The publisher of the conservative Bulwark website begged Democrats in a Saturday column to do everything they can to make sure their nominee is one that can beat President Donald Trump in 2020.
“Dear Democrats,” Sarah Longwell wrote. “I’m a Republican and I’m here to help.”
Longwell remarked that the current spate of presidential hopefuls, the “Democratic present is looking an awful lot like our Republican past.”
“Remember 2015? It was an exciting year for Republicans,” she wrote. “There were 16 candidates running for president and a slight majority of them looked (at the time) like pretty good options.”
Longwell noted that between 2015 and 2016, GOP voters went from “spending a lot of time trying to decide which candidate in that distinguished pack would earn my vote” to it being all over with Trump as the nominee.
“In retrospect you can see where everything went wrong,” she wrote after outlining the many missteps on behalf of the non-Trump candidates. “And therein lies the cautionary tale for you, my Democratic friends.”
She noted that “the moment Trump won the nomination” was when Republicans failed to heed the call of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who dropped out of the race after a series of “missteps.”
“Today, I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the field in this race so that a positive, conservative message can rise to the top of the field,” Walker said when he dropped out. “I encourage other Republican presidential candidates to consider doing the same so that the voters can focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive, conservative alternative to the current front-runner. This is fundamentally important to the future of the party and, more importantly, to the future of our country.”
Republicans didn’t heed the former Wisconsin governor’s call and instead “stayed in and decided to battle each other for the supremacy of their respective lanes,” Longwell wrote.
“They were so concerned with winning the ‘moderate’ lane, or the ‘evangelical’ lane that they didn’t bother to look at who was winning the actual race,” she added. “They ignored Trump, who was consistently polling in first place, all alone in his ‘burn it all down’ lane.”
Read the entire column via The Bulwark.