Likewise "Democratic primaries" - is that really accurate? Weren't most of them open primaries? Yes, shenanigans were all the rage in the primary challenges, and yes the main candidate in each primary was a Democrat who planned to challenge a sitting Republican, but my understanding is that they were not Democratic primary races.
Semantics are important sometimes, and any side degrades its position among those people trying to understand facts and chart a course through them, by engaging in these rhetorical misdirections.
No. None of them were open primaries. Every single one was to determine the candidate who would challenge the Republican senator in that district a month later. If they were open primaries, like in Washington and Louisiana, then Hopper, Kapanke, and the rest would also have been on the ballots.
My understanding was that in a Wisconsin recall election, the primary is open and whoever wins, challenges the sitting legislator. This is not the same mechanism as a normal election with an open primary.
Yes, it is. In any election, whoever wins the primary goes on to the general election. Sometimes the incumbent must face a primary and sometimes not; some states require primary voters to be registered members of that party, and some states do not have party registration at all. A Republican entering a Democratic primary because he fills out the proper paperwork doesn't make it not a Democratic primary.
I wonder if entering opposing parties' primaries in an attempt to knock off incumbants twice is ever going to become a thing.
Likewise "Democratic primaries" - is that really accurate? Weren't most of them open primaries? Yes, shenanigans were all the rage in the primary challenges, and yes the main candidate in each primary was a Democrat who planned to challenge a sitting Republican, but my understanding is that they were not Democratic primary races.
Semantics are important sometimes, and any side degrades its position among those people trying to understand facts and chart a course through them, by engaging in these rhetorical misdirections.
No. None of them were open primaries. Every single one was to determine the candidate who would challenge the Republican senator in that district a month later. If they were open primaries, like in Washington and Louisiana, then Hopper, Kapanke, and the rest would also have been on the ballots.
My understanding was that in a Wisconsin recall election, the primary is open and whoever wins, challenges the sitting legislator. This is not the same mechanism as a normal election with an open primary.
Yes, it is. In any election, whoever wins the primary goes on to the general election. Sometimes the incumbent must face a primary and sometimes not; some states require primary voters to be registered members of that party, and some states do not have party registration at all. A Republican entering a Democratic primary because he fills out the proper paperwork doesn't make it not a Democratic primary.
I wonder if entering opposing parties' primaries in an attempt to knock off incumbants twice is ever going to become a thing.
I hope not as a standard tactic, but spoiler candidates have been around for a while. The Tea Party suffered the same problems in various districts in 2010, and if I knew my political voting history better I bet I could find dozens of other examples over the last couple of centuries.
Likewise "Democratic primaries" - is that really accurate? Weren't most of them open primaries? Yes, shenanigans were all the rage in the primary challenges, and yes the main candidate in each primary was a Democrat who planned to challenge a sitting Republican, but my understanding is that they were not Democratic primary races.
Semantics are important sometimes, and any side degrades its position among those people trying to understand facts and chart a course through them, by engaging in these rhetorical misdirections.
Calling the primary for the Democratic Party a 'Democratic Primary' is not a 'rhetorical misdirection'.
My understanding was that in a Wisconsin recall election, the primary is open and whoever wins, challenges the sitting legislator. This is not the same mechanism as a normal election with an open primary.
For any partisan office, a recall primary must be held for each political party which is
entitled to a separate ballot and from which more than one candidate competes for the party’s
nomination in the recall election
The primary is 'open' but it is still a partisan (i.e: Democratic Party) primary. Calling it a Democratic primary is not a rhetorical misdirection.
Likewise "Democratic primaries" - is that really accurate? Weren't most of them open primaries? Yes, shenanigans were all the rage in the primary challenges, and yes the main candidate in each primary was a Democrat who planned to challenge a sitting Republican, but my understanding is that they were not Democratic primary races.
Semantics are important sometimes, and any side degrades its position among those people trying to understand facts and chart a course through them, by engaging in these rhetorical misdirections.
Calling the primary for the Democratic Party a 'Democratic Primary' is not a 'rhetorical misdirection'.
My understanding was that in a Wisconsin recall election, the primary is open and whoever wins, challenges the sitting legislator. This is not the same mechanism as a normal election with an open primary.
For any partisan office, a recall primary must be held for each political party which is
entitled to a separate ballot and from which more than one candidate competes for the party’s
nomination in the recall election
The primary is 'open' but it is still a partisan (i.e: Democratic Party) primary. Calling it a Democratic primary is not a rhetorical misdirection.
I think most of us will agree that, regardless of whether or not such tactics are allowed, it does weigh in at historic levels of fuckmuppetry to enter your opposition's primary (at a substantial cost to the voting public) with the sole intent to give your doomed candidates one month more of sweet, sweet life.
Likewise "Democratic primaries" - is that really accurate? Weren't most of them open primaries? Yes, shenanigans were all the rage in the primary challenges, and yes the main candidate in each primary was a Democrat who planned to challenge a sitting Republican, but my understanding is that they were not Democratic primary races.
Semantics are important sometimes, and any side degrades its position among those people trying to understand facts and chart a course through them, by engaging in these rhetorical misdirections.
No. None of them were open primaries. Every single one was to determine the candidate who would challenge the Republican senator in that district a month later. If they were open primaries, like in Washington and Louisiana, then Hopper, Kapanke, and the rest would also have been on the ballots.
My understanding was that in a Wisconsin recall election, the primary is open and whoever wins, challenges the sitting legislator. This is not the same mechanism as a normal election with an open primary.
Yes, it is. In any election, whoever wins the primary goes on to the general election. Sometimes the incumbent must face a primary and sometimes not; some states require primary voters to be registered members of that party, and some states do not have party registration at all. A Republican entering a Democratic primary because he fills out the proper paperwork doesn't make it not a Democratic primary.
I wonder if entering opposing parties' primaries in an attempt to knock off incumbants twice is ever going to become a thing.
I hope not as a standard tactic, but spoiler candidates have been around for a while. The Tea Party suffered the same problems in various districts in 2010, and if I knew my political voting history better I bet I could find dozens of other examples over the last couple of centuries.
As it happens, I am quite well versed in political voting history, and I can assure you that it has not been common practice at all, and it didn't happen in 2010 either. There were quite a few Tea Party candidates running in districts where there were also Republicans in the race, but not because they were hoping to push the Democrat into office, they simply felt that the Republican wasn't far enough to the right. People virtually never enter primaries of the other party, because beating an incumbent is quite difficult, and most attempts from people with good party credentials fail. I'm afraid you don't know as much about this as you think.
I have to think it can't be that difficult - particularly with modern computer simulating and calculating potential - to automatically divide a state's districts based on population density and arbitray longitude and latitude. Or find the geographic center of the state and send out spokes to the border while making sure each 'pie' has an equal population. Automatically redistrict after a census, no one gets to redistrict them for their own gain.
Sure you might get some people who're stuck out in the boonies away from a polling location, but that is better than having the power of the day redistrict you so that your vote is effectively discounted. You'll probably also get ridiculous things like someone in Appleton being in the same district as Milwaukee and not feeling 'adequately represented,' but hey. If your district is defaulted to another party's power because of how the districts are reorganized for the party in power it won't much matter.
The whole redistricting thing via "MATH!" is actually a very difficult problem, to the point where supercomputers would be involved to get approximate answers. This is on top of the fact that perfectly random distribution of districts is actually the opposite of the intention. Some districts are gerrymandered to preserve majority minority districts.
The bolded above is a very bad statement regardless and really doesn't follow from the redistricting comments. There is no reason you can't have multiple polling places per a district. Shit, if I had to drive to the geographic center of my congressional district to vote I would spend about 5 hours in the car, one way.
Having the closest polling station 5 hours away would be impossible. There are polling stations everywhere, and depending on redistricting there are plenty of new places to put them (until my old town got a city hall they just used the school, for example). But you'd still likely end up with situations like the reservations, where there are like 5 polling stations for an area one-third the size of Rhode Island.
It would also help prevent Gerrymandering, because Gerrymandering is a very specific type of redistricting where one party attempts to redistrict to its own advtantage - to marginalize its competition. This is why we often end up with ridiculous districts that snake around each other and form completely illogical shapes.
Not quite germane to the current topic of discussion, but on the local radio stations in Madison, there have been attack ads against Sen. Luther Olsen during almost every commercial break for the last few days. I'm kind of surprised by this, considering that the most of Olsen's district is out of range of Madison's FM stations.
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Not quite germane to the current topic of discussion, but on the local radio stations in Madison, there have been attack ads against Sen. Luther Olsen during almost every commercial break for the last few days. I'm kind of surprised by this, considering that the most of Olsen's district is out of range of Madison's FM stations.
My guess is that they want to catch travellers, or just want the Republicans to know what's coming for them.
That trick has been making the rounds all over the country for a few years now. The thing is, by the time any complaint gets made and it rolls through the largely toothless FEC, the damage has been done, and the people who did it get a slap on the wrist fine, or at worst have to dissolve their group and start a new one with a different name.
Not quite germane to the current topic of discussion, but on the local radio stations in Madison, there have been attack ads against Sen. Luther Olsen during almost every commercial break for the last few days. I'm kind of surprised by this, considering that the most of Olsen's district is out of range of Madison's FM stations.
My guess is that they want to catch travellers, or just want the Republicans to know what's coming for them.
That trick has been making the rounds all over the country for a few years now. The thing is, by the time any complaint gets made and it rolls through the largely toothless FEC, the damage has been done, and the people who did it get a slap on the wrist fine, or at worst have to dissolve their group and start a new one with a different name.
I'm of the opinion that anyone who interferes with the voting process in such an egregious way should lose their own right to vote. Of course, actually implementing that without any sort of slippery slope (where do you draw the line?) would be tricky.
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Union dues are "taken" in the same sense that taxes or fees are taken. You knew they were going to be expected if you did a certain thing (work in the US and disclose that fact, join a workforce protected by the union etc.) so you doing those things means you were perfectly happy with the conditions.
It's almost as if the same people constantly extolling the wisdom and self-determination of the average person treat them as defenseless snowflakes in certain contexts.
Not quite germane to the current topic of discussion, but on the local radio stations in Madison, there have been attack ads against Sen. Luther Olsen during almost every commercial break for the last few days. I'm kind of surprised by this, considering that the most of Olsen's district is out of range of Madison's FM stations.
My guess is that they want to catch travellers, or just want the Republicans to know what's coming for them.
That trick has been making the rounds all over the country for a few years now. The thing is, by the time any complaint gets made and it rolls through the largely toothless FEC, the damage has been done, and the people who did it get a slap on the wrist fine, or at worst have to dissolve their group and start a new one with a different name.
I'm of the opinion that anyone who interferes with the voting process in such an egregious way should lose their own right to vote. Of course, actually implementing that without any sort of slippery slope (where do you draw the line?) would be tricky.
Just make it a felony with jail time, and raise the barrier of entry to that form of fraud from "you might need your backers to pay a few hundred thousand in fines" to "anyone found to be involved will be in jail for the next 10 years"
The only issue is when you're doing it for an office with pardon powers, but one would hope an elected official would be up on impeachment charges in seconds if it was found that they ordered people to commit a felony with the promise of a pardon in order to get elected.
Union dues are "taken" in the same sense that taxes or fees are taken. You knew they were going to be expected if you did a certain thing (work in the US and disclose that fact, join a workforce protected by the union etc.) so you doing those things means you were perfectly happy with the conditions.
It's almost as if the same people constantly extolling the wisdom and self-determination of the average person treat them as defenseless snowflakes in certain contexts.
Considering how much more on average a unionized worker makes I'm not sure they have a lot of room to complain about dues either.
Currently, three Democratic challengers are leading their Republican incumbents (Darling, Kapanke, and Hopper look to be going down), while one is trailing (Harsdorf may survive). I don't remember if the Democrats being recalled have been polled or not, but this is certainly encouraging news.
Wasn't there also something about it just been plain up illegal? I thought there was some story about the Democrats refusing to run fake candidates on account of it not being allowed (and they didn't want to sink the same levels)?
Thought this was suggested and then shot down pretty quickly afterwards?
I don't think it was found to be illegal, just sleezy as all fuck and ultimately unneeded.
High road for once hasn't fucked us!
It also served no purpose. The entire point of running the spoilers wasn't to knock anyone out of the running (they weren't going to win), it was just to delay the elections by a month or two in order to give the incumbents more time in office and possibly burn out steam on the recall engine by trying to stagger the actual recall elections (iirc, the dems proposed to run their own spoilers in their own primary to force all the recalls to happen at the same time still)
Not quite germane to the current topic of discussion, but on the local radio stations in Madison, there have been attack ads against Sen. Luther Olsen during almost every commercial break for the last few days. I'm kind of surprised by this, considering that the most of Olsen's district is out of range of Madison's FM stations.
My guess is that they want to catch travellers, or just want the Republicans to know what's coming for them.
That trick has been making the rounds all over the country for a few years now. The thing is, by the time any complaint gets made and it rolls through the largely toothless FEC, the damage has been done, and the people who did it get a slap on the wrist fine, or at worst have to dissolve their group and start a new one with a different name.
Honestly, this is par for the course with most things in society. Punishment-After-The-Fact is fundamentally and horribly flawed, even though we love to use it. Shit, it's one of the reasons the entire Tort system sucks.
It's especially bad with elections and other time-constrained stuff because there's no way to fix the problem in time.
I don't think it was found to be illegal, just sleezy as all fuck and ultimately unneeded.
High road for once hasn't fucked us!
It also served no purpose. The entire point of running the spoilers wasn't to knock anyone out of the running (they weren't going to win), it was just to delay the elections by a month or two in order to give the incumbents more time in office and possibly burn out steam on the recall engine by trying to stagger the actual recall elections (iirc, the dems proposed to run their own spoilers in their own primary to force all the recalls to happen at the same time still)
With Wisconsin's open primaries the Republicans were taking the long shot chance that one of their spoilers would win. It wasn't an incredible long shot with it being a short window, no incumbents and everybody, R and D and I, able to vote in the primary. If I recall correctly they also wanted to get the elections staggered to prevent a wave of momentum from being built and string out the D's money supply by making them spend on two elections instead of one.
The Democrats were really only trying to prevent R challenges so the primary would be a walk requiring little resources and to control the election dates, getting as many as possible to fall on the same day so make a giant push easier.
This is another of those things that make more sense if you understand that R's want less people who might vote to vote and D's want everybody possible to vote.
I'm sure the Republicans would've loved for one of their spoilers to win, but it's not why they ran them, DA. Your second point about spreading out the season is more accurate. Everything is about money with Republicans; specifically, spending more of other people's money while hoarding more of their own.
But what it really is all about is having another month to push through Walker's odious agenda.
Unfortunately for Republicans, VanderLeest is not that strong opponent they might have been searching for. The wind farm developer has raised a total of just $2,000 for his campaign, a pittance compared to his opponent’s $318,000 haul since April.
He also has a criminal record, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, “including a couple of disorderly conduct convictions, $25,000 in unpaid property taxes and allegations of domestic abuse.”
A Daily Kos poll released Monday found that 62 percent of likely voters in SD-30 said they would vote for Hansen, and just 34 percent said they would vote for VanderLeest.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, VanderLeest was not the Republicans first choice. The party’s candidate of choice was State Rep. John Nygren. He received just slightly more than the required amount of signatures on his recall petition. Democrats challenged, and Nygren was left with only 398 valid signatures: two signatures shy of the required 400.
Yeah. This guy is the vanderleast of Hansen's worries.
Congratulations! You managed to find a single example of something you claimed had "dozens of other examples". I would like to see, I don't know, 7 more examples or so before I believe your claim as to the frequency of the occurrence.
Also, how often are you going to keep moving the goalposts? You've done it about three times already.
Well, I pointed out the Nader push from a bunch of Republicans.
Edit: Which obviously doesn't count since you were talking about spoiler candidates in primaries, not trying to leach votes from a candidate in the general. D'oh.
Congratulations! You managed to find a single example of something you claimed had "dozens of other examples". I would like to see, I don't know, 7 more examples or so before I believe your claim as to the frequency of the occurrence.
Also, how often are you going to keep moving the goalposts? You've done it about three times already.
You'll have to point out this alleged goalpost movement, as your snarky attitude marks you uninterested in a conversation (as opposed to point scoring) and thus renders all your accusations suspect. In fact, I only count "about" five posts in the whole thread that set out any sort of goal or threshold for someone to get beyond at all, so it'd be impressive for that collection to have three "moving goalposts" fallacies; they aren't even on the same specific topic.
Do you really want me to find seven examples of spoiler candidates over 200 years of US electoral history?
No. Believe it or don't, it was conjecture on my part... as I made abundantly clear in yet another post you didn't quote. Carrot disagrees, and while he's basically appealing to his own authority I'm not going to ask him to prove a negative. I gave one good example of a spoiler in the 2010 races as a partial refutation, and the article (which I'm guessing you didn't read) lists a few others, but I'm willing to bow to Carrot's supposed encyclopedic knowledge of 2 centuries of Congressional primary elections. If the dude says he knows that much about US Electoral politics, it doesn't bother me much to accept that.
Well, I pointed out the Nader push from a bunch of Republicans.
Edit: Which obviously doesn't count since you were talking about spoiler candidates in primaries, not trying to leach votes from a candidate in the general. D'oh.
I was talking about spoiler candidates in general. It's a broad enough topic, I think, to include general election spoilers.
Posts
I wonder if entering opposing parties' primaries in an attempt to knock off incumbants twice is ever going to become a thing.
From page 13...
The primary is 'open' but it is still a partisan (i.e: Democratic Party) primary. Calling it a Democratic primary is not a rhetorical misdirection.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/19827327#Comment_19827327
Scott Ashjian's fake Tea Party candidacy in Nevada is a good example of the sort of thing that went on in 2010.
Having the closest polling station 5 hours away would be impossible. There are polling stations everywhere, and depending on redistricting there are plenty of new places to put them (until my old town got a city hall they just used the school, for example). But you'd still likely end up with situations like the reservations, where there are like 5 polling stations for an area one-third the size of Rhode Island.
It would also help prevent Gerrymandering, because Gerrymandering is a very specific type of redistricting where one party attempts to redistrict to its own advtantage - to marginalize its competition. This is why we often end up with ridiculous districts that snake around each other and form completely illogical shapes.
It is illegal, but who in wisconsin would enforce it?
pleasepaypreacher.net
Prosser.
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My guess is that they want to catch travellers, or just want the Republicans to know what's coming for them.
That trick has been making the rounds all over the country for a few years now. The thing is, by the time any complaint gets made and it rolls through the largely toothless FEC, the damage has been done, and the people who did it get a slap on the wrist fine, or at worst have to dissolve their group and start a new one with a different name.
I'm of the opinion that anyone who interferes with the voting process in such an egregious way should lose their own right to vote. Of course, actually implementing that without any sort of slippery slope (where do you draw the line?) would be tricky.
It's almost as if the same people constantly extolling the wisdom and self-determination of the average person treat them as defenseless snowflakes in certain contexts.
Just make it a felony with jail time, and raise the barrier of entry to that form of fraud from "you might need your backers to pay a few hundred thousand in fines" to "anyone found to be involved will be in jail for the next 10 years"
The only issue is when you're doing it for an office with pardon powers, but one would hope an elected official would be up on impeachment charges in seconds if it was found that they ordered people to commit a felony with the promise of a pardon in order to get elected.
Considering how much more on average a unionized worker makes I'm not sure they have a lot of room to complain about dues either.
Yeah, it was a classic half a baby decision.
High road for once hasn't fucked us!
Thought this was suggested and then shot down pretty quickly afterwards?
It also served no purpose. The entire point of running the spoilers wasn't to knock anyone out of the running (they weren't going to win), it was just to delay the elections by a month or two in order to give the incumbents more time in office and possibly burn out steam on the recall engine by trying to stagger the actual recall elections (iirc, the dems proposed to run their own spoilers in their own primary to force all the recalls to happen at the same time still)
Honestly, this is par for the course with most things in society. Punishment-After-The-Fact is fundamentally and horribly flawed, even though we love to use it. Shit, it's one of the reasons the entire Tort system sucks.
It's especially bad with elections and other time-constrained stuff because there's no way to fix the problem in time.
With Wisconsin's open primaries the Republicans were taking the long shot chance that one of their spoilers would win. It wasn't an incredible long shot with it being a short window, no incumbents and everybody, R and D and I, able to vote in the primary. If I recall correctly they also wanted to get the elections staggered to prevent a wave of momentum from being built and string out the D's money supply by making them spend on two elections instead of one.
The Democrats were really only trying to prevent R challenges so the primary would be a walk requiring little resources and to control the election dates, getting as many as possible to fall on the same day so make a giant push easier.
This is another of those things that make more sense if you understand that R's want less people who might vote to vote and D's want everybody possible to vote.
But what it really is all about is having another month to push through Walker's odious agenda.
But will he drive him before him and hear the lamentations of his women?
We can only hope
Yeah. This guy is the vanderleast of Hansen's worries.
One election down, eight to go.
Congratulations! You managed to find a single example of something you claimed had "dozens of other examples". I would like to see, I don't know, 7 more examples or so before I believe your claim as to the frequency of the occurrence.
Also, how often are you going to keep moving the goalposts? You've done it about three times already.
Edit: Which obviously doesn't count since you were talking about spoiler candidates in primaries, not trying to leach votes from a candidate in the general. D'oh.
You'll have to point out this alleged goalpost movement, as your snarky attitude marks you uninterested in a conversation (as opposed to point scoring) and thus renders all your accusations suspect. In fact, I only count "about" five posts in the whole thread that set out any sort of goal or threshold for someone to get beyond at all, so it'd be impressive for that collection to have three "moving goalposts" fallacies; they aren't even on the same specific topic.
Do you really want me to find seven examples of spoiler candidates over 200 years of US electoral history?
No. Believe it or don't, it was conjecture on my part... as I made abundantly clear in yet another post you didn't quote. Carrot disagrees, and while he's basically appealing to his own authority I'm not going to ask him to prove a negative. I gave one good example of a spoiler in the 2010 races as a partial refutation, and the article (which I'm guessing you didn't read) lists a few others, but I'm willing to bow to Carrot's supposed encyclopedic knowledge of 2 centuries of Congressional primary elections. If the dude says he knows that much about US Electoral politics, it doesn't bother me much to accept that.
For the time being at least.