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Primary Elections! America Hates the Establishment of Both Parties
enlightenedbum
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So there are midterm elections coming up in America this November, and today kicked off a string of primary elections to be held throughout the country.
The story so far!
Sen. Bennett of Utah was unceremoniously dumped from the GOP ticket two weeks ago at a party convention for daring to support a very wonk supported and very, very free market health care bill with Sen. Wyden of Oregon (a Democrat!).
Tonight lots of interesting things happened!
Kentucky:
Rand Paul (son of Ron Paul, libertarian Congressman from Texas and Kevin Nash favorite) handily won the Republican side against the Mitch McConnell supported Secretary of State Trey Grayson.
On the Democratic side, Attorney General Jack Conway defeated Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo. Conway was the more liberal candidate, hooray!
That creates a fascinating general election. The Republicans should be favored here, but the GOP primary was not a friendly affair and there doesn't seem to be a huge enthusiasm gap, at least based on the primaries where turnout was roughly proportional to registration (it's a closed primary in Kentucky).
Pennsylvania:
Rep. Joe Sestak defeated many, many time incumbent and party flipper Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary. He in fact won fairly handily despite Specter being supported by the President, Vice President, Gov. Rendell, and the Mayor of Philadelphia. Turnout here was about half of what it was for the Democratic primary for President two years ago. Also a 50% increase over 2006 turnout in a Democratic primary, but now Senator Casey didn't have a real competitor so that probably depressed things. Tough to say what that means. Though I think turnout in Philly was depressed and that lack of machine support ended up killing Sen. Specter.
Sestak will face crazy person and former Club for Growth President Pat Toomey for the seat in the fall. He should be able to keep this one for the Democrats, but it'll be an interesting test of the media's Tea Party hype.
Democrats also easily won a special election in PA-12 and will hold that seat for the next six months.
Arkansas:
On the Republican side, sadly the strongest candidate John Boozman won with a majority tonight. Boo!
On the Democratic side, incumbent Senator Lincoln failed to gain the 50%+1 needed to prevent a runoff against hard charging Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter. Lincoln is facing a ton of criticism from the liberal flank of the Democratic Party concerned with her actions on health care, labor, environmental and a ton of other votes. Recently, she's tried to push through strong regulations of derivatives to shore up her support on the left, but it didn't seem to work terribly well. There will be a runoff in two weeks and Halter is probably a slight favorite at this point. He was 1.8% behind with 13.1% of the vote going to a third candidate. It seems unlikely that Lincoln will get enough of the already anti-her vote to win, but is certainly possible.
On the turnout front, more than twice as many votes were cast in the Democratic primary. Interesting!
Use this thread to discuss further primaries (though I think the biggies were all tonight), the Lincoln-Halter runoff election, general Congressional election news (like the Hawaii special election Democrats have inexplicably blown on Saturday), and how you think the midterms will go.
The story so far!
Sen. Bennett of Utah was unceremoniously dumped from the GOP ticket two weeks ago at a party convention for daring to support a very wonk supported and very, very free market health care bill with Sen. Wyden of Oregon (a Democrat!).
Tonight lots of interesting things happened!
Kentucky:
Rand Paul (son of Ron Paul, libertarian Congressman from Texas and Kevin Nash favorite) handily won the Republican side against the Mitch McConnell supported Secretary of State Trey Grayson.
On the Democratic side, Attorney General Jack Conway defeated Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo. Conway was the more liberal candidate, hooray!
That creates a fascinating general election. The Republicans should be favored here, but the GOP primary was not a friendly affair and there doesn't seem to be a huge enthusiasm gap, at least based on the primaries where turnout was roughly proportional to registration (it's a closed primary in Kentucky).
Pennsylvania:
Rep. Joe Sestak defeated many, many time incumbent and party flipper Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary. He in fact won fairly handily despite Specter being supported by the President, Vice President, Gov. Rendell, and the Mayor of Philadelphia. Turnout here was about half of what it was for the Democratic primary for President two years ago. Also a 50% increase over 2006 turnout in a Democratic primary, but now Senator Casey didn't have a real competitor so that probably depressed things. Tough to say what that means. Though I think turnout in Philly was depressed and that lack of machine support ended up killing Sen. Specter.
Sestak will face crazy person and former Club for Growth President Pat Toomey for the seat in the fall. He should be able to keep this one for the Democrats, but it'll be an interesting test of the media's Tea Party hype.
Democrats also easily won a special election in PA-12 and will hold that seat for the next six months.
Arkansas:
On the Republican side, sadly the strongest candidate John Boozman won with a majority tonight. Boo!
On the Democratic side, incumbent Senator Lincoln failed to gain the 50%+1 needed to prevent a runoff against hard charging Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter. Lincoln is facing a ton of criticism from the liberal flank of the Democratic Party concerned with her actions on health care, labor, environmental and a ton of other votes. Recently, she's tried to push through strong regulations of derivatives to shore up her support on the left, but it didn't seem to work terribly well. There will be a runoff in two weeks and Halter is probably a slight favorite at this point. He was 1.8% behind with 13.1% of the vote going to a third candidate. It seems unlikely that Lincoln will get enough of the already anti-her vote to win, but is certainly possible.
On the turnout front, more than twice as many votes were cast in the Democratic primary. Interesting!
Use this thread to discuss further primaries (though I think the biggies were all tonight), the Lincoln-Halter runoff election, general Congressional election news (like the Hawaii special election Democrats have inexplicably blown on Saturday), and how you think the midterms will go.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
enlightenedbum on
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I guess I'll vote for Brown for the glorious return of Governor Moonbeam and his suede/denim secret police, but realistically it doesn't matter who's the governor of this busted ass state.
Depends how motivated I am in the future and how alive the thread is and how much people bug me to do so.
I must admit being quite pleased at this as well. From what I understand Specter, despite his moderation, has in the past been at best a fairweather friend for the Democrats. So why, again, would I want to vote for him?
To be honest, I'm happy for anything that pisses off the leadership of either party, although I am a little concerned Rand Paul might actually win.
Good god folks, as if you hadn't got rid of one idiot in the white house you want to install more idiots in your Government?
It's still easy enough to start a fight between teabaggers and their wing, hence. Ask them about Iraq, military aid to Israel, Cuba, the Patriot Act, the death penalty, the war on drugs, marijuana prohibition, etc. - in these, Ron (and presumably Rand) take up more classically isolationist and libertarian (and liberal?) positions.
Which didn't work, obviously... wonder why his ads didn't just hammer Paul on his isolationist views. "He opposes the Patriot Act!!!11!one" etc.
They are pretty literally the founding principles of the Liberal party - laissez-faire economics and small government.
Given that they are technically relatively socially liberal (IN PRINCIPLE - the problem is that Ron Paul is a creationist/ID chap, so I'm not sure how he is on gay issues etc) and pretty decent from an "American" liberal point of view on Iraq etc and general hawkishness they are probably preferable to the Republican mainstream.
On the other hand, they also support ideas like returning the gold standard, nuking every government office into orbit and allowing states to turn themselves into retarded fiefdoms. At least they have principles, I guess
EDIT: His gay marriage position is weird; he's not against it, but he wants it to be a state-based thing with no federal interference. Huh.
He's also against abortion, but would pass the decision on to the states themselves.
Death penalty:
He's a weird mixed bag of opinions.
Are you discussing after his party switch or before? Previous to that he was one of the less insane R's but after that he's been pretty solidly there for the D's. For a guy who caucuses with the R's they'll only support a limited amount of aisle crossing, the same as we would.
I'm happier with Sestak but at the same time I'm happy the President and party honored the commitment they'd made to get him to switch parties. Burning people who jump to you is a bad long term play.
Also, I think E-bum glossed over the PA-12 result. It's not earth shattering news but it is quite a beacon of hope for this fall. The district is R+1 and yet is still D. Mainly I'm annoyed that I know I'll hear like 3 seconds on it but if the R's had taken it we'd be hearing about it for solid for two weeks at least.
I'm inclined to trust Nate on his analysis here.
Ron Paul (and, likely, his son) plays a very careful game here. He wants to appeal to the nativist racist wingnuts, the gold standard wingnuts, and the educated libertarian camp all at the same time, so virtually all his stands tend to have some kind of hedge.
e.g., he nominally supports free trade. But he never votes for any kind of free-trade legislation, because it's not free trade enough. This makes him both able to claim to stand for free trade, while still winking and nudging enough to the nativist crowd.
Likewise on gay marriage: nominally, a libertarian support for gay marriage. He'll oppose Washington DC defining marriage as between a man and a woman. But he'll support individual states doing so. This is pretty much an extreme version of "state's rights!!" flagwaving; it allows Ron to hold diametrically opposing positions when it suits him.
My first association (sad though it might be) is Wheel of Time.
You are now making me wonder if that Rand was named after Ayn Rand.
WIKI!
Rigorous Scholarship
If Rand wins, would this have a shot at leading to a Liberterian party breaking away from the pubs? Ron doesnt remotely seem to jive with traditional pubs, if Rand is the same way, and the tea party gets some whackos/libs in there, youd have a pretty decent group of folks who may be able to get away with not towing the party line.
If that's the case then why do Alabama Republicans keep on reelecting Shelby?
And if these primaries are any indication, this fall we'll be seeing (I hope) more Democrats actually moving left instead of right for a change.
Actually find myself agreeing with this, so long as they fill in contentious seats, and don't actually gain a significant foothold in the party. That moral fiber, if it were strong enough, might even combine with a desire for national attention and result in going against the party line, but, of course, the trend has been to boot people like that out of the Republican party as soon as possible, so I'm not betting on it.
NNID: Hakkekage
To be sure, I would love to watch a Paulite campaign gain political momentum. Preferably from a distance. The fireworks would be amazing: either they finally have to backstab their notoriously vocal supporters, or they don't and then dramatically demonstrate why the world has the institutions it has, however imperfect.
Plus they syphon off Republicans.
I am not entirely thrilled that my home state got the great honor of being a test tube for a bunch of Tea Party BS propped up by a bunch of out-of-staters, just because Ron Paul's son happened to have a medical practice here.
Still, I guess it's better for the state if he's in the US Senate than if he ran for Governor or something. And, to be fair, as the OP states, he's running more as a generic Republican than a crazy John Bircher lunatic. But I still don't like it.
This. It's the contrast between the reactionary NOs we are accustomed to getting and a brief moment of consideration (before the equally ardent NO).
Again, this is provided they don't get that significant foothold. They're crazy, but almost in an adorable way.
NNID: Hakkekage
Murtha's district voted for McCain but in an open seat special election the Dems won (again) when the GOP supposedly has this huge enthusiasm and demographics gap. Conway is to left of Mongiardo. Obama et al supported Specter because they promised to in order to get him to flip, but in reality Sestak is a more natural fit. Halter is to the left of Lincoln. We're temporarily going to lose a seat in Hawaii as I understand it because of weird special election rules but the Republicans haven't actually won anything from all this teabagging yet
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Except for the racism and neo-Confederate rhetoric?
ed
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
This is matched by the fact that the more conservative republicans won their primaries.
Pants: Adorable not because they have cute views, but because their bark is much worse than their bite. Does anyone actually expect them to make significant headway in getting their policies adopted?
I seem to be using the word significant a lot.
NNID: Hakkekage
Not a Tea Bagger. Shame on you Beeb. He is however supported by them.
Not a Randian either (Rand = Randall, NOT Ayn). They are hard core libertarians. Which does mean many of their policy preferences overlap with Objectivists, but the justification is different.
Objectivist "philosophy" -> Ayn Rand
Objectivist example -> Alan Greenspan
Libertarian philosophy -> Robert Nozick
Libertarian example -> Milton Friedman
http://www.theonion.com/video/semiliterate-former-gold-prospector-given-own-cabl,17408/
This question seems to imply that the Democratic establishment is notably liberal. It really is not. The Democratic base has been significantly to the left of the party leaders for some time now (like, since the Clinton era).
Especially with the influx of young voters Obama brought into the party. If they can be convinced to show up to the polls again in 2010 that new base could be the Dem's silent majority. Sadly most of us are more liberal than the average Dem and thus are disappointed with the performance by the Democratic majority thus far
Well the media spin is "anti-establishment" = anti-Obama = more conservative/teabaggy. The actual results don't support that but its certainly the spin its getting. And in PA-12, the more establishment candidate - Murtha staffer Mark Critz as opposed to businessman Tim Burns - both won and happened to be the more liberal (or at least less conservative/Republican/teabaggy) candidate in a McCain R+1 economically hard hit district.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Rand Paul is pro-life and thinks Roe v. Wade should be overturned but would not ban abortion outright on the federal level short of an amendment to the constitution, which he has said he would support. He defers to state law on gay marriage. This is more federalist than libertarian, but is not the same as supporting something like DOMA.
On other issues, he's anti PATRIOT ACT, anti Iraq War, anti federal War on Drugs, and anti deficit spending. Unlike his father he's a bit more hawkish on the war on terror, although compared to establishment Republicans he still looks like a peace-nik. This is why Cheney, Ghouliani, Santorum, McConnel and the other warmongering neo-con RINO's endorsed his opponent.
Regarding his more libertarian views on respecting the fourth amendment or not invading other countries because we want oil he was wisely quiet about them during his campaign because he's well aware they don't fly with most of the republican electorate (or really any electorate in the US).