Hey, @clairecmc, go fuck yourself https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/1324216738465173505

Fucking fuck. What the fuck. How DARE you, @clairecmc? How DARE you? “Rights for transsexuals.” Oh, I’m sorry that I’m a fucking human fucking being, you utter piece of garbage.

“Rights for transsexuals.”

You seriously went on fucking TV and said that had only Democrats not pushed for people like me to have “rights” (you didn’t even say what kind of rights, just general “rights”), Dems would be doing fine.

Oh, you were worried about “leaving voters behind?” Am I not a voter? Are people like me not voters? Does my life not matter, @clairecmc?

Also, you never did jack shit for people like me. What “rights” did you help secure, FORMER senator? None. Nothing. Nada.

You lost your seat in a WAVE election year, @clairecmc. Do you realize how hard that is to do? You and other Republican-lite Senate Dems got trounced in 2018. It turns out that voters who support Republican policies... just vote for the Republican candidate!

If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that Dems made mistakes by thinking that if they just move a little closer to the center that they’ll win over Republican voters. Nope! Didn’t work for you, @clairecmc, didn’t work for Donnelly in Indiana, didn’t work for Heitkampcin ND.

If there’s a failed Dem electoral policy, it’s that they keep running clones of you, @clairecmc. How’d Trump Democrat Amy McGrath do this week? Did running a pro-Trump and help her win her race? No, it did not.

The fact that MSNBC pays you to appear on air in any context other than, “We welcome to the show human electoral cautionary tale Claire McCaskill,” is amazing, @clairecmc.

The only electoral advice @clairecmc is qualified to give is to hope that you end up running against someone as incompetent as Todd Akin.

Instead, she lost her seat to a guy whose top issue is his own misunderstanding of the Communications Decency Act.

The core point here is that this lie that Dems were too focused on things like trans rights to talk about “meat and potato issues” is just a lie. Dems didn’t build platforms around trans rights. That was never core to their campaigns. LGBTQ rights was always a secondary priority.

Stop blaming trans people for your own failures, @clairecmc

Also, it’s really telling how many “hashtag resistance!” Dems are replying to this thread defending McCaskill. I see you. And I’m not surprised.

Anyone who’s confused by my anger at this same ridiculous talking point, read this thing I wrote more than 2 years ago https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/media-keep-talking-about-identity-politics-what-does-it-even-mean-anymore

Absolute trash in my mentions. Absolute trash.

Also, this is what @clairecmc does. She’s like a doll with a pull-string who says a handful of phrases whenever you put her in front of a camera, one of them being “stay away from identity politics!”

From February 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/14/what-claire-mccaskill-gets-wrong-about-identity-politics/

She’s been making this same point, unsupported by data, since she lost.

But yes, as @daveweigel points out, insofar as any party regularly makes trans rights an issue, it’s the GOP trying to scare voters. I’ve never seen Dems run an ad that was specific to a platform centered on trans issues. https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1324343651749842946

Here is an actual campaign ad Ted Cruz ran in 2016. His last-ditch effort to try to win the GOP nomination was to argue that Trump wasn’t hostile ENOUGH to trans people. (When Cruz refers to “grown men pretending to be women,” he’s referring to trans women FYI)

(That ad was in response to Trump being asked about a law North Carolina Republicans passed to explicitly legalize discrimination against trans people — again, not something Dems did. Trump eventually endorsed that law.)

And it’s something that right-wingers obsess over. Look at this quick compilation of guys on the right @JohnnyHeatWave made https://twitter.com/johnnyheatwave/status/1322270830819217409

If the issue was simply that Dems just need to put less emphasis on issues like trans rights or anything else McCaskill would roll her eyes at, that’d be one thing. But Dems *already don’t put emphasis on that*

The people who make this a big issue on the right do it unprompted. Know who talks about trans issues more than anyone else on TV? Tucker Carlson. Seriously. I’m 2018 I did an analysis of his show’s transcripts and it turned out that he’d mentions trans people every few episodes.

So get out of here with that “We just need to talk more about meat and potatoes issues!” nonsense. Dems are already laser focused on jobs/economy/health care/etc. and that’s good. When you talk like this, you’re just looking for excuses.