The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●NJ-02: After standing by their racist nominee in New Jersey's 2nd Congressional District for weeks, the NRCC finally withdrew its backing from Republican Seth Grossman after Media Matters unearthed social media posts in which Grossman favorably linked to hate-filled essays on white supremacist sites. One typically unsubtle passage from a piece that Grossman highlighted:
Campaign ActionHowever, my experience has also taught me that blacks are different by almost any measure to all other people. They cannot reason as well. They cannot communicate as well. They cannot control their impulses as well. They are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.
While Grossman squirmed when Media Matters asked him for comment, he'd never made any attempt to hide his views. Last month, shortly after he unexpectedly won the GOP primary, audio emerged from an April candidate forum in which he'd declared, "The whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap and un-American," calling the concept "an excuse by Democrats, communists, and socialists, basically, to say that we're not all created equal."
Soon thereafter, we learned what he believes about Islam ("a cancer"), Kwanzaa ("a phony holiday invented in 1960's by black racists"), and George Soros (akin to Leon Trotsky, who was an "International Communist—and a Jew"), thanks to a series of other online writings uncovered by CNN.
It's never just one isolated comment with guys like this, but the NRCC waited until maximum embarrassment had set in to cut ties, even though the committee was unlikely to ever devote real resources to Grossman. It's nevertheless a remarkable turn of events: The GOP has now triaged a seat it's held for decades—and one that Trump won!—because it couldn't avoid nominating a white supremacist. It won't be the last time.