Watching this clip, it strikes me that what happened to Democrat Barbara Bollier last night at her Senate debate is exactly what Trump and the GOP were hoping would happen to Biden at the presidential debates.
Can you imagine if Sleepy Joe were left grimacing visibly, multiple times, because he’d lost his train of thought?
Or actually admitted “I’m blanking” after trailing off during an answer?
This is the same woman who blanked on a question about the Patriot Act a few weeks ago before suddenly “remembering” that it had something to do with Trump’s tariffs.
These are the sorts of mistakes you make after sitting in Chuck Schumer's windowless basement for so long, @BarbaraBollier. #kssen pic.twitter.com/euIEZ8IYTt
— Joe Gierut (@Joe_Gierut) October 23, 2020
I take it she’s the Democratic nominee for Senate in Kansas because she’s literally the only Democrat in Kansas. There’s no other explanation.
The weirdest part, though? She’s not stupid. She’s a doctor! Ask her a question about the intricacies of anesthesiology and she’d presumably kill it. Ask her to memorize a script of basic political talking points or to acquaint herself with post-9/11 surveillance legislation at any point of the last 19 years and she comes off like grandma trying to figure out how to update a smartphone.
She’s going to lose this race, but because 2020 is 2020, literally nothing is easy for Republicans. She’s obliterating Republican Roger Marshall in fundraising, which is par for the course for Democrats in battleground races:
She has racked up a record third-quarter fundraising haul of $13.5 million and has raised a total of $20 million. Marshall raised $2.7 million in the third quarter and has a total of $5 million…
“It’s not a fair fight right now,” said a state Republican operative who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank about the race. The operative said Bollier was benefiting from “the environment and the passion of the other side and the tremendous amount of money that’s flowed to it.”…
Bollier has been critical in the debates and on the stump of Marshall’s support of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Marshall gave the president an “A+” for his response to the crisis and at one point announced that he had put his family on hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug Trump claimed could benefit those sickened by the virus despite a lack of clear evidence.
An A+ with more than 200,000 dead, huh? What we have in Kansas, it seems, is a battle between two lackluster candidates, which is reflected in the polling. Marshall leads in most surveys taken over the past month, but with a few exceptions he’s polling in the mid-40s. So is Bollier, who seems to have a ceiling in that range. Yesterday a NYT/Siena poll found Marshall ahead 46/42 in a state where Trump leads Biden 48/41 despite having won by 20 points four years ago. In the end most undecideds will probably come home to the GOP, leading to comfortable wins for both Republican. But it’s pitiful that we’re 11 days out and neither race is a pushover, especially when the competition is as feeble as Bollier.
