Nebraska Senate hopeful mocked Trump supporters in leaked audio

You couldn’t have picked a better way to kick off a statewide campaign in Nebraska than by calling a voter a "Billy Bob" from a hick town. It’s a bold strategy. It just might win.

The leaked audio captures Dan Osborn doing what a certain type of Democrat has done for years: sneering at the people he supposedly wants to represent. He looks down his nose at the folks in Red Cloud, waves off their flags as if they’re costumes, and concludes they’re just too dumb to know any better. That’s not a political disagreement. That’s contempt for the people themselves. And in a state like Nebraska, that leaks about as well as a screen door on a submarine.

What Osborn misses is that the Trump voter in a small town isn’t a rube who believes in a "television character." They are watching the same economy he is, and they’ve drawn different conclusions about who is on their side. When a candidate says "all he knows is that he’s on the winning team," they are saying that working Americans have no principles, only tribal instincts. It’s a deeply cynical view of patriotism, and it tells you everything about how he’d vote in Washington—he’d side with the people who share his worldview, not the people he mocks.

There’s a certain irony in a candidate insulting the voters he needs while simultaneously asking them for their time and their signature on the ballot. You don’t have to live in Red Cloud to know that talking down to the base is a losing strategy. Maybe Osborn thinks he’s too clever for the room, but he’s just proved the one thing conservatives have said about the left all along: they don’t think we’re smart enough to run the country. Their words, in this case, not ours. Good luck with that in November.