Sep 25 2010
Castle Needs To Run Write-In Campaign
Since I have been for removing the Democrats in power and not for any specific group on the right, I have to break all my earlier complaints with Crist and Murkowski and others who could not listen to the voters and go with the idea of a Mike Castle write-in campaign. This is more in line with my support for Joe Leiberman, when he bolted the Dems after his primary loss.
As with then, the two primary candidates available are damaged goods. Someone asked me in the comments why I have been hard on O’Donnell over her falsifying campaign finance records. My answer was simple – I have not tossed out my principles or my views on the equal and fair application of the law for political power. Or worse, simply to be part of the latest political wave. I support every other Tea Party candidate out there, have issues with none of them. But as details have come out about O’Donnell’s misuse of campaign funds, I have concluded we cannot sell out our values and morals and honor for political gain.
Worse yet, the GOP & O’Donnell are trying to deflect from her illegal actions by admitting she had ‘mortgage’ problems back in the day. She was doing some kind of pro bono advertising work for someone or something. LOL! Good lord, that is the lamest excuse to break the law I have ever heard – and irrelevant. O’Donnell lied on government forms and used campaign money to feed herself, travel and pay her rent. That is all illegal. We don’t need more crooked people in Congress who skate by the laws the rest of us have to follow – got enough of those already.
So my choice is between a far left candidate who will keep Harry Reid in power, a serial misleader who admits she falsified government forms and a good man who votes center left verses more center right – but who has pledged to vote for a GOP senate leader and to repeal Obamacare.
I take the 3rd option. Mike Castle should run and let the entire population of DE chose who they want. My guess is he will blow out the other two easily, since they are currently in a battle to see who is the worst choice. I feel for DE, because all year it has been who is the worse choice. But now, with CA and WA possibly slipping away from the GOP and the Senate in the balance, not to mention my own personal values when it comes to equal application of our laws, I have no choice but to come out in support of a Mike Castle write-in campaign.
As for the Tea Party organizations and the GOP – when you lay down with mangy dogs you get the mange. You should never have been willing to ignore and accept someone who willfully broke laws and lied on government forms to line her pockets – no matter WHAT the rational. Maybe instead of playing Good Samaritan, O’Donnell should have been working? Whatever, we now see your standards are as low as all other political parties. You will ignore anything to gain power. If I have to chose between my values or someone who votes more left than I like, I pick the center left candidate. Every time. The law is the law, and it applies to all. And my values are worth more than one election race.
You know I agree with you completely that Castle should run a write-in campaign. Now I’ll make a friendly wager – I would bet that O’Donnell actually wins a 3 way, because I think she’s got a dedicated 35% in her pocket and none of them will switch since this is a fight for the Coons supporters. BUT, it’ll be interesting to see how it actually plays out. If Castle believes he can win a 3 way, he should try.
I see it in terms of playing the odds – either O’Donnell or Castle will win, helping pad the GOP’s advantage in the Senate. (which won’t mean much as long as Obama is in office, of course) Worst case – Coons wins, but since that already looks like where we’re headed, there’s nothing to lose from the gambit.
It’s all upside, with no downside.
Question for the day – will Castle refuse to run if his inside polls show that he may be enabling an O’Donnell victory?
WWS,
Your on. If O’Donnell wins you can write two “I told AJ so” posts on it!
WWS:
I doubt if she will win. Castle has won 12 state wide elections in Delaware, O’Donnell never won an election until this last primary and she would not have won that if it were not for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
I don’t know if I think Castle should run a write in or not…I tend to think that if you lose, you lose.
But I have noticed that conservatives have had precious little to say about Hoffman running a third party ticket in NY again, this time after losing a legitimate primary…and of course there is Tancredo in Colorado.
There is an interesting comparison to make here however, Maes in Colorado has turned out to be as problematic as O’Donnell and so if someone like Tancredo or Castle step in they are not acting the spoiler, like Hoffman is in NY. After all, there is no way O’Donnell can win and it is unlikely that Maes can win either.
From Hot Air:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/09/25/statistical-model-of-delaware-coons-37-castle-34-odonnell-29/ –
Statistical model of Delaware: Coons 37, Castle 34, O’Donnell 29
Nate Silver took a stab at it but even he doesn’t sound terribly confident in his numbers. People are starving for a poll showing the effect of a Castle write-in bid on the race, though, so until we see some sort of proper survey next week, this’ll have to do.
The bad news for Republicans, obviously: Castle wouldn’t necessarily tip the race towards her, as I and others thought it might. The good news: It dramatically improves her chances, cutting Coons’s 16-point lead over her in the last CNN poll neatly in half. And of course the model doesn’t take into account the strategic considerations that Delaware voters will face if the race is this tight on November 2. My sense of strategic voting is that it benefits the candidate people see as the lesser of two evils; given the media push to paint O’Donnell as a crank because of the “witchcraft” nonsense etc, the lesser evil here to most voters is probably the cipher Coons, which means some moderates who are in Castle’s column right now might break for the Democrat once they’re in the booth simply in the interests of ensuring O’Donnell’s defeat. Then again, maybe Castle’s name recognition is sufficiently high in Delaware that moderates and indies will stick with him to the bitter end, thinking he can pull the upset and making it a true cliffhanger on election night.
Two interesting points from Silver:
Mr. Castle could receive a decent number of Democratic votes. Polling that pitted him head-to-head in a (now hypothetical) one-on-one matchup against the Democratic nominee, Chris Coons, had shown him getting about one-third of the Democratic vote. On the other hand, Mr. Coons has perhaps become a little bit more entrenched than the Democrat in Alaska, Scott McAdams, simply because — in contast to Mr. McAdams — Mr. Coons had become the overwhelming favorite to win his race the moment that Ms. O’Donnell became the nominee. There may be an element of loss aversion among Democratic supporters of Mr. Coons, who could be less likely to support Mr. Castle in practice than they might have been in theory…
One dynamic that may be more favorable to Mr. Castle is that it seems conceivable he could win with as little as 35 percent of the vote. It seems probable to me that Ms. O’Donnell’s support is going to hover in the area of 30 percent — not a lot higher, not a lot lower — which was about the percentage of voters who had a favorable impression of her in the Public Policy Polling survey. That would leave Mr. Castle and Mr. Coons to fight over the remaining 70 percent of the electorate, making half that total — 35 percent — the magic number.
Yeah, unlike Alaska, which has always been expected to stay red, the Dems now have a legit chance of flipping a seat that was headed towards the GOP back into their column. Democrats who like Castle might be extra reluctant to part with that by defecting to the RINO. The possibility of a 35/34/31 race is pure gold for O’Donnell supporters specifically and Republicans generally, though, since the margin is so thin that a massive GOTV push at the very end could lead to her pulling the upset. Specifically, if she can peel off an extra 10 percent of independents from both Coons and Castle — and she’s got $2.5 million in the bank right now with which to do it — the race would be an almost even three-way split. The macro-point, though, is that the specific numbers don’t matter all that much right now. However they shake out, Castle’s entry into the race would push roughly 65 percent of the votes in Delaware into the Republican column — not enough to guarantee victory for either him or O’Donnell, ironically, but better than the 50-55 percent that are currently predicted to go Democratic. If you prefer either O’Donnell or Castle to Coons, if only for the sake of maximizing the odds of a Republican majority in the Senate, then you probably want Castle in to bring that about. If you’re in the “true conservative or bust” camp, then obviously you don’t. I think that’ll be the only real takeaway from whatever the polls show next week.
For your viewing pleasure, here’s Coulter jabbing at sore-loser RINOs a few nights ago on Hannity’s show while helping to lower expectations about taking back the Senate. As you’ve probably already seen elsewhere, Bill Maher’s latest archived clip of O’Donnell shows her arguing in the 1990s that evolution is a myth. That might hurt a tiny bit more in a blue state like Delaware, but have a look at this Gallup poll taken last year on the anniversary of Darwin’s birthday. How much is it going to hurt really?
[…] of Justice voting rights section chief Christopher Coates yesterday. The Washingt more… Castle Needs To Run Write-In Campaign – strata-sphere.com 09/25/2010 Since I have been for removing the Democrats in power and not […]
I still cannot get to your home page when you make new posts.
I think the race Hoffman is in is off everyone’s radar screens now, but yes that’s despicable of him to try and sandbag a race he can’t win. I had been quite critical of Tancredo for jumping into the race, but you’re right, Maes has flamed out spectacularly. (It’s come out that Maes has lied quite a bit about his past, among other things) What needs to happen is for BOTH Maes and Tancredo to drop their bids which would allow the GOP to put someone else entirely on the ticket. Barring that, looks like Hickenlooper gets 4 more years as Governor, which is a shame since that was an easy pickup.
Still, as we’ve been saying along, no political team ever gets through a season undefeated, no one bats 1.000 – there’s always going to be some winnable races lost because of stupid reasons. We can only take comfort in the fact that this happens on the other side, too.
lurker9876, try emptying your ‘cache’ in your browser. Still trying to fix the bugs that crept in the last upgrade.
Hey Lurker, did you see Perry’s still got about the same lead? It’s not a huge one, but Bill White can’t get much over 40% no matter how much he tries. And with just about all of the campaign themes already out there, I don’t know what could happen in the next 5 weeks (all the time we have left) to change that.
I still stand by my prediction for the Texas gov race:
final tally, Perry 54%, White 45%, other, 1%
for those outside of Texas, Perry was never wildly popular, and he’s done a lot of things to piss a lot of people off over the last 10 years, including me. 4 years ago he won re-election in a 4 way race with only 40% of the vote. Lucky for Perry to be running in a Republican Wave year, or he could have been in real trouble!
But you really gotta hand it to him. Perry, who’s never been wildly popular, is going to end up being the longest serving Governor in Texas History by far. He seems to be one of those types who always finds a way to survive.
Hi, wws, I read today’s Chronicle of a similar message. The people that polled the Texans found that no matter how much Bill White spends or does, he hasn’t been able to get ahead of Perry. But they did find that Houston and San Antonio, Perry and White are polling equally but in Dallas Perry is ahead of White by 30 points.
Perry is singing the Tea Party and anti-Obama messages this year and that is how he just might win another term. Did you see the TV Ads that Perry is playing in Houston…that Bill White double the debt per person, dipped in the police and firemen pension funds to finance other government programs, and left Anise Parker a mess of a budget. Then Perry equates Bill White to Obama. Clever Ad.
To wws and lurker9876:
As a Houstonian, my only real gripe with Bill White is that he is running as a democrat.
In THIS election, that is the kiss of death as far as I’m concerned. While normally opposed to straight-ticket voting, I fully intend to this time. You can probably guess which party I’m NOT voting for.
As I’ve harped on in “the bottom line”, we need to vote in as many Republicans as possible, to even be able to BEGIN undoing the damage and have a chance at overriding vetoes that will be guaranteed in those circumstances.
So, while White appears to be a nice guy, the very last thing we need at this moment is yet another democrat in power anywhere.
–