Posted on 05/18/2010 8:11:13 PM PDT by Tribune7
Mark Critz, the aide to the late Congressman John Murtha, won a special election Tuesday to fill the remainder of his term which ends Jan. 3.
Critz, a Democrat, easily beat Republican Tim Burns, who state GOP Chairman Rob Gleason had tapped over Bill Russell, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who ran against Murtha in 2008.
(Excerpt) Read more at BillLawrenceOnline.Com ...
You don't see how??? What he's saying now will become "inoperative" after Pelosi gets hold of his neck. Or, as Obama's campaign said when they were caught lying "oh, that's just campaign talk".
Hard to win when your opponents supporters are given TWO chances to vote at the polls .
What I haven't heard yet was "Which Republican won the primary election?"....you know, the person who will be running against the Dem in the Fall?
So is it going to be Russell or Burns against Critz in November???
Well, once again we are at zero for gaining winnable Dem-held seats. I think why we lost this was partly because it was scheduled during the primary, with the big action on the Dem side (had it been Specter vs. Toomey in the GOP primary, it would have been a different story). I think the bitterness between the Bill Russell and Burns camps didn’t help, either. I switched from being a Russell to Burns supporter when I saw faults with Russell’s candidacy (the squandering of money). Burns will get the rematch in November, but he may still similarly come up short.
Excellent analysis!
Perhaps both Russell and Burns are whores.
This particular contest was a special election because of Murtha’s death. It was decided yesterday: the Democrat, Critz, beat the Repub, Burns.
There will be a rematch in November for a fresh term since Burns beat Russell in the GOP congressional primary race while Critz defeated two novice primary challengers.
The election was both a primary election to see who would run in November and a special election to see who would complete the balance of John Murtha's term.
I have since found out that Burns won the Republican primary portion of the election and Critz won the Democrat portion. They will face each other again in the Fall.
Burns was appointed by the Chair of the PA Republican Party to run for the unfinished Murtha term with no voter input. When he did this, he completely overlooked Hoffman - who had scored the highest vote totals ever against Murtha during the last run. It seems like another case of the RINO leadership trying to pad their numbers.
I admire a person who researches what s/he wants to know. Thanks for the good information. This will be a contest to look forward to in November.
The folks of his district will just have to hold his feet to the fire. Pictures of him with Mistress Nancy and the Bummer.
I think the district itself was a big hurdle. This district was carved out of territory that has been Democrat for the past few decades, even resisting Reagan and Bush 41 when they were winning statewide. It has been GOP-trending (Bush narrowly lost it in 04 and McCain narrowly won it), but as it usually is in these cases, the local party performance tends to lag behind the national vote. Even in the South we still have problems winning some historically Dem districts (AL-5 being a big example, we only got that one through a party switch). What makes PA-12 worse is that it was drawn to avoid the traditional GOP constituencies like affluent suburbs, so there was even less of the “normal” GOP vote to work with. When you don’t have voters who are accustomed to voting Republican, it takes a lot more effort to pry them loose. Burns to his credit has probably run closer than any Republican has in that area for a long while (absent a statewide landslide), but it just wasn’t enough.
Yeah, as I remarked to someone else, Burns had the best showing since the 1974 special to succeed John Saylor. Rendell’s scheduling the election to coincide with the higher-turnout Dem primary was also a brilliant tactical movement to hold the seat. Had Specter remained in the GOP, the GOP turnout would’ve been higher in a Toomey-Specter matchup. As it was, the only game for 12th district Republicans was the House seat, since the Gov and Senate nominations were already decided for the GOP, but for the Dems, they had highly contested races in both of those.
In Nashville, we had a city primary (postponed 2 weeks due to the flood) for some local races (like Court Clerks, etc), but I didn’t bother to vote since only one race even had Republicans running, and the nominee wasn’t in doubt, while the real “action” was in the Dem primary, where one troubled incumbent got the boot in an extremely low turnout.
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