Because of our (Washington) primary system, a person is not presumed to be the party’s nominee - in partisan races, the candidate says the party he or she likes, not which party likes them. (This year, there was a “prefers Problemfixer Party,” a “prefers Reluctantly GOP party,” and a “prefers Happiness Party.”)
Still only one Tea Party candidate listed himself as “prefers Tea Party,” and he’s not moving on to the general election. The rest ran as “prefers Republican” or “prefers GOP,” they’re not moving on either.
[Moderator Note]
This is GQ; political jabs are not permitted. Let’s refrain from using loaded terms like “lunatic” here. No warning issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Quoth GreasyJack:
I saw him in a debate once (when he was running for governor), and it was hilarious: His solution to every single problem was to turn the state into a parliamentary system, without ever saying anything about how that would solve anything. Except I don’t think he even knew the word “parliamentary”: He kept on calling it “premiership”.
Quoth arson2995:
Hilarious typo. But I think it was stallions, not mares.
How dare anyone label this Tea Party canidate as being a lunitic. 
Peer pressure.
She fell in with a bad crowd in high school.
Everything is better now.
I saw that clip. The thing that struck me about it was not that she said she’d “dabbled in witchcraft” (who cares?), but that I thought she was clearly making it up. She said she went a “a date with a witch on a satanic altar.” Witches don’t have “Satanic altars.” Witches don’t worship Satan at all. That’s fundy mythology, not reality.
Either she was completely making it up (and exaggerating/fabricating sordid pasts is fairly common for Born-agains), or she completely misunderstood whatever was going on, or possibly someone was just totally fucking with her.
Doh! too much horses on the brain
So she’s the type of person who will say anything to get attention and then go back and deny that it meant anything and that’s OK? I thought that the Tea Party was about replacing politicians like that. :dubious:
Sorry, I’m off to great debates on this one . . .
Bunkum.
What the US call primaries, other democracies call preselections and they are every bit as factionally partisan as stateside.
If you want to see at it’s most politically obsessive-compulsive and vicerally internecine (without resorting to lethal force, if you discount the murder of John Newman in '94) my suggestion is to look up the NSW ALP right (with it’s own feuding sub-factions of the Terrigals v Ferals) v the NSW ALP left.
I think the emphasis is on the two major parties part. When NZ used first-past-the post voting, there were two major parties which had a stranglehold on Parliament and each party had internal factions that indulged in great battles within the party. When MMP was introduced, many of those factions splintered from the parties as they could see that they had a chance of being elected on their own bat, e.g. ACT on the right, Progressive (now, used to be New Labour as part of Alliance) on the left, and NZ First as a centrist, anti-immigration party.
Also, in most Westminster style parliaments, there are party whips. If you are part of the party bloc, then by God, you vote the way the party wants. As I understand it, the US Congress doesn’t have party whipping in that sense so the Tea Party Republicans could thumb their noses at the rest of the GOP representatives/senators when they vote in the house.