Turner had been the Republican candidate for the district in 2010 and got 43,129 votes (to Weiner’s 67,011).
I think a key factor was that the conservatives pulled together. Turner got the nominations of the Republican and Conservative parties and there was no “Tea Party” candidate so he didn’t have to worry about a challenge on his right.
Also, I seem to recall Jon Stewart last night saying something about how Weprin didn’t even live in the district. Is that true?
I would say that a district that has not elected a Republican representative in anyone’s living memory is a “hardcore Democratic district”.
Hardcore, but not hardline - or is it the other way around? Probably so; I’d say the “hard” part is questionable when you’ve been just voting for the same side for decades 'cause that’s what you do. It was a district taken for granted and that was a huge error. Pathlewt and Martin Hyde have it IMO: Specially with the trend in redistricting over the past decades being towards favoring “safe” seats, this distorts the true leanings of the voters by creating de-facto single-party jurisdictions. The residents historically voted consistently D but as with the Kennedy Senate seat in MA, with time that alignment becomes broad but relatively shallow and even just inertial; when you provide a circumstance in which you un-anchor the formerly “inertial” choice, and on top of it enough circumstances line up to show the voter that the established side is not satisfactory and a clean break offers a chance to make a difference, s/he will be motivated to take that chance.
yes it is. i do think it is odd when the rep. doesn’t live in the district, however it does happen.
This needs to be repeated. Also this: special elections are weird.
Kathy Hochul won NY-23 and is only the third Democrat to hold that seat in the last 150 years. it’s not quite as hardcore Dem as NY-9, but all rural areas in New York state are overwhelmingly conservative (and Republican) in nature. Her win was helped along by a poor Republican challenger and a Tea Party nut who further split off votes.
When you consider the fact that Weyprin was the poor candidate and their was no Tea Party runner to split off votes, the result becomes less of a surprise.
Maybe so, but unless we know the percentage of *all *voters who are declared to either party, it doesn’t tell us the whole story. I’m a registered voter without an official party affiliation, and I suspect that to be the rule rather than the exception.
Yes, obviously magellan01 doesn’t know what he’s talking about in blaming Obama.
Let’s go to a more savvy expert on the Weprin campaign:
Probably Weprin is also a poor source of insight on the Weprin campaign, eh?
Well, if the guy who lost blamed someone else for losing, I have no reason to take his assertion as the authoritative truth!
You have the authority of the Counselor to underscore it, who’s reputation for non-partisan objectivity is the stuff of legend!
Weprin’s alternative was to blame himself for running a poor campaign, and he couldn’t have done that, could he.
Well, he could have, but good point, both of you. Weprin’s account is not one of a disinterested, neutral observer.
Of course, he could have blamed Koch’s campaigning or the bigotry of same-sex marriage opposition, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely devoid of meaning that he chose Obama as the scapegoat, but I admit he’s not the guy to ask.
Why can’t it be all of the above? I mean it seems pretty clear that if Obama was riding high it would have been much less likely that Turner could have won. But even with Obama where is he is popularity-wise it’s pretty clear that there were some district-specific effects here, especially when you consider how abnormal demographically this district is.
So yeah,
How you assign weights to these is more a reflection of your own political hopes than any empirical study, IMO.
As I recently said in another thread, the Republican candidates should be doing some empirical studies. It’s not enough to say, “Well, I think people are unhappy with Obama so all I need to do is run against Obama.”
But if it turns out the reason people voted for Turner was because they thought he had a stronger pro-Israel stand, then Rick Perry would like to know that so he can make a fact-finding mission to Tel Aviv.
40% of voters in Turner’s district are Jews. In the US, the percentage is only around 1.5% to 2%. Granted, in Florida and NY State the percentage is higher, and those two have a lot of electoral votes. But turning NYS blue is a pipedream, while Florida is pretty sure to turn red in 2012. So - no trip to Tel Aviv required.
BTW - why to Tel Aviv? The capital and the seat of government is in Jerusalem.
That’s only if you assume that just Jewish voters are motivated by the candidate’s stance on Israel. Which, again, is the kind of thing that the candidates need to be researching.
Right, the strategists of BOTH parties should be dissecting the NY-9 results (and NY-23 and Massachussetts Senate, etc.) to see which factors in the upset can be generally applicable to other elections(*) and which are situationally specific to the place and time, and how did each of those factors actually influence the result.
(*and that means portability both in time and place, i.e. what can apply to other districts/states but also what will apply to retaking or retaining the same districts/states in the next election)
Very much THIS. A couplea people, who were interviewed on the local news reacted that they just couldn’t be bothered to vote right now. People, people’s jobs, they clear time around election time to carefully make some choices (or at least, if they vote a stright ticket, hype themselves up with the party line) it shouldn’t shock anyone that people might not care as much.
Very important too. There’s often a third option to at least bleed of some voters. People shouldn’t have forgotten there wasn’t one this time.
Many pundits see this as a blanket rejection of Obama. It think that, while it may have some truth to it is ignoring a major factor, not mentioned here yet. When there’s a scandal, people vote the OTHER party. Its happened often enough, I can’t believe everyone is neglecting to mention it. Its not that many people actually care what Weiner did, or blames the Democrats for it. But the whole procedure just leaves them with a bad taste, and they just switch to “the other guy”, just to seem to be doing something.
Missed edit window. Some people on this board are casually mentioning Weiner’s scandal as a contributing factor. But really, when a scandal rocks, people do demand a reboot. I think Gore lost at least some votes because he couldn’t, convincingly, either support or censure Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal – and the Republicans knew that. And its happened at other time – dredging up scandals really does swing votes – people just get a “let’s clean house” mentality. The news pundits just seem to ignore that.
Scandal was also a factor in the 26th district special election. A Republican congressman had to resign and he was replaced by a Democrat - maintaining the balance in New York politics.
The 23rd district special election was unusual. Republican John McHugh was not involved in any scandal and was very popular in the district. He resigned his seat to accept the office of Secretary of the Army. And the district is solidly Republican - it hadn’t elected a Democrat in over a hundred years.
So it appeared like it should have been as safe a seat as the GOP had. But amazingly, they lost it to the Democrats.
Under normal circumstances, Dede Scozzafava should have easily won the special election. She had been a local assemblywoman for five terms. Scozzafava was only one of several Republicans who sought the nomination for what appeared to be an easy move into Congress.
The Democrats, on the other hand, had a harder time getting a candidate. Most Democrats in office saw this as a sacrificial run and they didn’t want to hurt the position they held. Bill Owens, a local attorney, finally got the nomination. Owens probably hoped to get some decent numbers but expected to lose to Scozzafava.
But then things got weird. Scozzafava, like pretty much every Republican in New York (including me), would be considered a RINO by national standards. Conservatives, including the newly formed Tea Party, apparently felt they could do better. They wanted a real Conservative not just a Republican.
So Doug Hoffman, a local businessman, stepped in. He had been one of the people who had tried for the Republican nomination. When he didn’t get it, he went for a separate nomination from the Conservative Party. He got that along with an endorsement from the Tea Party movement. Hoffman got support from a number of national conservative groups along with endorsements by national conservative politicians like Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, and Fred Thompson.
And that’s probably what killed his campaign. I grew up in New York’s North Country and we’re a bunch of cranky small-town rednecks. We don’t like it when people from Albany or New York City try to tell us what to do and we certainly didn’t want to hear what all these people from out of state were telling us. Hoffman looked like an outsider who wanted to get elected so he could represent the Tea Party in Congress rather than the 23rd district.
Hoffman discounted Owens and saw Scozzafava as his real opponent. Her campaign ended up getting trashed but Hoffman found that while he sank her chances, it was Owens who was picking up her supporters. Three days before the election, Scozzafava announced she was withdrawing from the race and a day after that she endorsed Owens. Owens ended up winning the election with 73,137 votes to Hoffman’s 69,553 (with Scozzafava getting 8,582).
Hoffman ended up making a bad impression worse by claiming that Owens had won because ACORN had tampered with the ballots. Both Democratic and Republican local officials say they saw no evidence of this. Hoffman subsequently withdrew the accusation.
One final note is that while Owens initially won the seat in unusual circumstances, he was re-elected a year later in a more routine election. Owens received 82,232 votes while his Republican opponent, Matthew Doheney, received only 80,237. Arguably, what might have cost Doheney the election were the 10,507 votes cast for the Conservative candidate - Doug Hoffman.
So if there’s a lesson the Republicans need to learn from all this, it’s don’t let the Conservatives drive the entire party off a cliff.