Branded 'cowardice, not conviction' two weeks ago, Michigan and Georgia Republicans try it again on debate night.

As it ran on the front

Tuesday night, two states, two Republican candidates for governor found the same exit and used it on live television. In Michigan, Rep. John James stood across from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in the first debate of the race, and Benson spent the hour doing what everyone in that state already knows how to do: she called him a Trump-backed congressman, over and over, until he had to answer for the name attached to him. In Georgia, Republican Rick Jackson met Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms at a town hall the same night, and spent his own hour sparring over the same live wire — how close his campaign looks to the president, and what to do about the data centers Georgians never voted for.

James had already run this play once, in public, with a camera on him. On August 30, with the Canada tariff fight landing squarely on the auto industry he represents in Congress, he told Face the Nation that the trade war "cannot be borne on the backs of Michiganders" — a Republican candidate on the record against his own party's trade policy, in the one state built to feel it first. Twenty-five days later, Common Dreams ran the obituary for that kind of move under the headline "Cowardice, Not Conviction," logging Republican Senate hopefuls in Iowa and Michigan calling for distance from a president whose approval numbers were cratering less than six weeks before the midterms.…