I guess even the absentee ballots are not going to save Hoffman. Wow. I have to say, all credit for this surprising result has to go to Sarah Palin and her crowd. They poured their efforts into a meaningless race and managed to snatch a difficult defeat from the jaws of an easy victory. They lost because a chunk of the Republican party told them to go to hell. And let’s not forget that the original Republican candidate flipped them the bird and endorsed her Democratic opponent instead of the [del]carpetbagging Palin coattails candidate[/del] conservative independent.
Are there national implications here? Eh. I know we’re going to hear a lot about it, but I’m not sure. In part I’m skeptical because conservative money and votes may be out of alignment: the candidates may believe they can ignore those non-rightwingers because the money and star power are with the Palins of the world. But tonight it looks like Palin, Pawlenty et al flat out gave away a Congressional race.
She did bow out. Her name was still on the ballot, but Scozzafava dropped out of the race on Saturday and endorsed Owens.
Referendum 71, if passed, will affirm the law passed by the state Legislature granting domestic partnerships (which already existed prior to the passing of this law) all the rights of marriage (except the title “marriage”) within the state. If rejected, domestic partnerships will remain but without all the rights of marriage.
I had a long drawn out analysis about why Portland won’t change things, but I deleted it while I was trying to copy it, and since it involves a lot of math, I won’t repeat it here. But basically, if Portland and Brunswick come out on the gay marriage vote the same way they have so far, the yes vote will still lead by about 10,000 votes, and since, with the exception of Cumberland county, where Portland and Brunswick are, the yes votes have been winning, and there are still a lot of precincts to count in the other counties, it won’t change the outcome or defeat the referendum.
They will probably also trumpet the fact that their candidate got 44 percent of the vote despite being an out-of-district third-party candidate. So they’ll treat it as if that 44 percent would have gone to the Democrat or stayed home, rather than probably giving a win to the Republican candidate, with the hint that they could have done even more.
That would be politically tough for a legislator to vote against the wishes of his constituents. It would certainly cost several votes, and I don’t think that the leadership would want to risk the fallout by bringing it up again…
I think this isn’t a good thing for the tea party movement. It looks to me that there were an awfully lot of people who ranked the parties 1) Republican 2) Democrat 3) Conservative. They would have voted Republican, but would rather vote Democrat than Conservative. That might be partly due to party loyalty in the area - I understand it’s been solidly Republican for many decades.
But it may also mean that the tea partiers are misreading the general electorate as badly as the Democrats are. It looks to me that the center is a bunch of angry, slightly right of center moderates who are moderately fiscally conservative and mildly socially liberal. They’re pissed off, and they’re not going to let either side push them around.
Umm, what? Upstate New York has never been a particularly liberal part of the state. And especially not the 23rd. In fact, no Democrat had won in NY-23 since the mid-19th century. Even in massive Democratic wave years, Republicans have held the seat. While Obama did carry the district, he lagged his national numbers, and was far behind his state-wide numbers. The district is clearly more Republican than the country as a whole, and is a seat that the Republican party had no business losing, except they shot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly.
Correct. In Maine, “Yes” means repeal the SSM law, “No” means keep the SSM law. In Washington, “Yes” means give domestic partnerships the same rights you give marriages, “No”, means keep the domestic partnership law the same as it was, which has fewer rights than marriages.
The weird thing about that is, the national mood is not hard to read. A lot of people are out of work, they’re pissed that financial institutions seem to be getting more help than the public, and that’s that. And they want some health care reform but don’t have any faith the government can do it, although that’s not a major issue in these few elections. What’s the mystery?
But you’re right: the tea parties don’t have any kind of reading on the electorate, and they never did. They’re not political strategists. They’re a group of freefloating nuts that caught on after a cable network gave them tons of free publicity (leading the other networks to do the same). They think everyone agrees with them, and good luck convincing them otherwise. I don’t think they have any ability to translate their bizarro anger into electoral results.
Y’know, I remember during Sunday school many years ago, listening to the teacher talk about “the crowd” shouting Hosanna! to Jesus on Palm Sunday, and shouting “Crucify him!” five days later. Oh, that fickle crowd! the teachers would say.
And I always thought, were the same people in both crowds? How would we know? Maybe a whole different group of people showed up to shout “Crucify him!” than showed up to shout “Hosanna!”
Same thing here. Even even-numbered non-Presidential years are about who you can get to show up. That’s even more true for elections in odd-numbered years.
Take thefollowing with a grain of salt for now, because none of it was backed up by links. But that said:
If true, that would explain things a lot more than a turn by ill-defined ‘independents.’ If the VA ‘independents’ of 2009 were substantially older and whiter than those of 2008, then of course they would vote differently, without anyone’s necessarily changing their stripes.