I did a Space last night with former Casey Putsch campaign worker George Roush discussing why Putsch lost. George unfortunately did not record it but here is my summary:
- Casey COULD have won. Early campaign analytics had Putsch beating Vivek Ramasmarmy with 54 percent of the vote. That was in December.
- Casey became the candidate because George had been canvassing for someone to run against Vivek and Casey was the only one who stepped up. So thank you to Casey for that at least.
- Casey had incredible access to the resources he needed to win. He had a number of big donors who were ready to open their wallets, he had Turning Point staff working on his campaign, and he had access to institutional GOP support.
- Putsch largely ruined his chances through his narcissism and ego. He refused to take his campaign's advice, refused to moderate his presentation to appeal to Ohio voters (the advice I gave last night---don't attack Trump, don't sperg out about Israel, don't stunt on social media---was told to him repeatedly by his own staffers), steadfully refused to fundraise, and was habitually abusive to his workers to the point where he had a revolving door on personnel. Casey even refused to attend policy meetings, then would go on interviews where he embarrassed himself, then blamed his campaign staff even though he refused to put in any work himself. George himself departed the campaign in February due to the hostile work environment that Casey had created and the harm that Casey's antics were doing to George's professional relationships.
- Kim Georgeton, Casey's running mate, was a consummate professional who did far more work and was far more of a team player than him. She would actually listen to staffers, helped develop policy, networked at GOP events on her own time, and actually took the campaign seriously.
- The Ohio GOP played dirty. The campaign had a consistent problem with retaining personnel. Casey barely qualified for the ballot due to a complete meltdown in signature gathering.
- The Putsch campaign's initial strategy was to use a mix of positive press from sympathetic journalists (I was one of the ones they reached out to) and trolling the MSM in order to keep the GOP from "smothering the campaign in silence." This was to be followed by Casey doing a hard pivot to position himself as a normal Christian candidate, starting with Casey doing a Christmas photo op on the one-year anniversary of Vivek's Christmas Crashout. Casey refused to go along with the pivot and a crucial opportunity was lost.
- Casey largely checked out of his own campaign at the end of February in favor of trolling on social media and focusing on his YouTube channel. By that point, his remaining staffers had determined he could not win. The votes that Casey got were entirely due to what was left of his campaign doing outreach and networking and not due to Casey himself. As George put it, without that infrastructure, Casey would have gotten five percent of the vote at most.
- America First United (Anti-Semitic Fyre Fest) in many ways symbolized the failure of the Putsch campaign. Casey chose to hobnob with a bunch of influencer freaks that were poison to the voters he needed to win. Casey himself was obsessed with getting an endorsement from Nick Fuentes despite his staffers telling him this was a terrible idea.
- The Retard Right is in the middle of collapse. George pointed out that Putsch ratioed Nick Fuentes a few days ago. A certain other Retard Right political candidate who has openly attacked me is liking all my posts attacking Fuentes. More public recriminations are coming.
- George's organization has successfully built an infrastructure that they can use to run insurgent candidates anywhere in Ohio. This means that future candidates, better ones, can take the lessons learned from Putsch's failure and win.
- A significant number of boomers really do hate young Americans. As part of the campaign, Putsch's volunteers would point out Vivek's Christmas Crashout to boomer Republican voters. A disturbingly large share of them agreed with Vivek and said they would vote for him BECAUSE of the crashout, because they thought kids these days are lazy and ungrateful. We have a LOT of work to do to overcome this hurdle.
I'm grateful to George for doing the Space and sharing what happened. Also looking forward to what his organization does from here on out. This isn't about Casey Putsch. This is a generational struggle which will have many losses until we win.
