ISTM that over the last decade or so the Republicans have squandered quite a lot of opportunities to pick up very winnable Senate seats by putting up too-extreme or otherwise not-ready-for-prime-time candidates. I’m thinking of O’Donnell (Delaware), Angle (Nevada), Murdouck (Indiana), Akin (Missouri), and now Moore (Alabama). Perhaps others that I’m forgetting just now. (That’s in addition to Miller in Alaska, where Murkowski held the seat with a write-in candidacy, and - nuttiest of them all - Trump, who actually won.)
At any rate, were it not for this tendency, it’s very likely that the Republicans would have a very healthy majority in the Senate. But perhaps I’m more focused on “the one that got away” on the Republican side. Are there comparable numbers on the Democratic side? Cases where the Democrats let winnable seats slip away by voting too-extreme or loser candidates?
I think part of it on the Republican side is that there’s an element of populism at this time (the Tea Party movement in particular) which is deeply distrustful of professional politicians, and prefers homespun country boys and Little Guys. But like every other area, there are rules of the game and useful skills when it comes to winning elections. Nominating people who have histories of electoral success screens for people who have the right traits, and who have the necessary experience. Ignoring this in favor of “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” hopes has a cost.
But it’s also possible that it’s in part the result of conservative voters relying so much on talk radio and other RW outlets. Not to say that conservative voters are the only ones in cocoons, but it’s probably greater for someone who relies heavily on openly partisan media than for someone who relies on the mainstream media. Because though (I believe) the mainstream media leans left, it doesn’t lean that way nearly to the extent that RW talk shows lean right. The upshot of all this is that although the “nobody I know voted for him” phenomenon exists on both sides of the aisle, it may be more of a factor on the right side than on the left, and that leftists may be a bit more realistic about what’s winnable than rightists.
But again, I could just be missing what’s going on on the Democratic side.
One that comes to mind is Geoffrey Fieger running for governor of Michigan. Best known as Jack Kevorkian’s lawyer, he really wasn’t embraced by the party.
While it’s certainly true that both sides can nominate loser candidates - Coakley up in Massachusetts lost to Scott Brown, after all - I think there’s something to what you say. Someone like that slipping through the primaries on the D side is an unusual event. But it’s getting to be routine for the R side to lose winnable seats through the nomination of overly partisan and extreme candidates. You’ve certainly listed the highest profile ones.
I also think you’ve hit on something with your analysis of the bubble some people live within. While I might dispute an overall lefty lean in the general media, I don’t think anyone can dispute - effectively - the rightward lean of FoxNews and the various radio and television hosts who beat the drum incessantly for ratings. Combine the reinforcing factor of that sort of thing with the limited number of primary voters and you get a lot more ‘true believers’ winning primaries on the R side than on the D side. It’s a part of what’s been distorting the republican party for 20 years now and I see no indication that they can change. The fact is the whack jobs are so ingrained into the republican party at this point that without them they’d become an extreme minority party.
On the D side there are certainly whack jobs - the radical greeners, all men are rapists and others - but they rarely manage to claw their way through the process. That’s because the democratic leadership is more interested in actually governing and compromise than their opponents. But extremism on one side breeds extremism on the other as lines get drawn and feet get dug in. It’s a hard time we’re going through and I got no solutions, I can tell you that. None that are feasible, anyway.
Beyond that, I don’t think that was a particularly winnable seat. John Engler was a two-term incumbent who had won his previous re-election bid with 61% of the vote. (He did only marginally better against Feiger.)
It’s very common for fringe candidates to get nominations in long-shot elections, since better known candidates don’t want to run. But the examples I gave on the Republican side were all very winnable contests.
Yeah, I think this is pretty much just a Republican problem right now. I can’t recall anyone vaguely analogous to Moore being nominated by the Democrats. Martha Coakley, mentioned above, was IIRC a really bad campaigner but not particularly extreme WRT policy stances.
The problem is that the Republican party wants to be both the conservative party and the moderate party.
No matter how you define conservatism, it is, by definition, a wing of the political spectrum and not the center.
Democrats don’t do this. While their opponents often deride them as being liberals, very few Democratic candidates identify themselves liberals. Democrats generally run as moderates not liberals. In other words, they are running in the center of the political spectrum rather than to a wing.
Look at the 2016 Presidential election. On the Republican side, you had one moderate (Pataki, who was ignored) and fifteen conservatives. Each Republican candidate tried to establish that they were the most conservative candidate among a group of conservatives. On the Democratic side, you had Clinton and Sanders. Sanders is a liberal. Clinton didn’t try to compete with Sanders by trying to out-liberal him. She ran to the right of Sanders not to his left. She conceded the left wing to Sanders and focused on the center.
The result was not surprising. While Trump won the Electoral College and the Presidency, Clinton won more votes. This fits with the general pattern of elections; the Democratic candidate has won more votes than the Republican candidate in six of the last seven presidential elections. I give credit to Republican conservatives for managing to squeeze three wins out of those seven elections despite this. But the overall trend is that the voters prefer Democrats to Republicans and the Republican party needs to see this is a long-term problem.
There are some examples of inept candidates (like the aforementioned Coakley) on the Democratic side, but I can’t think of any examples of crazy radical ones that could reasonably be described as mirror images of the ones you named on the Republican side. I’m pretty sure there haven’t been any in the last few decades; the conservative media would have trumpeted it to the skies if there were.
The Republicans have a small subset of extremists who are very vocal and motivated. Voter turnout in primary elections is typically very low, so a minority of a party can still nominate one of their own if their supporters are sufficiently motivated. The primary runoff in Alabama (Roy Moore vs. Luther Strange) had a 12% voter turnout! Moore only needed votes from 6% of eligible voters to become the nominee.
I don’t think there is an equivalent group of extremist Democrats. I’m not even sure what that would look like.
To clarify, the LaRouchies won nominations for the relatively obscure positions of Lt Gov and Secretary of State. Not to excuse the Dems for falling asleep at the wheel, but it’s not like they nominated them for Governor or Senator.
Sanders certainly made Hillary move to the left, even if she didn’t try to “out-liberal” him. For example, she was in favor of The Trans-Pacific Partnership before she was against it. Here’s a visual if you need it.
Like others have said, Democrats have had some really bad candidates (HRC being the foremost example, but Coakley too), but I can’t readily think of one that lost a very winnable seat because of their extreme positions. For example, the Dem nominee to challenge Mike Lee in Utah was nuttier than a squirrel turd, but it was never a competitive seat. Looking at competitive Senate races that Dems lost in 2016, I don’t readily recognize any as having been lost because the Dem candidate was “too-extreme or otherwise not-ready-for-prime-time”, but I admit to not having really followed them very closely.
The parties typically want to pick their own candidates, and in that process those with a lot of connections at the party level have an advantage even if they aren’t the best candidate. When people talked about it being “Hillary’s turn” it meant different things to the electorate but within the Democratic party it was a clear signal that she had paid her dues to the party and deserved the nomination on that basis. We’ve seen both parties do this at the presidential level, and as you move down the chain to the state level it becomes an even bigger factor. The parties at the national level have limited influence over state politics. Congressional candidates need the state party structure behind them to get on the ballot and have a chance of winning, and the game prefers those who are most deeply embedded within the party. The active party members, state politicians and party leaders live in a sort of political bubble, often hearing the praises of a potential candidate from within their group without seeing how these candidates, presented as strangers to the public, will be received.
Long story short, both parties tend to nominate party insiders without electability as the top priority.
Just coincidentally, [Dennis Hastert](Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf) has just received a court order not to be alone with children.
I agree, the Democrats aren’t throwing away elections by nominating looney candidates. But they certainly have been squandering winnable elections somehow, and at least as much as the Republicans. Katie McGinty, Jason Kander, Deborah Ross, Evan Bayh, Michelle Nunn, Bruce Braley, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Natalie Tennant, Shelley Berkley, Joe Sestak, etc. etc. all lost attainable seats. Not to mention Hillary Clinton pulling out all the stops to lose an unloseable election. But putting Clinton aside, since that’s been talked about enough, why did all those other apparently fine candidates lose? Were they all just outgunned by their opponents, or is there some kind of pattern that fits at least many of them?
ISTM that one component of this argument is that many in the GOP are comfortable with a candidate who, at one level, represents a big FU middle-finger to some perceived opponent/enemy target. Trump being the most obvious example. It seems to be an attractive quality to some percentage of GOP voters. Hence the seeming extremists.
The Democrats just don’t operate that way when it comes to picking candidates.
The only Dem I would put in the same category as the Akin/Angle/O’Donnell/others would be Alan Grayson of Florida, but there are a couple notable differences.
While he is, in my opinion, a crackpot/fraudster/jerk of the first order, he actually won a seat in the House for a few years (not unlike Akin), but then he got crushed in the Democratic primary for a Senate seat.
I think one of the main reasons why Dems haven’t had the same problems with horrible candidates being picked in primaries is that at this moment, there isn’t a big anti-government wing of the Democratic Party. When you get anti-government people running for office (instead of writing manifestos on the Bureau of Land Management and the perils of water fluoridation), you’re probably going to get the votes of those people who are writing such screeds. The Democratic Party, being the party of Big Government, just doesn’t have the same base.
Of course, there’s also something to be said for Republican campaign consultants who urge candidates to make commercials with opening lines like, “I am not a witch.” I mean, even Roy Moore’s people had the common sense not to set him up with 30 second spots declaring, “I am not a child molester! Yee-haw!”
In most other states, Secretary of State is an obscure office. Not so in Illinois; the Secretary of State oversees what would be the DMV in any other state, as well as the Inspector General’s office. As the office’s web site notes, it “has one of the largest and most diverse collections of responsibilities of any of its counterparts nationwide.”
In practice, the Secretary of State is probably the third-most-powerful office in the state, behind the Governor and the Speaker of the House. Two out of the last five Illinois governors (Jim Edgar and George Ryan) had held the office immediately before being elected Governor, and the crimes which led to Ryan’s downfall occurred while he was Secretary of State.
