Posted on 01/17/2014 8:47:18 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Lets read some 2014 tea leaves, shall we? First, some background on an Arkansas special election that was decided earlier this week:
The special election for a northeast Arkansas Senate seat vacated by a lawmaker who resigned over ethics violations will be an early bellwether on the fight to protect the states Medicaid expansion, as well as Democrats chances in the November election. Voters head to the polls Tuesday to cast ballots in the special election between Democrat Steve Rockwell and Republican John Cooper for state Senate District 21 seat that covers the Jonesboro area. The winner will serve the remainder of the term of former state Sen. Paul Bookout a Democrat. The race for Bookouts seat between Rockwell and Cooper has centered on the key issue facing lawmakers when they return for next months fiscal session whether to continue the states private option plan to expand Medicaid.
Craighead County has not been represented by a Republican in the state senate since reconstruction. An analysis from the left-wing Daily Kos explained the dynamics and significance of this race:
Craighead County is part of the Delta. As such, it is part of the rural Democratic coalition that dominated state politics for over a century. Today, county politics are still largely Democratic On the politics side of things, this election is huge. Craighead County is a key area of the state for both Mark Pryor and Mike Ross to win (they need to get at minimum 49% of the vote in this county to win the state) If Rockwell cant put up a decent showing, Democrats are going to have some serious issues going into 2014.
So here we had a contested race in a traditionally Democratic area, the outcome of which held significant implications for Mark Pryors re-election bid. An Obamacare-related controversy drove the campaign. Oh, and according to an email blast from the NRSC, the Republican candidate was outgunned on the spending front by a three-to-one margin. Your result:
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
It wasnt even close. The victorious Cooper called his triumph a statement win. Indeed. Id imagine Sen. Pryor can hear that statement loud and clear.
This strategy has worked so very, very well for the party in the past -- as amply demonstrated by the McCain and Romney administrations. As opposed to the failed Reagan candidacy, of course.
I'm sorry but, if a candidate can't get his own base out, he'll never win an election.
How about the GOPe strategy of blaming the base? Won't that work? They have some of their flying monkeys posting right here on FR.
They got the base out - they won the red states handily. They couldn't win the Rust Belt states (or the original snowbird state, FL), and that was all she wrote. No surprise there - no hard line conservative has won a Rust Belt governorship either. Rick Scott barely won FL in 2010, and that was an excellent year for the GOP. The electorate is moving left, and the irony is that the end of the Cold War has accelerated that move.
NC's governor, Pat McCrory, pushed through several laws social conservatives had been asking for. His approval rating is 37%. This tells me that Beverly Perdue's election victory was not a fluke, that the state's electorate is changing, either demographically or ideologically.
??? Why do you suppose the GOP establishment ran John Anderson as a third party candidate? Maybe you weren't around yet, or weren't paying attention. Reagan was attacked for being a trigger happy Cold War cowboy who risked nuclear war with the USSR.
He had Jerry Falwell's newly ascendant Moral Majority behind him, as well as Paul Weyrich's fundraising machine. And to be clear, the democrats did everything they could to make sure everyone knew how conservative Reagan was.
That's how he was attacked, but it never stuck. That's why he was called the Teflon President.
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