The Law of Unintended Consequences

You may recall Elise Stefanik, by action if not by name.  She's the Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee who kept interrupting the proceedings by breaking the agreed-upon rules and then when she wasn't allowed to speak out of turn, snarkily kept whining that it was all Chairman Adam Schiff's fault.

(For the record, if you couldn't follow what the foundation of the issue was, it's this -- Before the hearings began, certain rules were set up on how the proceedings would be run, and they were agreed to.  Among those rules it was determined that the first 45 minutes for each side would be restricted specifically and solely to either the party leader or the party's attorney -- and no one else.  So, when Devin Nunes, the Ranking Member for the Republican Party tried to defer some of his opening time to Ms. Stefanik, that was against the agreed-upon rules.  Neither he nor Adam Schiff could do that.  Either Mr. Nunes or the Republican lawyer could speak during that first 45 minutes of GOP time -- but no one else.)

Anyway, after the hearing, Rep. Stefanik (R-NY 21) took to Twitter and began crowing about...well, something, but it seemed to be sort of that she had ostensibly, somehow exposed Adam Schiff to the world for apparently his supposed partisan unfairness -- and she was roundly trashed for it by those who understood that she was lying.

But what stood out most to me is that, in her social media complaints, she included a fundraising plea, asking people to donate to her campaign in order to allow her to keep speaking out against all this supposed Democratic unfairness.  At which point it all became clear to me.  After all, her interruptions and petulance during the hearing seemed so weird.  But it seemed less weird (though no less reprehensible) when you saw it was a fundraising stunt to get people to donate money.

There's good news and bad news to this.

The good news is that it turns out the public took Elise Stefanik's words to heart, and they did indeed donate money to the race.  The bad news is that people donated their money to her Democratic opponent, Tedra Cobb instead.  And in a really big way.

How big?  By the end of the weekend, Tedra Cobb had received over one million dollars!
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I am happy to announce we raised $1 million dollars!

It is impossible to express the feeling of gratitude I have tonight. Thank you #TeamTedra

Together we started something big but it’s not over yet.

If you haven’t had a chance you can donate here⬇️https://t.co/w0DWfCeoj0

— Tedra Cobb for Congress (@TedraCobb) November 18, 2019

Two things to keep in mind:  first, the above is time-stamped at 5:25 PM , so 15 hours later I have no idea how much more money has come pouring in since then and what the total is up to now.  And second, this is for a congressional race.  One million dollars is a huge amount of money.  And that's not how much Ms. Cobb has to spend, but only how much she's raised in four days.

To be clear, the New York 21st district is solidly Republican.  So, Elise Stefanik is in comfortable position. But when she ran year ago against the same Tedra Cobb, her margin of victory was safe, but not insurmountable.  It was 14 points.  And we've see a lot of swings of 15-20 points in local elections during the past year.  And that's before Ms. Stefanik drew so much attention to herself whining and lying to defend Trump.  Will that and the million dollars and whatever else Tedra Cobb raises be enough to overcome last year's 14-point difference?  Who knows, we'll find out.

But when you ask people to donate to your race, be careful what you wish for -- you just might get it.