Democratic debates can be like this too. Just let the Larouchie candidate in the primary debate.
The two Republican candidates for Governor of California (neither of whom has a chance against Jerry Brown) are Assemblyman Tim “Don’t mind me as I carry this gun on board an airplane” Donnelly, the Tea Partyista, and Neel “Bush functionary” Kashkari, who has endorsements from all of the main stream Republicans, including former Governor Pete Wilson and Mitt Romney. Donnelly is leading in the polls. Even Darrell Issa has called him “hateful and ignorant”.
I say give all campaign debates back to the League of Women Voters and let them decide who gets in.
I remember once watching an all-comers debate for Montana governor, which was hosted at Montana State. There were several sane candidates (including Schweitzer, who eventually won), but then there was one guy whose solution to literally everything was to institute a parliamentary system in the state government (though he used the word “premiership”), and another guy who had silvered himself blue.
I think the Kochs should decide.
Cute.
According to this article, Tea party losing races but tugging GOP rightward:
Bozell, who founded the conservative Media Research Center, said of the Republican primaries: “With virtually no exception, everyone is running as a conservative. No one is running as a moderate, no one is running as an anti-tea-partyer.”
One can only hope this is the case. Unless the GOP trims it’s debate schedule, we are in for more of the delight recently seen in Idaho. They are looking like a side show, and not serious about leadership. The more the Democrats can paint the Tea Party as far out of the mainstream, extreme, intolerant, old white guys, and the more the standard issue Republicans appeal to this mold, the better.
Keep in mind that a conservative party does not actually have to win a whole lot to get its way. If all conservatives ever did was win the seats they should win, they’d have more than enough to keep liberals from ever doing anything.
Mitt Romney won 226 Congressional districts in 2012.
http://cookpolitical.com/story/5606
If those are the red districts that Republicans should normally win, then their majority in the House should endure for a long time. Plus Romney won 24 states, which means 48 Senate seats that the GOP should normally win.
Even if they never win another Presidential election, the GOP can stop everything with a Congressional majority and 48 Senate seats.
In the current US system, with the conservative party we have, the number of seats they should win is zero.
There’s an awful lot of voters that would disagree, and they just happen to be geograpically spread out, whereas liberals are concentrated in a few places. Howard Dean was right: Democrats have to start winning over voters in all 50 states, rural and urban. The Democratic Party may be the current majority party, but they are also strictly a regional party. Those regions just happen to be the most populous regions.
If the Democrats are a “regional party”, then the term has no meaning. Don’t be ridiculous.
It’s hardly their fault that our system prioritizes places over people.
No, it has a new meaning – the “regions” being not North vs. South nor East vs. West nor Coasts vs. Flyover, but City vs. Countryside. See this red-blue map broken down by county – and a cartogram of the same morphed to reflect population density – notice how, in the latter, we have islands of blue and shoals of purple divided by rivers of red.
Of course – was William Jennings Bryan ever President? History teaches us that when a political conflict comes down to City vs. Countryside, the Countryside usually loses and usually deserves to lose. The City is where most of the brainpower and culture and wealth and industry and sophistication and hope and excitement live.
The city wins the Presidency, but the country wins the Congress. You know, the place where the laws get made.
Couple things. First, if you had to choose between the White House and a House majority, which would you choose?
Second, the nation is becoming more urbanized. The rural share of seats in Congress will surely decrease over time. How do you spin that into good news for the GOP? Since you’re the second coming of Baghdad Bob, I know you’ve got a way to put a nice spin on it.
Me, the House. No contest. Especially if the GOP controls most of the states as well. That means the real action happens in the states, while the House makes sure the federal government stays out of things.
For awhile, the urban areas were in decline. They’ve only recently revitalized(Detroit excepted). There’s no guarantee that will continue forever. The suburbs, by contrast, are genuine swing areas and I believe the suburbs will be where most population growth occurs, as well as in towns with populations below 50,000, some of which are defined as rural, some urban, but in most cases, red country.
This is something to boast about?
In 2012, the GOP won the House despite Dem candidates getting more votes for House candidates than GOP candidates did - and, of course, the Dems won the Senate outright, despite the inherent rural bias of Senate composition. The antidemocratic outcome in the House was partly attributable to Dem voters being more clustered than GOP voters, but also attributable in part to some really impressive gerrymandering in ‘purple’ states where they’d won control of the state legislature in 2010.
The GOP can only maintain a share of control by political tricks (vote suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters and other Senate delaying tactics) for so long. But while it’s happening, you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that that IS what’s happening.
No doubt there was gerrymandering, but the Democrats have always had to win a lot more than a majority to win the House. Complaining that they didn’t win 25 seats off of a 1% margin of victory and blaming it on gerrymandering is nonsense. Democrats have won by as much as 5 points in previous elections and failed to gain a majority.
What’s actually happening is that Democrats have limited appeal outside the coasts and large urban areas and this makes it hard for them to control either chamber of Congress. They only still have the Senate because of the Tea Party. They would have lost it in 2010 with no prospect of getting it back anytime soon if not for the Tea Party.
Post #60 reported.