Electoralism/Democratism

Do We Still Elect Boring Guys Like John Avlon to Congress?

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You could think of journalist turned congressional hopeful John Avlon as a kind of Rockefeller Republican revivalist, one of that vanished breed of cheerfully patrician moderate no longer welcome in either party. As a Democrat, Avlon still believes in the ’90s idea of the Third Way, a throwback notion these days. Even his wife, Firing Line host Margaret Hoover (yes, that president’s granddaughter), thought his let’s-all-get-along politics was “naïve” when she met him. And yet, after years in journalism editing the Daily Beast and working as a CNN pundit, he’s had a midlife turn toward running for Congress. He’s competing in New York’s First District, which includes Sag Harbor, the media-elite Hamptons village where he owns a summer house; it’s also currently represented by a Republican who endorsed Trump. As New York’s Shawn McCreesh writes after spending a few weeks hanging out with Avlon, “His candidacy now seems like a case test: If you run a perfectly reasonable, media-trained golden retriever of a man who talks like a Clinton Democrat crossed with an extinct breed of pragmatic big-city Republican, will voters go for it?”

—Carl Swanson, editor-at-large, New York

The Nice Guy Can former CNN pundit John Avlon flip a Long Island congressional seat blue with his West Wing throwback politics?

Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
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