How about a little Nice Time in your election results? Today’s theme is “Redemption Arcs,” although we’re using the term loosely since neither of the people we’re looking at did anything they need to redeem themselves for; rather, they’re decent people fighting against the GOP sedition agenda.
First up: In Virginia, the candidates are set for what might be the state’s most competitive House seat, the race to replace Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) in the Seventh District. Spanberger earlier this year announced she’d be leaving office to run for governor in 2025, so a whole bunch of folks from both parties announced they’d run for the open seat, which Spanberger herself flipped blue in 2018.
The Republican nominee will be Derrick Anderson, a Trump-loving former Green Beret who has never held office; he beat Cameron Anderson, a a Trump-loving former Navy SEAL who has also never held office, leading us to suspect that the Stepford Corporation may be back in business somewhere churning out GOP primary candidates. We suppose we could tell you something about their “issues” on “positions,” but as far as we can tell they’re no different from any other MAGA idiot than two different store brands of cold medicines.
Following Tuesday’s primary, the marquee House race in Virginia will be the contest between Anderson and the winner of the Democratic primary, former Army Col. Eugene Vindman, who like his twin brother Alexander Vindman was working in the White House when Donald Trump made that infamous “perfect phone call” in 2020 to try to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into digging up fake dirt on Joe Biden.
Both Vindmans were serving with the National Security Council at the time, and reported their concerns about Trump’s shakedown scheme. Alexander ended up testifying in Trump’s first impeachment trial, and once Republicans acquitted Trump, since a little high crimes and misdemeanors were fine with them, both brothers were fired from their White House jobs and transferred back to the Army. For evil measure, Trump’s minions then tried to sabotage the Vindmans’ military careers, because shitty revenge plots were already the norm for Trump well before he started promising more of the same if he returns to office.
Eugene Vindman, himself a first-time candidate, ran on defending democracy, a subject he knows a hell of a lot about firsthand, and his high name recognition helped him raise $5 million in contributions. In one of his campaign ads, he said, “I sacrificed my military career to expose Trump’s corruption,” a message likely to go over well in Spanberger’s district in a year when people are good and tired of Donald Trump. The New York Times points out that Vindman isn’t guaranteed a win since Gov. Glenn Youngkin won that district by 4.9 points in 2021, although Spanberger came right back and was reelected in 2022 by a 4.6 point margin.
The Washington Post notes that the district has a “large concentration of military veterans and defense contractors as well as Marine Corps Base Quantico,” and that both Anderson and Vindman emphasized their military records, although from decidedly different perspectives. The fall campaign is likely to be expensive and ugly; Anderson is already projecting heavily, accusing Vindman of “only running for revenge — revenge against Donald Trump and revenge against Republicans,” which is probably insane enough to make MAGA folks want to come after Vindman with torches and pitchforks because only a monster would be driven by revenge.
For his part, Vindman is keeping with the old-fashioned idea of democracy being better than insurrection and bullying, telling the Post in an interview during his victory party Tuesday,
“The voters in this district recognize what’s at stake in this next election: that it’s a crossroads for this country. […] There’s a choice to be made between common-sense approaches and an extremist agenda.”
You can practically hear his revenge-driven madness in print, can’t you?
In other nice time primary news, over in Montana, the Democratic nominee for state House District 1, covering Kalispell and environs, will be Dakota Adams, 27, the oldest son of convicted January 6 seditionist Stewart Rhodes, who’s doing 18 years in federal prison for trying to overthrow the 2020 election. Adams, a construction worker, volunteer firefighter, and political science student at Flathead Valley Community College, has been very open with the media about the “extreme isolation and paranoia” he and his family faced under Rhodes.
Until he, his mother Tasha Adams, and his siblings escaped from Rhodes in 2018, Adams was home-schooled, and not terribly well. He didn’t learn multiplication tables until he was studying for his GED. He got interested in running for office after canvassing for Democrats in 2022, and noticed that lots and lots of Republicans ran unopposed.
So what the hell, he’s running as a progressive Democrat in Lincoln County, where voters went for Donald Trump by 74 percent in 2020. Going door-to-door campaigning, though, he says he gets very positive reactions from people, youth, long hair and leather jacket notwithstanding:
“Montana elections happen at the doorstep,” he said. “So far, my reception has been surprisingly positive at doors, [despite] canvassing dressed like Alice Cooper and openly admitting to being a progressive Democrat, or self-identifying even as a Democratic socialist when asked.
“I attribute that to there being a Republican supermajority that’s been running the state – it leaves very little room for excuses.”
He also likes describing himself as an “honest weirdo” and pointing out that in America, you don’t have to be defined forever by being raised by an antigovernment extremist. In a March 2024 profile by the AP, he described Stewart Rhodes as anything but a brilliant antigovernment radical, calling him “lazy, paranoid and a grifter who had an exaggerated sense of his own importance as a threat to the government.”
“Basically until I’m an adult it’s all one continuous gray time of survival and moving boxes,” Adams said. “We lived in extreme isolation in one particular cultural bubble in increasingly paranoid and militant right-wing political spheres everywhere we moved in the country, until eventually we ended up in Montana.”
And if his politics don’t go over well in prepper country, he says, that’s fine, because he’s all about being true to himself, which is the most American thing there is:
“I have refused to tone any of this down since deciding to run for office,” Adams said, gesturing at his clothing, “because I spent so long as a child conforming to a little character to enhance my father’s political ambitions and image that I refused to do it ever again for any reason.”
Driving home the point, he said: “I feel like being an honest weirdo is a lot better to a lot of people than being a Spirit Halloween cowboy when you’re asking for their vote.”
Damn right. And if he’s clobbered in the general, he’ll have learned a lot about running a campaign that he can share with others, and that’s how you organize an alternative to one-party rule, AMEN.
PREVIOUSLY!
[NBC Washington / WaPo / AP / Guardian]
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