Would you vote for a Republican while Trump leads the party?

Republican candidates who crossed Trump lost in the primary election.

Republican candidates who did not cross Trump lost in the general election.

In Oregon, neither gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan nor state senate candidate Brad Hicks dared to cross Trump. 

I asked readers a question: What would it take for you to vote for a Republican?

Tam Moore answered. A long life has given him the perspective of history. His answer: The right person deserves your vote.

Moore is a career journalist. He was elected a Republican Jackson County Commissioner in 1974, the Watergate landslide year, when voters rejected public corruption and trusted journalists.

Young Tam Moore: early 1970s

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Contributors to this blog are often prompted to act by a nudge from Peter. He nudged me back in December 2025 with the question “What would it take for me to support a Republican candidate in Oregon?”

For perspective, when the question was asked, unbeknownst to us and the general public, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had already – as disclosed this year in court filings – ordered Operation Metro Surge. The mobilization of some 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned out by early 2026 to be a sweeping crackdown in Minneapolis-St. Paul which generated fear among immigrant communities. Resulting news reports generated widespread national public controversy. Federal agents killed two U.S. citizens and a detainee died in custody. 

Political fallout from that operation, followed by a string of Trump-related impacts on our system of government, our international alliances and our national economy culminated in last week’s mid-term elections. Trump made it a referendum on his stewardship of the American Dream.

Republicans in national, state and local elections felt the impact, losing race after race, many in states and locales the President carried handily when elected to his second term just two years ago.

Readers of this blog know the 2026 answer to Peter’s question. Given this year’s revelations about the Trump stewardship, Peter – and millions of other voters – couldn’t support candidates associated with the Republican party.

That said, it’s timely to take a wider look at the question.
I’ve been a registered Republican ever since I became eligible to vote in 1956. As a young journalist I covered my first statewide and national elections two years before I could vote. It was a time when splitting the ticket – voting for candidates you thought would do the best job, regardless of party affiliation – was practiced by many including my parents who came of age during World War I, watched the pro-business national administrations of the 1920s, suffered during the Great Depression and finally began their family as FDR’s New Deal took hold in a traumatized country.

So before I give my answer to Peter’s year-old question, my prediction for the political future: We are in the midst of restructuring U.S. political parties. Trump, as some of us predicted when he won his first term, made a shambles of the GOP of Eisenhower and Reagan. Democrats, with the rise of Mamdani, AOC and Abdul El-Sayed, also have a restructuring in progress. The result is political structural change, perhaps as dramatic as the disappearance of the Whigs and emergence of the Republicans who swept Abraham Lincoln into the White House just five weeks before shooting started in the American Civil War.

That said, there’s a cookbook answer to Peter’s question for cross-party support of candidates in Oregon statewide elections. The late Dennis Richardson provides a case study. A lawyer and city councilman in Central Point, he was elected to the Legislature as a Republican. Richardson had a reputation among his legislative peers for integrity and hard work. Now Gov. Tina Kotek, then Speaker of the House, described Richardson as “a man of integrity and a dedicated public servant.” Republican colleagues talked of his honesty and civility. He was serious about policy, not a partisan.
Richardson was the GOP candidate for governor in 2014. He lost, but like many statewide candidates, Richardson came out of that election with a network of supporters. Richardson’s campaign raised concerns about Gov. John Kitzhaber’s ethics. Then early in 2015 Kitzhaber resigned as ethics investigations unfolded.
Known from the 2014 campaign as a watchdog, Richardson filed for Secretary of State and won election in 2016. Richardson’s coalition crossed party lines capitalizing on statewide visibility and a strong rural base. Government audits are part of the Secretary of State’s portfolio.

So the answer is distinguished legislative service, a reputation for honesty and hard work, a network of supporters across a state that leans heavily Democratic in urban areas, heavily Republican in rural areas. And it doesn’t hurt to have a scandal and a bit of political chaos in the opposition’s camp.

Richardson, by the way, could have built his strategy on the political career of Vic Atiyeh, Oregon’s last Republican governor (1979-1987) who won in 1978, combining long legislative experience, a strong showing in losing the 1974 election to Bob Straub, and an electorate ready for change. The statewide economic challenges of 1978 found fertile ground for an Atiyeh campaign touting fiscal discipline and economic development. Vic got 55 percent of the vote in the rematch with Straub.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.] 

 

The view from Canada: relieved, still defiant.

A Canadian diplomat likened the U.S. under Trump to "an unreliable boyfriend." 

She is too kind. The U.S. is an abusive one. 

Our relationship with Canada is one of Trump's biggest policy and political mistakes. Canada's geography is intertwined with ours. He has divided us from them. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Canada is doing what it must do: try to build a separate life, even if it shares a continent.

Trump demonstrated to the world of what the USA was capable of. The midterm election was a rebuke of Trump, but it doesn't fix things. American voters saw who he was and we elected him again in 2024, so it is on us. Canada sees what it is dealing with, and learned. The world is watching, and it got the message, too: If the U.S. would treat Canada like that, then the U.S would do anything to anybody. 

We aren't just unreliable. We are dangerous.

Sandford Borins is Canadian. He is a college classmate. He is Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto. He writes about Canadian politics and Canada-U.S. relations on his own website at https://sandfordborins.com, where this post appeared over this weekend.

Like millions of other Canadians, Sandy is wearing a poppy pin for Remembrance Day (November 11), the day people in the U.S. call Veterans Day.

Guest Post by Sanford Borins

Canadians followed the US midterm campaign closely. We watched Democrats denounce the tariffs on Canada, Trump daily accusing Canada of exploiting the US, and border state Republican candidates like Susan Collins (Maine) and Mike Rogers (Michigan) attempting to disassociate themselves from Trump. The blue wave that defeated Collins, Rogers, and many other Republican candidates is cause for cautious optimism here.

(Note: This blog has almost as many American as Canadian readers. The average American knows less about Canada than the reverse. My posts about Canada-US relations are addressed to both groups. Therefore I provide additional context about Canada. An example: CUSMA is Canadian for USMCA.)

The Carney Government’s refusal to sign Trump’s trade deal last August now seems prescient. A newly elected Congress with Democratic majorities can put pressure on Trump to end the trade war against Canada and to renew USMCA (or CUSMA here) on more favourable terms to Canada and Mexico. I trust that our diplomats are now speaking to legislators in both parties to determine how the ground is shifting and how that will affect future rounds of negotiations.

Still the Unreliable Boyfriend

Our optimism is tempered by a realization of what kind of person Donald Trump is. After his election campaign broadsides against Canada, Trump’s pre-election about-face that the US and Canada are close to a mutually beneficial deal is seen here as a typical lie, improvised for the occasion.

On October 13, Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s lead trade negotiator during the first Trump administration, published her memoir Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People. Freeland’s book is a best-seller and is influencing how Canadians understand Trump and the negotiations that replaced NAFTA (his “worst trade deal ever”) with USMCA (his “best trade deal ever,” until it wasn’t). Because of her capability as a negotiator and her gender, Trump came to despise Freeland, referring to her as a “nasty woman,” “totally toxic,” and a “whack.” Freeland recounts that back in 2018 Trump threatened to devastate the Canadian economy and wipe out its auto industry. Trump didn’t take a predatory turn towards Canada in his second term; rather than he began to say openly what he had long thought.

Freeland also observed the dichotomy between Trump’s behaviour in public and in private: “But face-to-face …[Trump] tells jokes, he remembers people … [and] … he offers compliments. … It is a lot easier than you think to have a friendly conversation with President Trump, and it is tempting to tell yourself that that concord will translate into real results. The problem is that it never does.”

Given Trump’s reputation for cheating on deals, Canada’s reputation for honouring commitments, and the imbalance of power between the US and Canada, I think there is a strong case for Canada not negotiating a trade and security deal with the Trump Administration. Freeland’s experience reinforces this conviction.

Playing the Field

There is a growing consensus among Canadians that the deep economic and strategic integration of Canada and the US was a mistake because it leaves us open to coercion. Numerous proposals are being circulated about how to do things differently. For example, Freeland draws from her experience as trade negotiator a proposal for “friendshoring,” which would involve liberal democracies (Canada, the EU, Japan. Korea, Australia, Taiwan) establishing a trading bloc. The bloc would provide resilient and trusted supply chains. Authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and possibly the US would be excluded.

Coincidentally, a second book released on October 13 was Ricardo Hausmann and Eric Protzer’s Canada After America: A Strategy for Prosperity in a Changed World. Though not a best-seller, it offers thought-provoking recommendations about how Canada can develop an export-oriented economic strategy that relies less on the US market. Hausmann is Director of, and Protzer a Canadian research associate at, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Economic Growth Lab. The lab focuses on understanding the complexity of economic supply chains and overcoming constraints to economic growth due to misguided public policies. Hausmann and Protzer look for high value-added exports for a global market that Canada could develop. They point out that automobiles and auto parts, a current area of tight collaboration between the US and Canada that is threatened by Trump’s tariffs, are regional (North American) rather than global exports. The global exports they suggest are aerospace and defence, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. Aerospace and defence make sense because of Canada’s strong existing firms such as Bombardier, and because the massive military procurement required to meet Canada’s NATO commitments will be primarily from non-US firms, with a substantial portion of production located in Canada.

Our defiance of Trump’s imperialist and demeaning vision of Canada as nothing more than a vassal state has gone beyond personal acts such as the goods and travel boycott to a collective search for public policy solutions that will free us from ever being held hostage again. For us, that will be a more enduring legacy of the Trump era than either a ballroom or an arch will be for Americans.

 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog by email go to Https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.] 

Easy Sunday: the spectacle of violent death

The execution of Nidal Hasan will not be livestreamed. 

Hasan, a former U.S. Army Major and psychiatrist who killed 13 people and injured 32 in the November 5, 2009, shooting rampage, was sentenced to death by a military court-martial in 2013. 

The decision to livestream the execution, and then not to, probably was based less upon the current sensibilities about barbarity and spectacle -- Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth saw that as a positive -- than from prudence. The public execution would be used by U.S. critics. It would be a recruiting film, depicting what Americans do to Muslims. It would invite retaliatory public executions. 

The last public hanging in my community took place in 1886. Two hundred people got tickets to watch.

Lynchings of Blacks were commonplace in the American South into the mid-20th century. The first year without a lynching was 1952. Lynchings were well attended public spectacles with happy crowds posing for photographs. 

It is a grim realization for me, but it is undeniable: There is public fascination in witnessing violent death. 

Larry DiCara is a college classmate. He was elected to the Boston City Council, taking office at age 22. He served there for a decade. He has been a key element in the repositioning of Boston from a declining industrial city into an extraordinarily successful hub of education, science, and technology: a modern boomtown.

Larry reflects a kind of old-school tradition, from an Italian immigrant family, Catholic, neighborhood-oriented, patriotic, family-oriented, civic-minded, and a Democrat.

Larry DiCara and his three daughters

Guest Post by Larry DiCara

Donald Trump cancelled the Pentagon’s plan to live stream the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter. According to the New York Times, dozens of retired admirals, generals and other officers had spoken out again the plan, saying “It would clearly violate the basic human dignity of the condemned prisoner.” Notwithstanding that directive, this topic merits reflection.

Saint Augustine wrote in Book VI of his Confessions regarding his friend Alypius who was enticed to attend the gladiatorial games in Rome. Augustine warned as to how a group’s passion can take over an individual. How is such a spectacle resulting in death 2,000 years ago any different from the killing of a man by firing squad which Pete Hegseth proposed be live streamed across the world?

Pete Hegseth has proclaimed his Christianity. He follows a pastor in Idaho who believes women should not have the right to vote. He has invited his local pastor, Brooks Potteiger to lead prayer sessions (certainly not nondenominational) at the Pentagon, which is a public building. Did his association with these pastors influence him in directing and encouraging death by firing squad? Speaker Johnson has suggested that video of the execution could become a “recruiting tool for future terrorists.” Senator Murkowski said, “It will give this individual…the martyrdom he seeks.” Where does Hegseth’s Christianity differ from that which St. Augustine discussed?

Would such a spectacle not encourage the type of mob brutality which resulted in the lynching of Black men across the south, often at large public gatherings with circus-like atmospheres. Of course, there were also eleven Sicilians lynched in Louisiana in 1891 because the citizens of that state considered them to be Black. It certainly appears that what “Call of Duty” Pete hears at church on Sunday is very different from what I hear at The Paulist Center.

Pope Leo has declared capital punishment “inadmissible”, referencing Catholic teachings that stress that the common good can be met without the death penalty. The Vatican Secretary of State has stated publicly that it is “unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle.” Perhaps that is why Vice President Vance suggested that he would not tune in to the spectacle. Although Donald Trump has cancelled the live streaming scheduled for early in December, this incident tells volumes no only about the bellicosity of the Trump administration, but also about their lack of respect for human life. As George Will recently wrote in the Washington Post: “Fill the government with barbarians, you get barbaric government.”

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog by email go to Https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.] 

No rest. No stopping. The 2028 campaign is on.

I attended a campaign event for U.S. Senator Ron Wyden Friday night. He will be on the 2028 ballot.

He told supporters at a Blazer-themed event what was on the agenda.

The mood was celebratory. 

The Democratic majority means that Wyden will be Chair of the Senate Finance Committee. 

Priorities include:

--  Health care.  Immediately address the cuts to Medicaid that force so many working poor out of the insurance pool.  And then implement Medicare for all. Some Democrats want simply a " public option," Wyden said. Wyden said Medicare for all is better, and that is his position.

--  fix Social Security. First step is to raise the cap on the income subject to the Social Security tax.

--  Corruption, grift, and financial crimes. Investigate the banks that facilitated Jeffrey Epstein's decades of trafficking; investigate and expose conflicts of interest and financial crimes by Trump and his associates.

Wyden said the political moment calls for Democrats to be bold. He used the word "bold" repeatedly. The public did not reject Trump so decisively so that Democrats could do small, incremental fiddling with the status quo. There are serious malfunctions in our allocation of incomes that make life difficult for the young, who cannot afford to buy a house, and the working poor who cannot afford essentials. They expect action. They expect change.  The moment calls for bold action.

To borrow a line from the Obama campaign of 2008, Wyden appeared fired up and ready to go.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Big Brother is watching you

White House Office of Public Liaison to 3,000 conservative groups, in highlighted yellow:

"As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations."

There is a reason that so many Republican candidates went down with the Trump ship: Trump demands loyalty. They were afraid of Trump and what he could do to them.

Wall Street Journal

My posts this week argued that Trump was on the ballot. Presumably electable Oregon Republicans like Christine Drazan, running for governor, and Brad Hicks, running for the state Senate, had big campaign treasuries behind them and lost anyway, because voters saw them as proxies for Trump. Which raises the question: Why didn’t they break free? Why not show a little independence? Why go down with the ship?

Because Trump is watching. He is alert to disloyalty, and he doesn’t nip it in the bud. He stomps on it. You are with him or you are a RINO, and whoever disagrees or disappoints gets the full force of his displeasure. And Trump leads his army of supporters who vote in Republican primaries. They take his advice. Texas Senator John Cornyn learned that the hard way. The smart, indeed necessary, strategy is silence.

Oregon’s lone Republican congressman, Cliff Bentz, showed me and my fellow Rotarians how it’s done. He told us at a Rotary meeting that he disagrees with Trump on some things. Then he steadfastly refused to say which things. There was nothing disloyal to get back to House Speaker Mike Johnson or the president. In fact, a statement like that is worth more than gushing agreement.  Agreement doesn’t require loyalty, only alignment. Loyalty is agreeing in public when you disagree in private.

Now Trump sees a problem coming. Presidential aspirants will start staking out positions of their own. The Trump/MAGA coalition is held together largely by the walled garden of conservative media and thought leadership, and Fox News sits at its center. That is why Trump polices the edges of its apostasy. He complained when Fox interviewed Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. On election night he complained that Fox put Bill de Blasio on the air, then blamed the network for the losses. He threatens to switch his affection to the smaller rival, One America News Network.

The new rules are already showing.

-- JD Vance, on X, named the Iran war as the reason Republicans lost. Notice what he didn’t say. He called the war unpopular, not wrong. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”

-- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, term-limited and leaving office in January, told Laura Ingraham: “This midterm, no question, was a rebuke of the president and the Congress by Democrats, independents and some Republicans that crossed over.”

-- Texas Senator Ted Cruz, now the only Republican left in statewide office in Texas, called it a “blue tsunami” and a “Watergate-level repudiation.” Then he went to policy. Tariffs, he said, have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long.

I suspect a great many defeated Republicans are feeling remorse about bad timing and lost opportunity. Before the election they lived by the rule that no public dissent from Trump was possible. Now there are new rules. Public dissent is possible, even necessary.

Those inside the conservative media walled garden were slow, or afraid, to pick up signals that were obvious to most Americans: that Trump’s war and tariffs had damaged the economy, and that his corrupt wealth-seeking had aligned him with his fellow billionaires at the expense of people like themselves.

The Trump era did not end on November 3, 2026. It ended in the weeks before, when voters decided that Trump was dangerous and that Trump-compliant politicians had to go. It would have taken courage to read that and act before the November 3 vote confirmed it. Most didn’t. They stayed compliant. And Republicans running anywhere without a Republican edge of 10 to 15 points lost.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

In praise of free will

American politics had a shock on Tuesday.

Americans discovered we aren’t stuck. Voters have agency. Voters took off their chains.

We have free will!

The election had a lesson for both parties: Old alignments aren’t frozen, and policy-making isn’t trapped between two sides dug into trench warfare. Texas, Kansas, Alaska, and even Mississippi are battleground states, if voters want them to be.

Fox News: Trump said the Democratic gains were Fox's fault.

The losing side in a tsunami election is the one most likely to adjust. Vice President JD Vance was quick out of the gate, breaking with Trump and calling for a new direction: End the Iran war, focus on the cost of living, change our relationship with Israel.

Republican candidates and officeholders also have new cautionary tales. The old ones were Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger, whose careers ended because they defied Trump. The new ones are Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senate candidate Ken Paxton, and Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who trails in a race still too close to call. Their ties to Trump sank them, and they are in red states. Republican politicians learned something new: Even in “Trump country,” voters will change their minds about Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s strategy once made sense. Keep the GOP coalition 100-percent compliant with Trump. It proved dangerous, indeed fatal, in any district with less than a 10-point Republican registration advantage.

There was a broad shift in voter behavior. Democratic House candidates who made the race a referendum on Trump -- and most did -- moved the balance their way.

The election will change Democrats, too. The 2024 election taught Democrats the peril of getting too far out in front of the average American on cultural issues like gender and affirmative action. Still, Democrats remained the party of well-educated coastal urbanites and it largely represented their sensibilities. Political consensus said that was the geography for Democrats. The only question was whether the Blue Wall line moved a point or two one way or the other.

That is different now. Voters left the trenches and their traditional party affiliation. Republicans voted for the Democrat. The field has opened up. Voters can vote for change. It can happen. It did happen. 

That changes what it means to be a Democrat, because Democrats now include representation from red-state America. Once again, Democrats will represent farmers and ranchers. They will represent cultural conservatives. Five years ago Democrats were furious with U.S Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) a moderate. Now they have elected representative from states almost as conservative as is West Virginia. They will need to adapt. Some Democrats won't want them to. Something new will emerge out of that conflict.

Readers in Oregon may think I am wrong about breaking free of closed-minded party-line thinking, at least among Democrats. How else could Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan have lost the governor’s race? How else could Republican Brad Hicks, with his extraordinary campaign advantages, have lost his state Senate race? Republicans fled Trump, but Democrats did not flee their party.

I think many Democrats wanted to, at least on the governor's race. There is substantial fatigue and dissatisfaction with Oregon’s Democratic leadership. Entrenched parties (and Texas and Oregon both experienced this) slide toward unpopular excesses. The interest groups that shape policy get too much of what they want. We saw it during Covid, when the teachers union, the OEA, made teacher health and safety, not student education, the state’s priority. That sows seeds of discontent.

So why did Drazan and Hicks lose so badly, if their campaign theme of restoring balance in Salem reflected what a critical mass of Oregon voters were thinking? Because Democrats and a critical mass of voters think Trump-compliant Republicans can not be trusted with power; Trump abuses power and Republicans let him do it. Trump looms larger in voters’ minds than Governor Tina Kotek or the Oregon Legislature. Kotek got reluctant votes. Better Kotek than a go-along Republican. Neither Drazan nor Hicks dared to break free of Trump, so they spent a fortune and lost decisively. They didn't read the room. 

Both major parties are going through a realignment. A week ago it didn’t seem possible. Now it seems inevitable. It is happening in real time. The 2026 election accelerates that process because voters see that they can make change. They can move the needle. We have government by the people. What a heady thought. 

We are free.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Trump: "Pretend, please, that I am on the ballot. Just pretend."

The election was a referendum on the person at the center of our politics, Donald Trump.

Hicks' campaign got his opponent elected.

Denise Krause should send thank-you notes to Hicks' campaign donors. 

"Good news. After 13 long months the ads, the texts, the mailers, and the phone calls are finally going to end."

In Senate District 3, Democrat Denise Krause defeated Republican Brad Hicks by about 13 points, 54.9 to 42.1 percent. Clay Bearnson, the Independent and Green Party candidate, got 3.9 percent.

The Senate District 3 race was a natural experiment testing my theory of political marketing. The theory is that a candidate’s denoted message is less important and less persuasive than the meta-message, that unspoken, often-unintended brand expressed by tone, image, identity, and the form of a message.

Brad Hicks had near-infinite money to spend defining himself and his opponent. He ran so many ads that he certainly reached a point of sharply diminished returns. If a voter hears a single message, let's say 157 times in the six weeks before Election Day, is there any positive value in the iterations after the 100th or the 120th? Maybe. If one has infinite money, one gives it a try. Why not?

My suggestion to Hicks, offered openly in this blog as good advice, was for him to donate most of his campaign money to a couple of appealing local charities. I preferred Krause, but I had no worry that I might be helping Hicks with my advice. I knew his campaign would ignore it and would instead raise and spend money on ads pounding the idea that Denise Krause was a morally flawed Democratic rubber stamp and Portland-loving extremist who would join in the failed, job-killing policies of the Democratic majority. And moreover, they would claim Hicks is a friendly, nonjudgmental, unpretentious citizen of bipartisan nature eager to work cooperatively with the Democrats he had just trashed. 

And that is exactly what his campaign did. 

Great wealth blinds people. Surely more is better. What is advertising for if not to persuade? His campaign saw money’s power to deliver a message, but failed to see that its meta-message contradicted and overpowered the message. The natural experiment was a good one, because they had the capacity and will to run a full-on brute-force campaign. 

My theory and proposition was that the real brand Hicks communicated to voters contradicted his denoted message. The sheer size of the campaign marked him as part of an aggressive Republican army. The experiment would have been a cleaner test of my theory had Hicks stuck to nothing but friendly assertions of bipartisanship, two million dollars of it. Would voters have noticed the heavy GOP hand if the denoted message had been  solely positive? We don’t know. In fact, the Hicks campaign expressed disapproval and contempt for Democrats in the front half of its ads, so voters did not need to infer bare-knuckle partisanship. They absorbed the meta-message from the entire context.

His campaign showed Hicks to be a Republican scrapper at the worst possible time, the year voters rejected the Trump-led GOP. Hicks never broke with Trump. A few words of public disagreement with Trump might have changed everything, but he is a loyal Republican, as voters saw clearly in the meta-message. He clung to the Republican ship and went down with it. He is who he is.

A brute-force campaign, no matter how big, even with that 157th iteration, is not persuasive. 

Here is the irony: Denise Krause won this election in significant part because the Hicks campaign was so very effective. They showed voters who Hicks was; it showed them what they did not want. His ads won the election for her.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.