This district went for McCain in the presidential election.
I do believe that polling showed that it wasn’t the Tea Party candidate that did the Republican in but Paul Ryan’s budget that the staunchly red voters couldn’t stomach.
How bad is this news for Republicans? Does this show that their base would vote for a moderate? Should they shed Tea Party? Can they?
Probably not as bad as I’d like. Eventually all the Teatards (AKA, far-rightists from the GOP) will realize that they’re no longer pusing the dialog rightwards. Once that happens, they’ll just rejoin the GOP and stop nominating their candidates and just start voting for the GOP candidates the way they have for the last thirty years.
-Joe
They’ve really backed themselves into a corner this one. Newt Gingrich tried disavowing the Ryan plan on “Meet the Press” a few weeks ago, and was widely denounced by the right. So, yeah, any GOP candidate is going to have difficulty attracting much support in the primaries if they criticize the plan. But if they embrace it too closely, they’re going to turn off the electorate at large.
I never underestimate the right-wing’s ability to put their ideology-of-the-week over electability. Keep it up TP’s!
Certainly many otherwise-R voters must have gone D here. But wasn’t the T share larger than the R’s margin from majority? Wouldn’t the T vote have virtually all gone to R without T in the race?
I was told that the Tea Party was a vast cross-section of American voters, covering Republicans, Democrats and Independants.
Color me shocked to think that all Tea Partiers would have voted Republican otherwise.
I want to vote them all out. follow a budget. stop giving $ to 150 out of 193 world countries (including china). I want term limits. I want to do away with pennies. No more gasoline selling for $3.799 per gal. no more store prices at $39.99, or autos at $27,999.99. You could beat them with sticks if I was king. No more "attempted murder " charges, if you stab , hammer or shoot someone and they don’t die, it wasn’t that you didn’t try to kill. I want honest elections, you can’t even enter a costco without serious member ID, but ACORN has been tried and convicted and prisioned for voter fraud and being tried in 14 states. Am I wrong to be a Tea guy ? I wish they were more right wing. Oh, kick the UN out of the country get all the troops on the borders with 100% pay raises.
Looks like summer vacations are beginning.
Actually, leading up to things, as the teabagger started to tank the Democrat had her share increase while the Repubilcan had her decrease.
So…believe it or not, not in the case.
I’m pretty sure that all the leftovers caused by pennies is being saved up to pay for the superhighway from Mexico to Canada.
-Joe
I don’t think laying those trends next to each other is definitive unless polls established that the same voters were involved. There could have been different groups moving in and out of the columns at the same time for different reasons.
I’d like to know what the results would have looked like with an instant-runoff system in place.
Interesting budget you’re following.
Also, who or what are we beating with sticks? Autos? Pennies? China?
The logic and grammar are kind of jumbled, but let’s keep the responses appropriate for this forum. puddin, if you want to discuss your political views, please start a thread in Great Debates (or join one). This thread is about the Tea Party and its effects on the NY-26 race. This article might be starting point in analyzing those effects.
The T guy in this race was a weird case; he’s run before…as a Democrat. According to Nate Silver, polls show his support as 2:1 Rep to Dem. If he had not been in the race, and his votes split along those lines, Hochul would still have won by a decent margin. (She would also probably have picked up most of the Green vote if Miller hadn’t run, but that’s only ~1%.) At worst, it would have been a competitive race in what tends to be a rather Republican district.
That said, I’m trying not to read too much into it. Special elections can be weird, and we’re still a long way from the general.
Well, it was enough of a scare that Paul Ryan is scrambling to redefine the Medicare debate with a snazzy new video.
Personally, I think the Democrats should yoink the term “Mediscare” and begin applying it liberally (heh) to discussions about Ryan’s budget. “This ‘Mediscare’ by Paul Ryan will kill your grandma!” It seems like a weak “push back” tool against the Dems but I think they could get some mileage out of it while confusing Ryan’s counter-message.
I’m thinking that perhaps, if the GOP wants to pull away from the fringe, they can view these results as a good reason to back Huntsman-- a moderate-- in the primaries. Maybe I’m wrong but it doesn’t look good for Republicans in the long run if they don’t moderate their message.
Sine there really is no official “Tea Party,” and basically anybody can label themselves as a “Tea Party” candidate, maybe the Dems should clog up the ballots with ultra-left decoy candidates under some kind of contrived “T” banner. Teabaggers are stupid. They’ll fall for it. They could pull enough votes away from the R column to swing the vote. It could be especially effective in conservative districts. The Socialist and Green parties should change their names to something with the word “Teaparty” in it. It could be a really fun time.
Of course, that could also result in all of us waking up the next morning, and seeing through our hungover fog that Ralph Nader is the new President.
It was too early. It gave the Repubs a warning of the danger of their extreme views. They will have time to modify the presentation. That will move them more toward the middle. But only during the election process.
If they win, they will go extreme like the mid west governors have. It is also like Bush, after a week of judicial overstepping, the supreme court declared him president. Then he declared he had a mandate to govern like he wanted.
Their base won’t let them move to the middle, especially during the primary season. They’re stuck - hoisted by their own retards.
Some extrapolation is required, but here is a poll taken just before the election. It shows 13% of self-described Republicans, 10% of self-described Democrats, and 16% of self-described independents voting for Davis. If Davis had not run, one might expect those voters to realign themselves along the same percentages as their other party members, which was about 6:1 for Corwin among Republicans, 9:1 for Hochul among Democrats, and 1.2:1 for Hochul among independents. There are actually more Republicans than Democrats, so this would imply a bigger boost for Corwin than for Hochul, but not by much.
Brown’s victory over Coakley was supposed to be a blessing in disguise as an early warning as well. We see how well that worked. Maybe the GOP will do better with it but I wouldn’t assume any guarantees.