Probably not a Republican vote. Or a Democratic vote. But elections are decided by the swing voters. And exposing Santos’ truly mind-boggling lies might have swung enough voters away from him to cost him the election.
He fabricates shit to make up for his inadequacies, at least that’s what I told my girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
It pains me to have to write that I live in Nassau County, in Santos’s district. At least I can say that I didn’t vote for him. His campaign spent a lot of money, with sleazy ads all over the place. In contrast, Zimmerman’s campaign was very low-key, surprisingly for a district that should have been very competitive and has swung back and forth over the last couple of decades. People were wondering why Zimmerman was so quiet, maybe because Santos lost the last time he ran, with 43% to his opponent’s 56%: 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in New York - Wikipedia.
The person whom many blame for the poorly run NY Democratic races and losses is New York State Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who happens to be the Nassau County Democratic Party Chair as well.
A couple of interesting articles:
New York Democrats Wonder How They Dropped the Ball on George Santos (thedailybeast.com)
Democrat who lost to George Santos calls on him to resign following NYT report (yahoo.com)
I’m rather surprised he did not claim to be another pope emeritus.
Just seems so odd - and disappointing - to have so clearly dropped the ball here given the long buildup as to the importance of EVERY seat. Being a Dem often seems like being a fan of a team that always seems to underperform…
“I didn’t say I was the Pope. I just said I was Pope-ish.”
Good question. The Dems must have been asleep not to make an issue out of any of this.
From slate.com:
A yarn for the ages.
This guy managed to flip a House seat on Long Island in November while seemingly lying about every single detail in his biography. According to several reports last week, the millennial Republican fabricated several easily falsifiable claims during his campaign, including having Jewish grandparents who fled the Nazis, attending Baruch College and NYU, working at Goldman Sachs, owning 13 properties, running an animal rescue nonprofit, and employing four people who were later killed in the 2016 Pulse massacre. None of those things appear to be true! He also claims to have been [openly gay] for a decade but was married to a woman until late 2019? And we haven’t even gotten to the shady financial disclosures yet! Or the alleged Ponzi scheme! (Somehow, New York Democrats neglected to jump on [any of this] before the election … perhaps to save themselves the embarrassment of losing to Santos anyway.) On Monday, in two interviews with conservative news outlets, Santos finally owned to a few of the fibs, which were really just misunderstandings, you see. His campaign website had asserted that he “began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced,” but that was merely a “poor choice of words,” he [told the New York Post] in that he never held any job with the company. Poor wording indeed! Moreover, Santos said, “I never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’ ” To his credit, this is an excellent choice of words! Very funny, George Santos.”
It depends how they were exposed.
I suspect that if the Jewish Press, which has a largely Orthodox readership, had exposed his lying about his ancestry and the Holocaust, this would have been very damaging.
But if the Forward, which has a progressive readership, had exposed this (as actually happened, but not until last month), the damage would have been less.
As if this had been exposed in Zimmerman campaign ads, well — check out the political science evidence on the effectiveness of negative ads.
You might think that negative ads work better than the political science averages when true. I really don’t know, but without evidence, I doubt it.
Many posts in this thread are ignoring the difference between dirt exposed in a campaign and the same outside of the immediate election context. The.New York Times would have less credibility, in a campaign, if all their negative stories were anti-Santos. Now that Zimmerman isn’t running, there’s no issue concerning whether coverage is balanced. The bad publicity hurt Santos, long term, worse because it came out after the election.
When I was a true swing voter, I liked voting against candidates who ran negative ads.
The good news is that Santos has been greatly damaged for 2024.
I disagree with that argument. If this story had been released before the election, it might have swung enough votes for Zimmerman to have won. The story released now - and I’ll note that nobody appears to be denying that the story is substantially true - might damage Santos’ reputation but won’t oust him from Congress.
In fact, I wonder if somebody in Santos’ organization was the one who leaked the story. By having it come out now, when it does no practical damage, it won’t be a bombshell that can be thrown at him in 2024.
A might is hard to argue against. But it wasn’t close (8.2% margin). And it depends who released it!
Not this year, anyway.
If the New York Times story had run in September, the FoxNews commentators would have been denying it was substantially true. For example, they might (that word again) have been saying he meets some made-up LGBTQ criteria for being gay for ten years. But, if not, they would have come up with some other misleading nonsense meaning, to those who buy it, that the Democratic are hypocrites whose dirt is substantially wrong. You are correct that nobody important is substantially denying it now.
18 months or so from now, we can check back and see how Santos is faring politically. I think that the New York Times (combined with his own behavior) destroyed his chances for a long political career, but, of course, I could be wrong.
Here’s a bit of news that may render the whole concern moot:
Gift link:
From the article:
Just a month before his 20th birthday, Mr. Santos entered a small clothing store in the Brazilian city of Niterói outside Rio de Janeiro. He spent nearly $700 using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show.
Mr. Santos admitted the fraud to the shop owner in August 2009, writing on Orkut, a popular social media website in Brazil, “I know I screwed up, but I want to pay.” In 2010, he and his mother told the police that he had stolen the checkbook of a man his mother used to work for, and used it to make fraudulent purchases.
Extradition is a thing.
The likelihood of Brazil extraditing an American Congressman over a seven hundred dollar theft is really remote.
Agreed, but you never know now that it’s a big political issue here in the USA.
To me, the funniest bit of that NYT article is this, “The matter, which stemmed from an incident in 2008 regarding a stolen checkbook, had been suspended for the better part of a decade because the police were unable to locate him.”
Presumably now he’s easy to locate.
Yes. It makes you wonder what other skeletons are in his closet that may come to light.
Based on EVERYTHING we know about this guy, you KNOW he was thinking “I know I screwed up…by getting caught”.
Just so. An article on cnn.com tells us:
“Brazilian authorities intend to revive fraud case against George Santos” … “related to a stolen checkbook in 2008, after police suspended an investigation into him because they were unable to find him for nearly a decade” … “Santos spent nearly $700 out of the stolen checkbook using a fake name”
I don’t like typical negative ads either. But “Congressman Jones is destroying America and hates your mother” is different than “Santos lied about attending college”
Apparently, when he cast his vote for Speaker of the House a few minutes ago, another Latino representative shouted, “Mentiroso” (Liar) at him.
Good times.