George Allen, Joni Ernst, & How One Video Can Change a Campaign

Sen. George Allen (R-VA)

In the Summer of 2006, the Democrats' fight for the US Senate was looking solid.  President George W. Bush was wildly unpopular, and they had struck a decent lead in Rhode Island, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, & Montana.  That was only going to get them, unfortunately, to 49 seats...and they needed 51.  The two races that seemed likeliest were in Tennessee & Missouri, both states that Bush had won two years earlier, and specifically in Tennessee, the Democrats were attempting to elect a Black man in a Confederate State to the US Senate, something the party had never done (and would not achieve until 2021).  

So the majority seemed out-of-reach...until George Allen decided to give the Democrats' an opening.  Allen was a very popular former governor, finishing up his first-term after defeating incumbent Sen. Chuck Robb in 2000.  This was a state that Bush had won in 2004, and Democrats hadn't succeeded in getting their best option (Gov. Mark Warner, who would run two years later), into the race, instead settling for the largely unknown former Reagan administration official Jim Webb, who had just become a Democrat a few months earlier.  Polling showed Allen with a decent lead, almost always in the low double digits, a position that almost no campaign can pull itself out of that close to election day.  Most, including myself, assumed that Allen would win the race, to the point that pundits didn't really consider it in the same sphere as Tennessee & Missouri in terms of being the tipping point state.

But Allen, during a rally in Breaks, Virginia, decided to call out a Webb campaign volunteer who was tracking Allen's campaign, videotaping him to use any damning footage of Allen to Webb's advantage (a not uncommon practice now, but at the time this wasn't something that was commonly understood by the general public...this moment would change that).  During his speech, Allen, clearly frustrated with being videotaped by his opponent, referred to the tracker, SR Sidarth, by the slur "macaca" and said "welcome to America and to the real world of Virginia" to Sidarth, who had lived most of his life in Fairfax County (i.e. Virginia).

The video quickly went viral, arguably the first really important campaign video to do so in the age of the internet, and Allen's campaign was caught unprepared, initially claiming that it wasn't a slur, and then trying to claim that Allen had meant to say "mohawk," given Sidarth's hairstyle.  But the damage was done-Allen, a couple of weeks later, had to call Sidarth and apologize, and the impact on his campaign was huge.  It underlined the fact that Allen, unlike Sidarth, hadn't grown up in Virginia, and Allen was essentially branded a racist by the press.  Webb largely avoided talking about the incident publicly, but he didn't need to with Allen enjoying such insanely bad press, and his standings in the polls skyrocketed.  By late October, Webb was the frontrunner, and by November, he would win the seat by less than half a percentage point, securing the Democrats their 51st seat and their first Senate majority in 12 years.

"This is a fun story, John, but what does it have to do with 2025?"  I'm glad you asked.  This past week, Sen. Joni Ernst, who in many ways resembles Allen's standings before the incident (i.e. a relatively safe incumbent in a state the Republicans won in the last presidential cycle), decided to have her own viral video moment.  Ernst, during a town hall, was chastised by the crowd for supporting Medicaid cuts, and when one protester shouted "we are all going to die" Ernst responded "well, we are all going to die" flippantly agreeing with her.  Ernst, clearly frustrated by the situation, initially could've apologized, but like Allen, chose instead to deflect, and doubled-down on her statement by saying in a video (bizarrely filmed in a graveyard), "I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.  So I apologize, and I'm really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well."  She later said that the only way to see everlasting life was to "embrace my Lord and savior Jesus Christ."

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA)

No moment in the past few months has quite cut through the Trump onslaught like this.  Ernst was universally condemned, and this spurred a major Democratic Senate candidate, State Rep. JD Scholten, to jump into the race, smartly realizing that this was the time to capitalize on the press (and the fundraising potential).  Ernst is a relatively gaffe-prone candidate (more so than Allen), at one point nearly losing the 2020 Senate election for not knowing the price of soybeans, but she has severely damaged her campaign in two ways even worse than 2020 this upcoming year.

First, she's made what could've been a sleepy race notable-Scholten will raise millions off of this, and her clips will be seen hundreds of times between now and November.  This is bad because it's easy to understand the cruelty in Ernst's message.  The criticism from the protester stemmed from Ernst's actions in cutting Medicaid and that people would needlessly die, something Ernst is smart enough to know, and by being so flippant, people who will die from the Trump administration's policies will fall on her doorstep (politically).  

Secondly, she's doing this to a MAGA crowd that has largely forgotten to provide cover to those who emulate Trump but aren't Trump.  Plenty of Republicans like Kari Lake, Tudor Dixon, & Mehmet Oz have tried to be Trump (callous, cruel, sarcastic in the face of human pain), but none of them have been able to gain a MAGA loyalty that equals his at the ballot box.  Even those who have come close (like Marjorie Taylor Greene) couldn't win outside of a blood red district.  Iowa is a state that has shifted significantly right in the past few years, but it's moderate enough that the Democrats are poised to nominate a sitting, elected statewide officeholder in 2026 as their gubernatorial nominee-it's not impossible for Democrats to win here.  Ernst losing isn't out of the question, and like Virginia, if it happens it will be blamed on her idiotic public statements...and like Jim Webb, if he were to win, there's a decent chance that JD Scholten would be Senator #51 for the Democrats.