by William Skink

New polling should put Montana Democrats on notice that what they are doing isn’t working. Denise Juneau is going to lose to Ryan Zinke, the Governor’s race is within the margin of error, and there is a good chance that Matt Rosendale will beat Laslovich for State Auditor. For more insight into these Mason-Dixon poll numbers, Flathead Memo has a post worth checking out.

While there have been plenty of articles examining the down-ticket impact of terrible Trump on local candidates, there has been virtually no interest in taking a closer look at how Hillary Clinton’s corrupt political operation has impacted Democrat candidates in Montana. Democrats in this state don’t seem to want to acknowledge that they have any culpability in creating a toxic political environment that turns off voters. Instead we get the kind of condescending analysis from partisan hacks like Don Pogreba, who is already promoting the stupid voter meme as the reason Democrats are sucking in 2016:

I’ve been reading the Lee stories about their polling of the statewide races with interest. The two trends that seem to have emerged from the polling are that Republican candidates are doing better than in 2014, and that wide swaths of the Montana electorate are poorly informed about a significant number of these races. I have some concerns about the polling results, a subject I hope to tackle later, but today I’d like to focus my attention on just why so many races seem to have badly informed voters.

If voters are poorly informed about these races, that would be the media’s fault, right? And if the media isn’t informing the voters the way partisans would prefer, then doesn’t that hint at the media rigging this election for Republicans? Isn’t that the underlying sentiment of this whiny scapegoating of stupid voters?

Here is the next paragraph from Pogreba, laying out the argument that money and the media are to blame for the shitty campaigns his candidates are running:

The nexus of the sudden emergence of limitless big money in our elections and the slow, death spiral of newspapers in this country are a clear and present danger to representative government. Why does Congressman Ryan Zinke, for instance, need to connect with voters when he can raise millions of dollars from out-of-state donors to fund negative, dishonest attacks on his opponent? Why does Greg Gianforte need to worry about his ongoing support for the worst forms of discrimination or his outsourcing business record when he knows there will be little coverage of either and can self-fund millions in ads of himself fishing in streams and talking about how much he loves Montana?

So is it all the media’s fault for not informing voters the way partisans want them informed? I don’t think so. In fact I think it’s two issues championed by Missoula Democrats that have gotten lots of attention from the media that have terminally hurt their statewide candidates: guns and refugees.

The timing of Missoula’s symbolic background check ordinance, and the do-gooder crusade to relocate refugees to Missoula, are the two biggest issues that will stick in the minds of those stupid Montanans who live outside the blue Missoula bubble. And to make things worse, the fear expressed by non-liberal Montanans over these issues is met with condescending accusations of ignorance, bigotry and racism.

I guess when you repeatedly insinuate that voters who don’t agree with you are stupid, and that their fears stem from ignorance and bigotry, then they are less likely to vote for your Democratic candidates. Go figure.

Don Pogreba claims voters aren’t undecided, they are just under-informed. He is wrong. Voters are scared and angry. They are more economically insecure than they were 8 years ago. They know Obamacare is a scam. They watched Hillary Clinton win a rigged primary election. And they are starting to figure out that under Obama, this country is creating terrorists, not fighting them.

If the only response from Democrats to all this is, you are stupid, ignorant, racist rednecks, well, get ready to lose, and lose big. Go ahead and blame the media if that makes you feel better on November 9th. Go ahead and double-down on your liberal disdain for the basket of deplorables who don’t have the good sense to live in West Boulder (Missoula). If that’s how you want to rationalize losing, fine. But don’t expect anything to change until you drop the smug condescension and scapegoating whininess that has accompanied the social wedge issues that have dominated the media attention in this election cycle.