For all the praise that Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders gets from talking heads in places like Fox News and OANN, the reality is that her electoral success has largely been more about being in the right place at the right time and less about any particular political savvy. She started as a do-nothing comms person for John Boozman’s campaign, bounced around for a while as one of the nine people in America who thought Mike Huckabee would make a good president, then jumped aboard Donald Trump’s MAGA train, riding it all the way to the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion.
To the extent she has any kind of political strategy, it is basically just various forms of punching down at groups that Sanders thinks her base will enjoy laughing at. (Her hamfisted, unclever ad about “men in women’s sports” is a perfect recent example.)
But even something seemingly as simple as punching down can backfire if you lack the basic political skills to understand which groups you should avoid because targeting them will make a certain subset of your supporters very angry. It’s a lesson that Sanders is quickly learning today after she posted this ad on Twitter Monday morning:
In case you aren’t able to watch the ad, a quick summary: a 20-something guy is playing video games and eating snacks, and we’re to believe he’s doing this via welfare money, which he apparently accepts in lieu of getting a job. Sanders appears on screen and tells him she’s ending his ability to do that, which prompts our antihero to put on a tie and join the workforce.
Just like with most of Sanders’ campaign messaging, it’s as lazy and unoriginal as it is stupid. Unlike her other messages, however, this one has a white guy as the butt of the unfunny jokes, which has a certain subset of conservatives feeling like they’re being bullied. And they are absolutely letting Sanders hear about it on Twitter.
Here’s just a tiny sampling of the racist, whiny vitriol MAGA types are spewing in Sanders’ direction today:
Won’t someone please think of the poor, oppressed white man?!
Again, this is just a tiny fraction of the response Sanders’ ad is getting, nearly all of it negative and varying only in degrees of overt racism and calls for Sanders’ head. At their most calm, the responses harp on whether it’s statistically accurate to use a white person for the ad, given the percentage of single, white men on welfare. At their worst, the responses are photoshopping other races into the ad and dropping N-bombs. Across the board, pretty much every negative response appears to be from someone who would likely categorize himself as a Republican voter, at least in Trump’s America.
Why even create such a tone deaf ad? Hard to say. One theory floating around in the cesspool that is Twitter comments is that this ad is specifically for Boomers for whom the caricature of a hapless 20-something white guy playing video games in a basement is how they picture “gamers,” who they also instinctively associate with “too lazy to get a job.”
While that’s plausible, at least on its face, it’s sort of undercut by the fact that Sanders’ people posted the new ad on Twitter — where lots of actual 20-something white racist losers hang out — and not on Facebook, where it might actually get seen by the bulk of Sanders’ Boomer-aged supporters. So it seems more likely that Sanders & Co., devoid of political instincts but supremely sure of their own brilliance, ran the ad on Twitter thinking it would get the same kind of “LOL THIS IS EPIC” response that Elon Musk gets when he farts out some lazy racist trope or conspiracy theory.
Instead, they got such blowback that Sanders felt the need to comment on the negative reaction. And, because she can’t help herself, she decided to go with snark rather than acknowledging any error on her part.
It’s all very dumb, admittedly. The worst people in the world, mad at Sanders for not being racist enough in a campaign ad. Still, the fact that Sanders’ camp was so incredibly wrong about the reaction they’d receive is yet another sign that there’s really no reason to worry about her ever being president.