We don’t need any pre-primary anything, much less some “convention” that could be overrun by a few Paulistinians or something. Regular elections in MS and throughout much if the South (but not TN, of course) already have a good system in place: a partisan primary with a run-off between the top two if no one gets 50%+1 (or 40%+1 in the case of NC) and a general election among the nominees of each party. Such system should be adopted by all 50 states, not replaced with something out of Ron Paul’s book of tricks. The problem with yesterday’s election was that MS doesn’t follow its own rules as would have been applicable for a regular election and instead uses that retarded, Louisiana-style “jungle primary” format where everyone runs on the same ballot irrespective of party and the top two go on to the general. If MS used its regular-election rules for special elections, the problem would be solved. (The one remaining problem in MS is that it doesn’t have party registration and thus Democrats can pretend to be Republican and vote for the likes of Cochran in the GOP primary, which is something that the legislature should remedy as well.)
Of all possible results from yesterday, having the one RAT make the run-off against a conservative Republican (which is what happened) was just about the best possible one. Had two prominent Democrats run they may have finished one-two due to the plethora of GOP candidates, thus guaranteeing a RAT congressman; and had a conservative arepublican and a moderate Republican made the run-off, Democrats would have voted for the moderate in the general and thus subvert the will of most Republican voters in the district. At least with a run-off between a conservative Republican and a RAT we know that the conservative Republican will get elected.
BTW, Poliics1 described Republican Trent Kelly (the next congressman from MS-01) as “Alcorn County prosecuting attorney,” and that technically is not incorrect given that he’s from Alcorn County and is a prosecuting attorney, but he is not a mere county prosecutor, but the District Attorney for a six-county or so area in NE MS (that includes Lee County, the largest of the region). That makes Kelly an experienced and prominent figure.
I agree special elections should be the same format as other elections with a Republican primary and a democrat primary, both with runoff provisions, also these should be CLOSED primaries. The jungle primary and open primaries both seem to favor the gop-e or possibly it appears that way because they can be manipulated by the ethically challenged.
Yes, Conservative/RINO was the worst case for the runoff (since only one rat ran making rat/rat impossible) since the rats would have elected the RINO.
CA Rep. Tom McClintock was fortunate to defeat his RINO foe Art Moore in the general election (and by a handsome 20 point margin, he was obviously successful in painting Moore as the defacto rat). In WA state tea party candidate Clint Didier lost to more establishment Republican Dan Newhouse for an open seat. Hate those jungle primaries.
I didn’t know MS had multi-county judicial districts from whence DAs were elected. Looks like Politics1 dropped the ball with it’s description of Kelly’s position.
There are 22 of them, Kelly’s district (1) includes 7 counties, Alcorn, Itawamba, Lee, Monroe, Pontotoc, Prentiss, and Tishomingo. (MS seems to love Indian names for counties)
https://courts.ms.gov/trialcourts/circuitcourt/circuitcourt.html
Seems counties have their own lesser “County Attorney”.