The Republican Party lost, but the Democrats lost more. Oh sure, the Republicans cruised to victory in New Jersey and Virginia, crushing big-spending Democrats by healthy margins. But the real play was in New York where the Republican candidate got 6% of the vote:
Owens (D): 49%
Hoffman (C): 45%
Scozzafava (R): 6%
All of the fatcat incumbent Republicans and the stooges that populate their party committees should be looking at this and waking up. Principle beat party last night, 45-6. I'm still registered as a Republican, if only so I can vote in the primaries. If it came to it in my district, I'd have no problem voting for a Hoffman here over a creep like Scozzafava even if it meant the Democrat won. At 45-6, it looks like I'm not alone.
I'm not sure I'd draw much conclusions from that: Scozzafava explicitly, and with much fanfare[1], dropped out of the race and endorsed the Democrat a few days before the election. The only reason she was still on the ballot was because they had already been printed. By rights, she was expecting, and should have gotten, *zero* votes.
ReplyDelete[1] By which I mean, enough fanfare that *I* heard about it at the time, and I was barely paying attention.