Posted on 04/12/2006 10:21:27 PM PDT by FairOpinion
An 18-month recruitment drive by the Democrats has produced nearly a dozen strong candidates with the potential for unseating House Republicans, but probably not enough to take back control of the House absent a massive anti-incumbent wave this fall, according to House political experts.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), said his party was able to avoid a primary fight in California and is emerging from Tuesday's balloting united and ready to go after independent voters. In contrast, he said, Republicans will have to unite a fractious party around a nominee who still has not been officially named.
Currently, there are 231 Republicans, 201 Democrats, one independent and two vacant seats in the House. It will be up to lesser Democratic lights -- running in Republican districts with less-than-glowing résumés -- to help provide the 15 net victories Democrats need to take back control of the House, which has been in GOP hands since the 1994 election.
In that context, Busby's performance -- respectable but not surprising -- is not encouraging to Democrats, said Stuart Rothenberg, a congressional analyst and editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
"Irrelevant."
How so?
"To a person, I have been told that they will NEVER make that mistake again. Will you?"
I never voted for Perot, I wasn't old enough to vote in 1992. But he was the only one to stand up against NAFTA (Bush Sr. supported it and Clinton dodged any NAFTA question.) If I was to vote knowing what I know now, I'd vote for Bush Sr. Otherwise, I highly doubt it.
You are also endorsing a New Majorityite backed and endorsed agenda which is for the most part , a liberal agenda hiding behind a platform the GOP has had for years.
Even if that is choosing the lesser of 2 evils, you call that success? amazing.
Well, at least somebody at the Washington Post is not drinking the Kool-Aid.
The dirty little secret is that 95% of the House seats are rigged for one party or the other. There just aren't that many competitive seats out there. The Dems can fantasize all they want, for example, that they can take Tom DeLay's seat outside of Houston but it ain't gonna happen.
At best, the Dems can inch closer to a split House but that's all they are going to get absent some major tidal shift.
If we want to elect more conservatives, we need to elect more Republicans, THEN go after the RINOs and replace them with conservatives.
Right now, if we were to get rid of the RINOs, they would be replaced by Dems and we would lose control of Congress, I don't see how that would advance the conservative agenda.
"No matter how you try to obfuscate, anyone who helps a Dem get elected, is NO conservative."
So a vote for a conservative independent or a conservative third party means you're not a conservative, whereas voting for a democrat with an "R" label means you are conservative?
zell could always move to Arizona and run against McCain, they're both getting up there but I'd take the crusty old Marine over the Keating 5 moderate CFR sellout anyday.
(just kidding about the zell moving part) ;-)
"Even if that is choosing the lesser of 2 evils, you call that success? amazing."
===
And you call accepting total, irrevocable defeat a goal to strive for?
Score!
A conservative third party or independent wiil NOT get elected, hence you withheld your vote from the Republican candidate, helping the Dem win.
The link you oposted about the Perot factor demonstrated that.
you really need to take a serious look about how you're trying to package your product.. just label it poop to distinguish it from the crap on the other side of the aisle. I might buy into that one. ;-)
This country has survived worse, besides at the rate things are going, we're gonna be part of a NAU in a bit anyway supported by mnay on both sides of the aisle.. in case you haven't read the writing on the wall lately.
What will you do then?
Who will you blame then?
faux conservatives?
In contrast, he said, Republicans will have to unite a fractious party around a nominee who still has not been officially named.
Who is talking?
A fractious party around a nominee, etc.!!
He must have talked about his own "sinking" party!??!
[If we want to elect more conservatives, we need to elect more Republicans, THEN go after the RINOs and replace them with conservatives.]
I couldn't agree more. I didn't mean I'd vote for a Dem in a primary but for another Repub if they're running against a rino.
You are forgetting, the only thing that is important is that the winner have an R behind the name.
Whenever you people don't have the facts, you go straight to insults, don't you? Pathetic.
What data are you talking about?
THAT is your "source"? LOL! You must be the only person who believes in exit polls. Other then Kerry, of course--are you going to defend the accuracy of exit polling in the 2004 election, too, or do you only defend exit polling when it gives you the results you're looking for?
http://www.amstat.org/sections/SRMS/Proceedings/papers/1993_194.pdf
Check out the analysis of the exit polls--for example, Bush voters were less cooperative than other voters, and the chart showing that self-professed Democrats voted 11/13 for Perot, while Republicans voted 19/17 for Perot.
See, the numbers 11 and 13 are LESS than 19 and 17. I know that screws up your theory, but sorry, I can find facts to confound your theory.
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/have_the_exit_p.html
Quoted below (please note the comments on Democratic overstatements):
One of the odd bits of received wisdom I keep hearing about the exit poll controversy is that up until this year, the exit polls were "always right." If so then this year's errors seem "implausible," and wild conspiracy theories of a widespread fraud in the count somehow seem more credible. The problem with this reasoning is that exit polls similarly "wrong" before, though perhaps not to the same degree or consistency.
Here is the documentation on previous errors. First, from the Washington Post's Richard Morin:
The networks' 1992 national exit poll overstated Democrat Bill Clinton's advantage by 2.5 percentage points, about the same as the Kerry skew
Warren Mitofsky, who ran the 2004 exit poll operation along with partner Joe Lenski, wrote the following in the Spring 2003 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly (p. 51):
An inspection of within-precinct error in the exit poll for senate and governor races in 1990, 1994 and 1998 shows an understatement of the Democratic candidate for 20 percent of the 180 polls in that time period and an overstatement 38 percent of the time...the most likely source of this error is differential non-response rates for Democrats and Republicans:
From the internal CNN report on the network's performance on Election Night 2000 (p. 48 of pdf): Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, heads of the CNN/CBS Decision Team, told us in our January 26 interview with them that in VNS's use of exit polls on Election Day 2000, the exit polls overstated the Gore vote in 22 states and overstated the Bush vote in 9 states. In the other 19 states, the polls matched actual results. There was a similar Democratic candidate overstatement in 1996 and a larger one in 1992.
In short, Mitofsky and Lenski have reported Democratic overstatements to some degree in every election since 1990. Moreover, all of Lenski and Mitofsky's statements were on the record long before Election Day 2004.
The exit poll errors four years ago led Mitofsky to tell the CNN investigators, "The exit poll is a blunt instrument," and Lenski to add, "the polls are getting less accurate" (p. 26 of pdf). They recommended "raising the bar" on projections made from exit polls: "The proposed changes result from a belief that exit polling is "less accurate than it was before" and that "we should take exit poll data with caution in making calls," said Lenski" (p. 27).
http://www.russbaker.com/TomPaine_com%20-%20Letters%20Debating%20Exit%20Polls,%20Part%202.htm
And this below is a quote from a largely POSITIVE examination of exit polls:
Probably the most disturbing part of Freeman’s theory is his myopic understanding of the ways in which presidential exit polls function. He writes: “Baker dismisses the validity of exit polls, but prominent survey researchers…political scientists…and journalists concur that they are highly reliable. As far back as 1987, political columnist David Broder wrote that exit polls "are the most useful analytic tool developed in my working life." Actually, I never said that exit polls weren’t valid. I said that they are imprecise. And I said that, in exploring the particulars of what happened on November 2 with the people who did the exit poll, I learned about all manner of technical complication that could have affected the numbers and the perceptions—a source of potential problems that Freeman fails to deal with.
The outfit that did the exit polling faced myriad headaches—including apparent quality-control issues with some of their canvassers whose job was to convince voters to voluntarily complete surveys outside polling places. Many of them are hired through subcontractors; some are more scrupulous in following rules than others; some relate to voters better than others and therefore perhaps get more accurate information. Probably the key factor was the election-day environment in which those people operated—almost circuslike, often combative, with teams of election watchers camped outside polling places wearing NAACP Election Protection T-shirts. It’s foolish or disingenuous to assert the accuracy of exit polls while denying the probability that some Republicans may have felt disinclined to say that they voted for Bush. The pollsters intend to do what they can to rectify these matters in the future, but they underline a fundamental reality about exit polls—they are surveys. They are not exact replications of actual voting. Suffice to say that if the author of some study concedes that it was flawed—and if he is considered generally expert and credible—as is true of exit pollster pere Warren Mitofsky—then there is no reason to insist that he is covering up some hideous plot. As it happens, besides being universally trusted and respected, the pollster is personally a lifelong liberal who had no use for Bush.
END QUOTES
But I guess you have your source and it gives you the answer you want, so you will continue to insult people who dare suggest you don't have any facts beyond a single piece of information that supports the position you want it to support. People arguing from an emotional as opposed to an factual one are beyond dense--they're INTENTIONALLY dense, and can't be helped. If you want to go along with the Democratic Underground Exit Poll worshippers, have fun. I prefer facts.
Yes. We simply do not have politicians who will champion our position without being politicians first. But the Republicans are clearly, to me, better on this issue, and we have to choose someone. I won't leave the power to the Dems no matter what--I just won't.
[Because after the country gets a dose of liberalism they ALWAYS run back to Conservatives.]
Man, I don't know about you but I'm getting too old to go thru another cycle of liberalism, I might not be here when the Conservatives get back in power. :-)
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