If Ossoff wins, I’ll say: highlighting your opponent’s corruption is good. If he loses I’ll say: highlighting your opponent’s corruption is good even if it isn’t politically resonant enough for a Dem candidate to win a runoff election in Georgia that he also did not win on Nov 3. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1345407459201085442

My take is based less on the view that anti-corruption politics are effective (elections are weird and highly variable) than that corruption is bad and corrupt candidates should be held to account.

I do suspect anti-corruption politics are pretty effective in the scheme of things: corruption costs politicians popularity and elected office a lot; all challengers would rather run against corrupt opponents than squeaky clean ones.

Republicans seem to get this too. Obama’s administration was unusually ethical, but Republicans strafed Dems with insincere anti-corruption rhetoric from day one: Solyndra, cornhusker kickback, “crony capitalism,” Lois Lerner, Fast/Furious, Benghazi conspiracy theories, emails...

The shock of it has worn off after 4 years, but the transition between Obama’s scandal free 8 years and the Trump era was very jarring. Even with all the bad faith of those GOP attacks, I’d like to go back—except this time with a commitment to accountability for past crime.

I think ignoring corruption is bad practice, and can have profound consequences, even if data people argue with pseudoscientific rigor that ignoring corruption in favor of other issues is savvy. There’s more to politics than supposedly laboratory-optimized campaign tactics.