Cliff’s Note:
I’ve been saying for years that authenticity beats wonky nerds, but the Democrats have been intent on ignoring that for ages—and losing. I live in Ohio, and just across the border in Indiana, something amazing happened this last week.
Lawrence Winnerman writes about how there was a candidate debate for Fayette County Council. The Republican didn’t show, because of course he didn’t. But Dem candidate Jaime West did—and the twelve minutes of her interview quickly became an internet sensation.
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CONNERSVILLE, INDIANA (The Daily Whatever Press) — Asked at a candidate forum what unpopular decision she’d make if elected to the Fayette County Council, Jaime West gave the only answer in the history of candidate forums anyone has ever remembered.
“Firing all Republicans.”
She did not stop there, because she is Jaime West and she had no notes. Like, literally, she had no notes. “I wouldn’t let them. I mean, I don’t even talk to them. I don’t like them.” Then, being fair: “There are good Republicans out there.” The MAGA ones, though, she called “racist” and “not very intelligent.” And when the moderator asked for her closing message to the voters of District 4, in a county where she says people have threatened her life, she thought it over and said, “We have guns too.”
Don’t believe me? Watch it for yourself:
The forum ran Friday, October 9, on LocalTV3, co-sponsored by the Connersville News-Examiner, whose managing editor, Amy Graham-McCarty, moderated with the composure of a woman who has moderated a great many things in Fayette County and never once this. West’s segment starts about thirty-three minutes in. By Tuesday, the clip was on Mediaite, the New York Post, Breitbart, the Blaze, TMZ, and, naturally, Libs of TikTok, which posted it with the caption “This is NOT a skit.” By midweek, BuzzFeed counted 8.2 million people engaging with it. The whole county has about 23,000.
Who she is
Jaime West is a mother of three grown kids. She owns Queen Bee’s Cleaning LLC. She delivers groceries and packages around Fayette County for a living, and she said so on camera like it was the most normal credential in the world, because it is. She opened by saying she had no prepared statement and would speak “from my heart,” and then she did exactly that for several minutes, and the heart in question turned out to have opinions about ICE “coming into our communities, stealing people’s jobs.” Yes, mama!
She came to clean house, and instead she won the hearts of every fed-up red state Democrat in the country. Hell, I live in Indiana, and if it didn’t mean voter fraud (which isn’t prevalent and always seems to be a Trump voter, anyways), I would drive a couple hours south and vote for this hero myself.
Her Republican opponent, Gary Keener Jr., did not attend. He had “prior business commitments,” so he sent a statement for the moderator to read aloud, and it said he had “never been more excited and committed to work diligently and tirelessly” to spend tax dollars efficiently and broaden the tax base. Graham-McCarty read it. I assume she read it well. Nobody has posted a clip of it, because nobody has ever posted a clip of a tax-base statement, anywhere, ever.
So that is the matchup in District 4: one candidate who showed up with nothing but herself, and one candidate who sent a fax from 1991.
What the outrage machine thought it was doing
Fayette County went for Trump by about 77 percent in 2024. There is no public polling on this race, because there is never public polling on a county council race, because until last Friday nobody outside Fayette County knew it had a council. The right-wing content industry found the clip and did what it does: it tried to turn a woman who cleans houses in Connersville into a national exhibit of Democratic derangement. Libs of TikTok asked whether she was intoxicated. Blaze Media’s Steve Baker decided she was “clearly drunk or high.” Zero Hedge got involved, which is how you know a story has reached the part of the internet where everyone is a doctor.
This data is presented as part of a partnership with Polymarket
Nothing has been confirmed. Not one of the people diagnosing her was in the room, and I am not going to be the forty-thousandth guy on the internet with a medical opinion about a stranger in a thirty-second clip. What I will say is that the people clutching their pearls hardest over “We have guns too” are the same people who spent the last decade posting family portraits where everyone, including the toddler, is holding an AR-15. A Hoosier Democrat says one sentence about the Second Amendment, and suddenly the Come and Take It crowd needs a fainting couch. SHUDDER
