-murderer Fidel Castro to the U.S. Senate might now elect the nation’s first “transgender” governor.
Winning the Democratic primary was transgender Christine Hallquist (shown).
“Tonight, we made history,” Hallquist said. “I am so proud to be the face of the Democrats tonight.”
How many Democrats are proud he is the face of the party remains to be seen.
Hallquist, whose birth name is David, claimed his victory is “a reaction to 2016,” meaning the election of notorious meanie, Donald Trump.
According to CNN, Hallquist “has declined embracing any labels of being a socialist”:
“I’m not a person that’s big on labels because I found labels are used to separate people,” Hallquist told [CNN’s John] Berman. “I look at the platform of a living wage and health care for all, that is called civilized society. I don’t know even how that became socialism or Republican or Democrat. Let’s be a civilized society.”
In other words, he’s a socialist.
And provided he’s not faking it, he’s also mentally ill, according to psychiatrists such as Dr. Paul McHugh, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University. Men who think they are women, and women who think they are men, McHugh says, need “evidence-based care” for their mental illness, not validation from political ideologues who encourage the delusion.
As for more mainstream candidates, Politico assured readers that some victorious Democrats in the Midwest were “white, conventional and boring,” including Walz in Minnesota and Richard Cordray in Ohio, where he won the Democratic primary for governor.
Just to make sure we get the message, another story in Politico said the Democrats “bet on boring” in selecting Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s public-schools boss, to run against Republican Governor Scott Walker.
Photo: AP Images
