Dem Chair: Tea Party Came ‘Out of the Trailer Parks’

Russ Feingold, who served 12 years as a hard-left Senator from Wisconsin and lost in the Republican wave of 2010, is hoping to make a comeback in 2016.

It has been more than 80 years since a defeated Senator reclaimed his seat in the next election, but Feingold and his supporters are counting on 2010 being a political aberration.

Jim Carmey, a Feingold campaign surrogate and Chair of the Pierce County Democrats, tried to explain away Feingold’s defeat at a recent fundraiser:

2010 was just so different, with Obama just having come in and a lot of the tea party people just kind of coming out of the woodwork — coming out of the trailer parks, essentially. There was a different mix of people at the polls.

Right. Emphasis, added, of course, in case the disdain from Mr. Carmey wasn’t immediately clear.

What is it about Democrats that they always assume any loss they suffer is because of some extraordinary event, almost unnatural? Are trailer parks hot-beds of potential Republican and conservative voters who would better serve political progress by not showing up to vote?

When Bill Clinton was facing serious allegations of rape from several women, Democrat strategist James Carville famously dismissed the claims as the inevitable result of “dragging a $100 through a trailer park.”

Bill Cosby probably wishes he could have used that line.

The statement by Carmey goes a long way to understand how the Democrat party has been obliterated in large swathes of the country. Opponents of the Democrat message are always branded as somehow living “beyond the pale.” They are racists, sexists, live in “trailer parks” or “cling” to God and guns.

Carmey’s own county, where he “leads” the local Democrats, went strongly for Scott Walker in the “trailer-park” election of 2010. It also went for him strongly in the 2012 recall election and in his 2014 reelection campaign.

There are dozens of things wrong with Carmey’s statement. Sadly, there are also dozens of reasons why local or national media will never call him out on it or ask him to opine further on his astute political observation.

Since losing reelection, Russ Feingold has spent years lecturing college students as an employee of Stanford University in California. Palo Alto no doubt has strict zoning laws against trailer parks.