OPINION:
Sometimes, candidates just acknowledge things that everyone already knows but that no one ever says out loud.
Dan Osborn has done that. An independent U.S. Senate candidate endorsed and adopted by Democrats in Nebraska was captured on tape — in a recording released by Townhall — explaining that he is forced to hide his leftist positions on key issues because voters would reject them if they learned of them.
“I have people recording me, so I can’t say I want to abolish ICE,” Mr. Osborn said on the tape, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “I can’t say those words.”
At another point, he acknowledged that he could not disclose his opinions on transgender athletes playing girls’ and women’s sports because he needed as much as 15% of the Republican vote to have any chance of winning.
All this is unusual because most of the time, a Democrat would never simply open up about deceiving the voters on plans to govern as a leftist, although it is exactly what Democrats are doing in this age of communism in their party.
Like in Kentucky, with this character, Zach Dembo.
He is the Democrat running in the 6th Congressional District there, seeking an open seat vacated by Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican who is running to replace Mitch McConnell in the Senate.
Mr. Dembo is pushed by national Democrats as one of their “normal” candidates, which is a hilariously obvious acknowledgment that too many of their candidates are openly running as wild-eyed extremists.
Still, Mr. Dembo is avoiding the mistake Mr. Osborn made of giving away the game, and he is keeping the con going.
First, about that designation as a “normal” candidate.
An early thing we learned about Mr. Dembo was that his email address was found in the data breach of Ashley Madison, the Canadian online dating service for married people looking for affairs. (Through a spokesperson, Mr. Dembo said he was not married at the time and has no idea how that happened.)
So normal.
More important, he is not at all who he presents himself to be.
His campaign narrative leans heavily on his time as a federal prosecutor in the Biden administration, and in his first television ad, he said he went after “violent criminals for the Department of Justice.”
Yet two years ago, Mr. Dembo appeared on a local Kentucky podcast called “The Good Guy Guide” and went out of his way to make excuses for those violent criminals he brags about targeting today. He offered the concept of “masculine discrepancy stress” as a psychological explanation.
“There’s this expectation of what it means to be masculine,” Mr. Dembo said on the podcast. “And when someone falls short of that, that’s when they tend to act in a way that’s not constructive, because they think they have to overcompensate.”
Yes, it is true. It turns out that this former federal prosecutor has a soft spot for the bad guys.
This concern for the mental anguish of criminals makes more sense when you realize that Mr. Dembo spent much of his career as a prosecutor putting police officers on trial. He used the entire weight of the federal government to go after cops, including some who were acquitted by the federal juries that heard their cases.
The Democrat would like people to believe that he was chasing hardened criminals, but in reality, he was in the woke Biden Justice Department, prosecuting law enforcement officers during the “defund the police” frenzy on the left.
Another thing is Mr. Dembo’s history of environmental activism, which would not sell well in a commonwealth where the economy was upended during the Obama administration’s war on coal. That is why you do not hear him talk about his days at Stanford University, where he was the outspoken and quotable leader of an extreme environmental group that believed that liberal Stanford was not liberal enough.
Perhaps the irony is lost on him, but the seat Mr. Dembo is seeking was won by Mr. Barr in 2012, in part because of the political fallout in Kentucky from national leftist environmental policies exactly like those at Stanford.
On the Republican side is Ralph Alvarado, a doctor and former state legislator, who will keep taxes low, fight crime, promote domestic energy production and attack the cost of healthcare with the expertise of a physician.
Mr. Alvarado, a client of my public affairs firm, is a solid conservative with a record that proves it.
Public polls show the race tied, but that is because of Mr. Dembo’s practiced obfuscation of his true ideology, and time is running out for him.
Sometimes it is through leaked audio, such as Mr. Osborn’s, and sometimes it is in past actions and statements, as with Mr. Dembo.
Either way, leftists always reveal themselves in the end.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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