Minnesota voters reject Will Stancil politics

Local activist and public servant Katie Jones wins with an assist from the Twitter left

You’ll have to indulge my pettiness on this one: tonight, infamous Twitter creep Will Stancil was handily defeated in his doomed campaign for the Democratic nomination in Minnesota District 61A.

The loss is saturated in irony because Stancil and his online goon squad represent two of the absolute worst tendencies of contemporary liberal politics. First, a bizarre conviction that centrist Democrats are the only people who know how to win, and that leftists never accomplish anything. These are the guys who talk about “pragmatism” and “being realistic” as if these are profound insights into realpolitik that the left just doesn’t get — rather than, you know, banal truisms that no one actually rejects.

Second, Will in particular is completely in the grips of an insane overestimation of the political importance of social media. Twitter is for these guys what control of the means of production is for Marxists: the axis upon which the wheel of history turns. I have written about his genuinely crankish views about this before so I won’t labor the point here, but suffice to say that winning the internet somehow did not end up winning the election.

This campaign was the perfect test for this approach to politics, and it failed abysmally. Endlessly punching left did not somehow appeal to local “normies”. Running a completely media-obsessed campaign did not translate into votes on the ground. Centrists do not have some kind of authoritative standing to lecture the left about winning, and this is especially true when we’re talking about a bougie online dilettante endlessly berating lifelong activists on the left about their supposed impotence and naivete.

I won’t pretend that this election was ever going to matter much outside of district 61a, but there are some lessons here if anyone cares to learn them. In conclusion: LOL.