The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by May Mailman during a Newsweek debate about the senate runoff election results in Georgia. You can listen to the podcast here:
People like to talk about candidate quality, but for me it's about first-time candidates. On the Republican side we had a lot of first-time candidates running statewide. They had not built out an operation, they did not have experience, and this was their first time in front of the media and in debates. It didn't work out universally, so hopefully there's a lesson to be learned. I know nobody likes career politicians, but you do need some experience and that would be helpful for Republicans moving forward. I know that Republicans are really trying to say, "this runoff election matters, you have to go out and vote because a 50 50 split is much different than actually being in the minority". I agree with that to a certain extent because Vice President Harris can't break ties in the committee so they can just ram through nominations of much more liberal candidates than they otherwise would have. That said, they could probably do that anyway, they just have to spend a lot more floor time in the Senate. What this will do is allow Democrats to maybe move more quickly on their nomination's agenda, but that might have happened anyway.
Every time Herschel Walker said something bizarre it went viral, but if you compare that to the Pennsylvania race, you had John Fetterman saying bizarre things that often throw into question whether he's able to do the job as a Senator, and yet the media continued to downplay that, and yet Fetterman ends up winning. You might have a smoother talking democrat in Georgia, but the media plays so much into this. What people remember out of Pennsylvania is "crudité", of all the things that come up it's Dr. Oz talking about vegetables, which is totally irrelevant to the campaign. The media didn't cover any of Fetterman's gaffes, compared to Herschel Walker in Georgia where they highlight only republican gaffes. You can overcome some of that bias, but you have to work for it. You have to be there for a while and earn the trust of the people who are listening to you.
May Mailman is a senior fellow at Independent Women's Law Center and former legal advisor to President Donald J. Trump.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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