Thread by @xenocryptsite

Everyone in Hawaii every two years since 1998:

https://twitter.com/GartonArthur/status/1426183732361322501

Women in Hawaii have the highest life expectancy of any state/gender group in America so she's probably not near done.

(If Tulsi Gabbard, apparently a particularly athletic and healthy young woman in Hawaii, hadn't been...whatever she is, she might have beaten all the Congressional longevity records.)

Like if she had just hung out in her safe seat, eating whatever weird health food she gets suspiciously large donations from, why not.

Well she IS and always has been a weird outsider, and that's probably why she has whatever audience she has. Good with the bad.

https://twitter.com/dorque_tx/status/1426192446032125959?s=19

(On paper Gabbard's resume might seem like a conventional "good political CV", various offices and military service etc, but the Gabbards are more like a weird independent political machine than anything else.)

Like that's why her campaign manager was her sister at one point and her chief of staff is someone else from the family health food store/son of a former third-party fringe candidate from the 70s. Or, indeed, why those categories could even potentially overlap.

The Gabbards had their own donor base that gave to Mike when he was a Republican and to Tulsi when she was a Democrat, a fairly unique distinction among politicians that I can think of, maybe outside of like, Boro Park.

(I thought her campaign manager was her sister at some point but now I can't find that. Her mother was her campaign treasurer at one point, though, and her mother-in-law was her office manager.)

So anyway, not unlike with Trump, coming up with weak ties to the national party network and having your own people and source of funds and media can lead to erratic behavior but also the potential for unusual combinations of positions that might have some appeal.

Having followed Gabbard on and off since her 2012 primary (christ I'm getting old), I'm not surprised she was an unconventional Member of Congress, I would have been more surprised if she wasn't.

I don't know if I'm aware of any another major politician than Gabbard whose early donors were so heavily just donors to her and her family and affiliates (often overlapping), not to any other candidates. There's probably some way to check that quantitatively I suppose.

I mean outside of self-funders or people from family money (although maybe Gabbard was just sort of a distributed version of that).