Give Rob Tracinski a chance: Former Tea Party guy has some good ideas

For a lot of Dems, hearing Rob Tracinski, who, as of today, is the first candidate to submit petitions to get on the ballot for the Democratic Party nomination in the Sixth District, say, “I was active in the Tea Party movement,” that’s a deal-breaker at the jump.

Now, to me, the bigger issue is that his most recent federal fundraising report has him at $44,131.61; Tom Perriello has raised $1.4 million, and Beth Macy has raised $1.1 million.

There’s three TV markets in the new Sixth District – Roanoke, Charlottesville and Harrisonburg; $44,131.61 will get you a few spots in the overnight hours, in between the paid programming, but that’s about it.

So, being a former Tea Party guy is just another hurdle for Tracinski, a Louisa County resident, political activist and author – Dictator From Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back – will have to overcome.

The book title tells you where his head is, and, I think, the value he can bring to the Democratic Party side.

I’ve long been of the opinion that Democrats need to seize the opportunity that is there with both disaffected Republicans and still current MAGAs who may now be realizing that Donald Trump has just been using them all along, with no intention to make good on the appeals to populism from the gilded billionaire.

I know, shocker there.

Having a Rob Tracinski on the team might help us build an understanding of what is possible to reach out to those voter groups, who to me seem ripe for the picking.

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“Having a background in the Tea Party movement, I think I have an understanding of where those people are coming from, where conservatives are coming from, and the reasons why they’re angry at certain things,” Tracinski told me this week in an interview for our “Street Knowledge” podcast.

It’s not pretty.

“I like to think that we rallied under the Gadsden flag, the yellow flag with the coiled snake, that says, Don’t tread on me, and when I saw that, I was thought it meant, don’t tread on anybody, right? The government should not be overbearing and oppressive,” Tracinski said.

“What I found out is the appeal that Trump made was that the operative word there was me. Don’t tread on me. Tread on those people over there, and cheer me on while I tread on these other people over there that you hate,” said Tracinski, whose diagnosis centers on the notion that Trump and his messaging team have figured out how to tap into the views of the past of a sizable subset of the populace with “an idealized view of the past, who want the ideal, perfect thing to be just to conserve whatever was here before,” Tracinski said, decoding for us that, “well, what was here before is, you know, we were a country that was mostly white people.”

Yeah, about sums it up.

I mean, I’ve been writing about this for years, like Tracinski has, like Beth Macy has – more people have read their analyses, since Tracinski has written for publications with a national audience, Macy is a bestselling author, and I write for little ol’ AFP – but, point here being, we’ve figured out the why, as to the motivations for the voters who cast their lots with Trump, despite those votes going against their personal best interests.

So what, right, a vote for Trump means higher gas prices because of the war in Iran, higher prices at the grocery store, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Target, Walmart and Amazon because of tariffs – what else: having to resort to GoFundMe when a family member ends up in the hospital, sending your kids to underfunded public schools because we’re putting more money into private schools for rich kids.

But, but, but – Trump has convinced me that the problem is illegal immigrants and trans college swimmers.

We know this is what motivates a pile of voters to add their weight to the Trump effort to turn America into an autocracy.

I’m still not sure any of us – myself, Rob Tracinski, Beth Macy – have good ideas on how we can convince these voters that the racism and misogyny they’ve been sold isn’t making their lives better.

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Does Rob Tracinski have a chance in the Sixth District primary?

I want him to.

I’m already on the record as being torn between Beth Macy and Tom Perriello, wishing there was a way we could meld them into a Dream Team.

The Dream Team would be well-served in having a former Tea Party guy who knows that kind of thinking from an insider perspective.

This isn’t how politics work, of course.

Democratic Party politics, in particular, is about as counterintuitive as it can be.

Even Macy, about as liberal as a person can be, is a punching bag for too many people on our side.

“When I go out to Democratic Party events, there are a lot of people where they’ve got one big issue, and if you’re not on board with that one issue, then if you’re not for universal healthcare, or if you’re not, you know, totally anti-Israel, and I mean, for some of those people, if you’re not anti-Israel enough, you know, they don’t want to hear from you,” Tracinski said, which I bring up from the interview because, man, you can’t be more spot on than that.

The rest of that quote from that portion of the interview:

“The way I see it, there’s one really crucial, most important issue, and that is that we are losing our democratic system, and Donald Trump is systematically dismantling it with incredible speed,” Tracinski said.

That’s what we need to keep in mind here.

We’re all on the same team, or need to be.

We absolutely need the tent to be bigger, at risk of the tent being outlawed.

Give Rob Tracinski a chance, is what I’m getting at.

Podcast: Rob Tracinski discusses his Sixth District campaign

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