So Crazy, It Just Might Work

It rings up 450,000 views on YouTube, and you end up on MSNBC twice in a week. Whoopi Goldberg gives you a shout-out on The View. Your phone starts ringing off the hook and the 2018 midterm congressional elections begin right there on your doorstep. Your mustache, and the Twitter handle it spawned—@ironstache—are both judged to be cool by the mysterious unwritten standards of the Intertoobz. Suddenly, the country knows you're an Army veteran who served in Central America during the Reagan years, and that you've already beaten testicular cancer. That's how it works these days if you're Randy Bryce and people say that you're "blowing up" a year and a half before anyone votes for anybody.

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Truth be told, despite its spectacularly fast start, it's a long haul up a dirt road for Bryce's campaign. First of all, a sitting Speaker has lost for re-election only three times in the country's history, most recently in 1994, when Democratic Speaker Tom Foley lost to Republican George Nethercutt. (The other two, Galusha Grow and William Pennington, got beat during the turmoil immediately preceding the Civil War.) Second, Bryce is facing a three-way primary and one of the other candidates, David Yankovich, moved from Ohio to Kenosha specifically to run against Ryan.

[...]

And last, of course, is the fact that Paul Ryan is the coddled child of America's plutocrats and will likely have so much money to spend on his re-election that god will ask him to float a loan.

  Charles P Pierce

We just saw an election where that didn't help.

Good luck, Randy Bryce.