That big, huge red wave that’s supposed to carry Republicans across the finish line in November’s midterm elections was stuck on shore in last week’s special election in Hancock County to fill a vacancy in the Maine Senate.
In fact, it was a big BLUE wave that crashed across Ellsworth and surrounding towns in Senate District 7.
Nicole Grohoski, a two-term Democrat state rep who marches in lockstep with the lunatic Leftist leadership of her party, soundly defeated Republican Brian Langley, a well-known and well-liked restaurant owner who held the Senate seat for eight years before terming out in 2018.
What happened?
Before I give you my take on the outcome, I want to ask for your support of our work at Maine First Project. With your help, we will continue to shine a bright light into the darkest recesses of the Augusta swamp — on both sides of the aisle.
Here’s what happened in the Hancock County special election last week.
Republican candidate Brian Langely made the mistake of following the advice of Maine Senate GOP Leader Jeff Timberlake of Turner.
And what is Jeff’s strategy for GOP victory this year?
DON’T ROCK THE BOAT…even if the boat’s on fire!
Timberlake’s strategy is to stay tightly focused on inflation, and try to link your Democrat opponent to Joe Biden.
Whatever you do, Timberlake warns, stay away from those controversial “culture war” issues.
And if you’re even thinking about standing with parents who are fed up with CRT indoctrination and pick-your-pronoun, gender-bender madness in K-12 classrooms, Timberlake says, forget about it!
According to Timberlake, that stuff might work for Republican candidates in places like Virginia — and even New Jersey — but Maine voters don’t care enough about what’s happening in their public schools to make any difference in a legislative election.
Wrong.
It turns out that GOP voters in Hancock County stayed home in droves rather than rushing to the polls to defeat “Gas tax Grohoski,” as Timberlake tagged her.
That was also his pitch in the almost-daily fundraising emails in the run-up to election day: Senate Republicans need donations to fund our campaign to expose Grohoski as a tax-and-spend liberal.
Meanwhile…
Last month, the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) was shamed into pulling down an instructional video for kindergartners, titled “LGBT+ Activism.” The brazen transgender propaganda piece informed 5-year-olds that sometimes the doctor makes a mistake when the doc tells parents whether a newborn baby is a boy or a girl.
That dangerous, demented nonsense was followed by rainbow-colored cartoon characters singing about “queer” and “pansexual” families.
Bear in mind that the “LGBT+ Activism” video is just the tip of the educational malpractice iceberg at MDOE. The Department’s website is packed with dumpster loads of Leftist/LGBTQ+ propaganda.
But Timberlake has consistently discouraged candidates from talking about the political and ideological indoctrination that’s the rule rather than the exception in Maine’s K-12 government-run schools.
If Langley had addressed these issues, would that have changed the outcome?
We’ll never know the answer, but one thing we do know: focusing exclusively on the price of gas and groceries was just proven to be a loser.
It appears to me that Langley never made any attempt to distinguish himself from a Democrat who embraces every extremist policy position of her party on social issues.
How about this:
Last year, Grohoski voted to kill LD 926, “An Act to Ban Biological Males from Participating in Women’s Sports.”
Grohoski is OK with allowing fully intact 17-year-old boys to compete against (and shower with) teenage girls.
To be sure, if Langley had mentioned that roll-call vote during the campaign, the Fake News media would have turned the blow torch on him. And I suspect that’s the reason so few GOP candidates are willing to stand with parents in these “culture war” battles: fear of negative publicity.
But that’s what you signed up for if you’re running for office in 2022, and it’s not going to change any time soon!
Maine’s corrupt and incompetent Fake News media flunkies are fully committed to every element of the education establishment’s campaign to normalize transgender madness.
The good news is that we can make that media bias work to our advantage if we’re ready and willing to endure the slings and arrows of the cowardly keyboard warriors of the Left. Their mindless attacks are just the ticket to inspiring and mobilizing the forgotten Mainers to head for the polls.
The alternative is to stick to “safe” issues and avoid controversy at all costs. We saw how that strategy turned out last week.
Of course, candidates should campaign on the crippling Biden/Mills economic policies that are harming Maine families. That’s an important piece of the puzzle. But candidates taking Timberlake’s advice to ONLY talk about the pocketbook — while so-called “educators” immerse the next generation of Mainers in pseudo-science and superstition — will suffer the same fate as Langley did last week.
Engaging in cultural warfare against an enemy who controls the media narrative will require boldness and creativity.
But if we flinch from this battle, we should be prepared to explain to our grandchildren what it was like when America was free.
Remember, as Ronald Reagan prophetically said:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Sincerely,
Hon. Lawrence Lockman
Maine House of Representatives, 2012-2020
Co-founder & President
Maine First Project
P.S.
Will Maine GOP “leadership” ever learn?
Yes, the economy is important, but…
Republican candidates who are too timid to stand up for Maine families in the culture war may soon discover that the inflation balloon they’ve latched onto won’t carry them across the finish line.