A 30-Year-Old Transgender Candidate Just Won the Utah Primary
Hey, look! When nobody was watching, elections broke out across America. It was not a Super Tuesday, but a pretty decent Tuesday. A couple of Democrats named Zephyr Teachout and Misty Plowright won their congressional primaries-in New York and Colorado, respectively-which means that the Amazing Name quotient in the House could increase by several percentage points in November.
Teachout, a longtime progressive activist who made her bones by putting up a good fight against incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014, won a chance to take over the Congressional seat held by Republican Chris Gibson, who is retiring. Plowright won a chance to take on incumbent Republican Doug Lamborn in a very tough district in and around Colorado Springs, which is the white-hot center of Christianist nonsense in America.
And it should be noted that Plowright was one of two transgender candidates named Misty to win Democratic congressional primaries on the slopes of the Rockies. In Utah, a 30-year old transgender grocery clerk named Misty Snow won the right to run against konztitooshunal skolar Mike Lee for the U.S. Senate. I don't see either Misty winning, but thinking about the Bible-bangers around the Springs confronting a transgender candidate from now until November, and contemplating Mike Lee's having to share a debate stage with Misty Snow, gives me wonderful visions of brains turning to oatmeal.
The Amazing Name quotient in the House could increase by several percentage points in November.
Elsewhere, one interesting dynamic in Tuesday's results was that the phenomenon of really conservative legislators being turfed out by wealthy and/or fanatically conservative rookie challengers went into abeyance, at least this time around. In Utah, brave IRS-hunter Jason Chaffetz held off a professor from Brigham Young University named Chia-Chi Teng, who put up a half-a-million dollars of his own money to finance his longshot bid. (As we can see from his op-ed in the Deseret News, Teng ran because of Chaffetz's well-known devotion to big government, and I am not kidding about that, either.)
Meanwhile, down in Oklahoma, incumbents Markwayne Mullin and Jim Bridenstine, longtime favorites in this shebeen, both won easily over challengers who tried to find running room to their right, only to fall off the edge of the world. Mullin's race was an interesting one; former senator Tom Coburn endorsed his challenger, Jarrin Jackson, an Army veteran who made some news by going on a talk radio show and comparing the border here with Mexico to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Come in, TPM.
"The first go-round, I was a platoon leader just a few miles away from the Pakistan border, and really, what we were doing was shore up a porous border kind of like, imagine our southern border, except for we were allowed to shoot 'em."
Yeah, except for that, and the fact that we haven't been at war with Mexico since 1848.
Now, Chaffetz, Bridenstine and Mullin are all slightly to the right of a bat with a nail sticking out of it, so the fact that they carried their primaries doesn't mean that the prion disease afflicting their party has gone into remission or anything. But it does indicate that, maybe, there are some sort of admittedly distant limits to its spread.
Of course, then we have the results in the Republican senatorial primary in Colorado, where a guy named Darryl Glenn, who was endorsed by both Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, but who barely has enough money in the bank to pay his campaign's phone bill, managed to secure the Republican nomination against two self-funded millionnaires. Take it away, Denver Post.
"People are frustrated. They are angry," Glenn told 100 supporters in a ballroom at The Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs. "They are tired of politicians saying one thing and getting elected to office and completely forgetting about the people that they left behind. I want you to understand that we get it."
The Republican primary campaign was five-alarms in Beijing almost from jump. Incumbent Democratic senator Michael Bennet was seen as one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents of this cycle, so a lot of folks jumped in. Which is about where the sky fell.
First, there was this guy, Robert Blaha, a mini-Trump who released an epic television ad on immigration that featured not only an exploding toilet but also a statement emphasizing Blaha's firm position against fisting, and a Facebook post about guns featuring dueling quotes from Alexander Hamilton and Adolf Hitler.
Then, three of Glenn's opponents in the primary had to go to court to validate signatures on their nominating petitions. (One of them was Blaha, who may have submitted signatures from Mars.) Another candidate, Jon Keyser, actually got caught submitting phony signatures and one of his staffers got arrested behind it. This prompted a bizarre interview in which Keyser appeared to threaten to set his Great Dane on a reporter.
This exchange, captured by the Post, ensued:
In an interview with The Denver Post and Denver7 during a break, Keyser dodged eight more questions on the issue. He took the issue a step further when he criticized the local TV reporter for "creeping around my house" after the reporter knocked on the door at his home to request an interview. "You woke up my kids," Keyser told the reporter. "Yeah, you woke up my kids. My baby cried for an hour after that. Did you get to meet my dog?" "I met your dog and your nanny. She was very kind," Denver7's Marshall Zelinger responded. "My dog, he's a great dog. He's bigger than you are. He's huge," Keyser said. "He's huge. He's a big guy. Very protective."
"What did you mean by his size?" Zelinger responded. "Did you see him? He's a Great Dane. He's 165 pounds," Keyser continued.
Duke, wisely, was unavailable for comment. He may run next time around.
So Glenn wins and Bennet remains one of the luckiest men in the history of American politics.
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