If you can’t beat them, shock them.
Or at least that seems to be the campaign slogan a whole host of GOP gubernatorial hopefuls have come to embrace as more and more Republicans attempt to win the hearts (and votes) for various governor’s races in November.
There’s GOP lawmaker Michele Fiore, who announced her run for Nevada governor last fall with a campaign video that shows her firing a gun at bottles labelled “vaccine mandates”, “critical race theory” and “voter fraud”.
More recently, Florida Gov Ron DeSantis launched a campaign ad from a public engagement at a high school where he tells the masked students to remove their face coverings and that “the political science show cannot go on. “It’s curtain call for Covid theatre”.
The new normal is anything but in the world of 2022 political theatre. The most recent ad campaign from West Linn-based political consultant Bridget Barton, who joined the field of Republican candidates for Oregon governor as an “outsider” last summer, fits this new post-Trumpian tone to a tee.
In the video, Ms Barton plays a game of H-O-R-S-E, a schoolyard game in which players take aim at a basketball hoop and for each missed shot add another letter to the word until it’s spelled out in entirety and they eventually lose.
In her twist on the game, she spells out a failure of the political system with each shot she takes: H, “insanely high prices on gas, cartel heroin killing our kids,” O, “outrageous mandates, shortages, gun violence” and so forth.
“Everyone knows, you get the same horse s*** electing the same stale politicians,” the Oregon-native closes, before hoola-hooping the basketball around her waist.
In case the ad wasn’t enough to shock voters into her orbit, Ms Barton included in her Twitter thread a more surefire gimmick to garner an increasingly divided nation’s short attention span: challenging professional basketball players to the game.
And the NBA mentions didn’t stop there. Ms Barton also went on to challenge NBA Hall of Famers Charles Barkley and Shaq to the childhood basketball game, along with dozens of other local – and not so local – celebrities, including American country music stars Jason Aldean and Toby Keith.
Ms Barton is entering a crowded field of a couple dozen contenders who are vying for the Oregon governorship, according to data from Ballotpedia, a nonprofit and nonpartisan online political encyclopedia.
Reviews of the TV ad on Twitter have so far been few, but include a mixture of approval and – perhaps the candidate’s goal – entertainment.
