Of all the "whither Democrats" thumbsuckers written in the past four days...

[mmcirvin]

War Liberal's has what I think of as the single best piece of tactical advice:

The first step, it seems to me, is to utterly destroy the remnants of the Rockefeller wing of the GOP. We can't afford to have anyone taking away blue-state Senate seats and governorships. Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, and any others cannot be allowed to straddle the fence anymore. Either they're with the Democrats, or they're with the far right. That may not be fair, but it's exactly a mirror image of what the Republicans have done in the South. It's harder with governors, but when Arnold runs for election in two years, the Democrats have to make Californians think that Bush is his running mate and DeLay his chief of staff. The same in New York: if whoever the Republicans nominate to succeed Pataki is even so much as photographed with Bush, make it seem like they're two peas in a pod.

This is essentially why I voted against my state senator, even though he's a nice guy with generally good policy positions (he won anyway). Sorry, Richard, it's nothing personal, it's just that you're still a running-dog lackey of the American Taliban terror militia death brigade that quests daily to eat our babies, and politics ain't beanbag.

In 1990, Bill Weld, a culturally liberal Republican, successfully ran for governor of Massachusetts against John Silber, a bigoted, theocratic crank of a Democrat who somehow ran an incredible streak of offending a different ethnic minority every week. Had I been registered in Massachusetts at the time, I certainly would have voted for Weld. But Weld's ascendancy led to a succession of Republican governors, the last two of which have been an incompetent and a cultural hardliner; so it's possible that that would have been a strategic mistake.

Comments

[jwgh]

The Silber/Weld election was the first election I voted in, and after a lot of agonizing I ended up not voting for anyone for governor.

I think that the real strategic mistake there was having Silber run for governor in the first place. Having Republican governors is no picnic, but having a series of Silber-style Democratic governors would have been not good at all either. (Although I guess you could hope that Silber was one of a kind.)

[tempest0402.livejournal.com]

Pete Coors suffered a similar fate here in colorado. He tried to paint himself as 'a moderate that would get things done'. Ken Salazar took him apart in the elections, though. The entire state house fell into democratic control.

The backlash that the media is so fond of doesn't get much traction here.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Now how can we get rid of Marilyn Musgrave?

[tempest0402.livejournal.com]

Preferably with a mallet, but I'm sure there are other ways.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Lincoln Chafee ought to follow the independent road, like that guy from Vermont.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

Tough call. It's not obvious to me that this is the right thing to do. It's not obvious that it's wrong.

My philosophy has been to reward the Republicans on the rare occasion they run a good candidate by voting for them. I voted for a Republican as recently as 2002 (a state assemblyman who was one of the only politicians with the guts not to roll over for a crazed local developer who was/is trying to scam governments for all sorts of breaks and tax credits for a super-mall he says he's going to build -- not that he's willing to promise to build it as a condition for the tax breaks.) But George says "You're either with the terrorists, or you're against them" -- and George and his cronies terrify me. Moreover, it's been clear to me for years that the national Republican party is morally bankrupt in the methods it uses to acquire and hold power.

Meanwhile back in central New York, Nancy Larraine Hoffman ran for re-election to the state senate this year. She's a 20 year incumbent. She was first elected by a few hundred vote squeaker, running as a Democrat, but she's been re-elected pretty easily every time since then. Several years ago she switched parties; I think she did it because she felt she was being ignored by the downstate-dominated Democrats. But of course the local Democrats never forgave her, and the Republicans -- though the party welcomed her -- don't really trust her. This year the party nominated someone else for her seat; she challenged the party choice in a primary and won. The party choice ran anyway as a third party candidate, taking a lot of her votes. And at the moment her Democratic opponent has a lead of about 1200 votes. There will be a recount, and there are enough absentee and provisional ballots that the race could go either way. Lesson? I don't know, but it seems relevant.