Very interesting stuff on Oregon, do you know anything about 1990 indy gubernatorial candidate Al Mobley? He got 13%. I can't believe no one is running for those state offices, what kind of incompetence is this, your chances of winning when not on the ballot are 0. Even here in Illinois we had sacrificial lambs against Jesse White, Lisa Madigan and Dan Hynes and we know how dumb the IL GOP is (elect a good Senator and force him from office, abandon candidates for wanting to have sex with their own wives and replace them with Alan Keyes embracing a perennial loser, running Judy Topinka against a reviled Governor ect.)
Well, I was a brainwashed public skrool yoot. I left the party as a teenager when I was still on the left, and paid a high price for doing so (my expulsion from the premier magnet school in my city the following year was partly politically motivated, although not exclusively). I was still migrating rightward over the next several years. I left the Dems in the first place over corruption issues. The party had, and still has, a high tolerance for criminality and the open brainwashing for the party of public school students really pissed me off, and I rebelled against it big-time.
"Very interesting stuff on Oregon, do you know anything about 1990 indy gubernatorial candidate Al Mobley? He got 13%."
Mobley was an anti-abortion activist, and all of his support came at the expense of Frohnmayer. Their combined vote was partly why the GOP was able to win the House there after 20 years. Frohnmayer had been counting on running against Neil Goldschmidt, but there were already whispering rumors about his private life (it would later come to light he was having an affair with a 14-year old when he was Portland Mayor -- and now even 34 years later, it's still having repercussions because of folks covering up for him. It has run past the statute of limitations, so he won't have to register as a sex offender. The Sheriff of Multnomah County, Bernie Giusto, just resigned last month because of this decades-old scandal), so he retired before facing him. As it was, Barbara Roberts ended up a pretty awful Governor and she quit after a single term (which was too bad for us, since had she been the nominee in '94, we probably would've won -- although in hindsight, running Denny Smith was probably a bad idea. Given that he had lost his own House seat 4 years earlier, he didn't have a solid base of support. I'd have rather run longtime Rep. Bob Smith (who was retiring that year, anyway, and had a lot of institutional legislative knowledge serving in both bodies in Salem) or to have gotten Atiyeh out of retirement).