Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) announced early Friday on Twitter that she won’t run for reelection to Congress....She's losing badly in the primaries and is clearly planning to run third-party, as Hillary Clinton predicted and as Charlie Gasparino and Lydia Moynihan of Fox Business have reported:
Gabbard cited her presidential bid in her decision not to seek another term....
Hours before announcing that she would not seek another term in Congress, Gabbard appeared on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show Thursday night to criticize Democrats for holding impeachment hearings in private.
Tulsi Gabbard, fresh off her nasty tussle with former first lady, secretary of state, and 2016 Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was given a hero's welcome at a meeting with Wall Street executives and potential donors on Wednesday evening in New York City that took place at Anthony Scaramucci’s Hunt and Fish Club restaurant, FOX Business has learned.(Wolf was also a prominent Clinton backer in 2016.)
... about two dozen Wall Street executives sat for the off-the-record meeting with Gabbard that was hosted by Robert Wolf, himself a prominent Wall Street Democrat (golfing buddy of former President Barack Obama) and past chief of Swiss bank UBS' U.S. operations.
... "Tulsi is a rock star," said one Wall Street heavy hitter who attended. "She's warm and smart, people in the room loved her."There's disagreement about who'll benefit from this campaign:
... party insiders believe she is poised to shake-up the race even further by running as a third-party candidate that would weaken any eventual candidate to oppose President Trump.
You have to look to the time when Sanders has lost (again) and some of his people are crying rigged (again) and then wonder if Gabbard would outperform Stein. https://t.co/aq6ilxBPyx
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) October 25, 2019
Click on the chart in the following tweet -- it does appear that Gabbard's current supporters don't like any of the other Democratic candidates in the race, which suggests that they're not really gettable voters in the general election.
Yes, notably, her supporters generally seem to not like other Democrats very much. https://t.co/SLeRHBGVSD pic.twitter.com/iczxAQmS6B
— John Ray (@johnlray) October 25, 2019
I've long been angry at Ralph Nader for his 2000 campaign, and at Jill Stein for 2016, but I've increasingly come to believe that there are certain progressive voters who just want to make themselves feel morally superior on Election Day, and are determined not to vote for the Democrat. They'll vote for Gabbard, but they would have voted third-party anyway. But will those be her only voters?
I don't think Gabbard will make much headway with 2016 Trump voters, even the incel/Gamergate/alt-right crowd. Yes, they call Gabbard "Mommy" on 4chan, the way Milo Yiannopoulos used to call Trump "Daddy" -- but these are dudebros we're talking about, and for them I'm sure "Daddy" is always superior to "Mommy."
I worry about Gabbard's ability to seem reasonable on television. Do significant numbers of swing voters watch Fox? Will she get TV time elsewhere? How obnoxious will her campaign to be included in the general election debates be?
She'll deserve to be in the debates if the ratfuckers achieve their goal, which, I suspect, will be to make her seem like a middle-ground alternative to President Trump and (I assume) Elizabeth Warren. She certainly takes a lot of positions -- in favor of a late-term abortion ban, against the Democrats' handling of the impeachment investigation ("Tulsi Gabbard echoes Republican frustrations with impeachment inquiry: 'I don't know what's going on in those closed doors,'" reads a headline at FoxNews.com right now) -- that put her to Warren's right. Yet the goal is also to sell a portion of the lefty electorate on the notion that Warren is a closet Republican and Gabbard is the true progressive in the race. And all of this has to be done for a candidate who frequently appears on Fox News. I'm not sure it's going to work.
Will Gabbard run as a Green? I assume so -- the alternative will be to mount an expensive campaign to get on the ballot state by state. That would probably need to be funded by Robert Wolf and his fellow fat cats -- not a good look for someone selling herself (at least partly) as the true lefty in the race.
I really don't know how this will play out. Maybe she can be turned into a surfer-girl Ross Perot by the Masters of the Universe and Fox News. More likely, she'll run as a Green, spend a lot of time on TV chatting with Tucker Carlson, and get about as many votes as Jill Stein did. Stein got only 1% of the vote -- but she got more votes than Trump's margin of victory in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. This time, we simply have to outvote both Trump and the ratfucker in every key state.
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