I wouldn’t be surprised if people like Hughes were on the Combiner payroll from the get-go. The primary was a complete joke.
Judge Don Lowery was obviously a far superior candidate in every respect (track record of winning elections, bronze star in the Vietnam War, experience in two branches of government, ability to articulate conservative principals, etc.) but he had a shoe-string budget and was DOA as long as the conservative "leaders" wouldn't give him the time of day and pi$$ed away all their time for Patrick Hughes. For what it's worth, Lowery spent next to nothing and got around 10% (winning most of the counties in the bottom 1/3rd of the state), Hughes spent 10X that, had campaign offices around the state, and got around 19% of the vote, winning 1 or 2 counties.
Add up all the anti-Kirk candidates combined numbers and it's around 40% of the time. The biggest mistake was the Hughes people stabbing Dr. Eric Wallace in the back and forcing his exit when they threw all their resources to Hughes. He had prepared for this race and made it known publicly long before Hughes name was even floated. They (and I as well) figured once Wallace was gone, Hughes should get the conservative vote by default. But Hughes was so incredibly inept conservatives were vary of backing him until the last minute.
Most of us who voted "for" Hughes made up our minds to do so during the final week of the campaign because he was the only non-Kirk candidate getting press coverage. It was a mistake, Hughes was a paper tiger and his candidacy was dead on arrival.
Hughes might be a little bit like Jim Ryan. Both of them actually have pretty conservative positions, and aren't party of any backroom deals, but both them are useful idiots for the combine. Jim Ryan tries to play nice and positive media coverage, and figured the combine would support him in the general election. He never saw it coming when "fellow Republicans" threw him under the bus and uniformly backed Blago in November. Hughes is probably getting the same bad advise from the GOP establishment. "Don't get tagged as a sore loser, campaign for Kirk in November and we'll support you in future campaigns".
Don't get your hopes up, Pat.
A horrible thought but I can’t say it’s not possible. He was poor enough a candidate that you could wonder.
Of course he could easily just be a fool as Billy says.
His shilling for Kirk could easily be attributed to a desire to get in good with the party bosses in anticipation of a future run for office. I shan’t vote for him in a primary again.