GOP Agenda "An Albatross" - Simon's Quick Take on Lamb's Big Win

In a thread this morning Simon offered his quick take on PA-18.  Greg Sargent of the Washington Post described it this way:

The Trump/GOP agenda may be a big albatross for Republicans. Republicans had banked heavily on selling their tax cuts to voters as proof that they’re getting things done for working- and middle-class people. But in the final days, Republicans dialed down their messaging about the tax cuts, because it wasn’t working. Lamb appears to have kept GOP foe Rick Saccone’s margins down in the deep-red counties while also doing very well in the Pittsburgh suburbs, suggesting that the tax plan is not working as planned either among blue-collar white Trump voters or among more-educated suburban whites, who were supposed to respond to it by suppressing their gag reflex about Trump and voting on taxes instead.

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg suggests that the results show not just that the GOP tax plan is failing, but also that the whole Trump/GOP agenda is an albatross for Republicans. Trump has fully embraced Paul Ryan’s plutocratic agenda — trying and failing to repeal a huge chunk of the safety net and passing a huge permanent tax cut for the wealthy and corporations — while continuing the drumbeat of racist and xenophobic cultural provocations (with a hasty, haphazard gesture toward protectionism in the form of the tariffs thrown in). But Lamb won back large numbers of disaffected blue-collar Democrats — exactly the people who are supposed to believe Trump when he tells them his tax plan is good for them — and the surge of suburban voters against Trump appeared to continue. In short: The pluto-populism isn’t working.”