I think a 17 point loss is more than just “Karl Rove/Establishment GOP” type effect. At some point, being a bad candidate counts for more, especially in a 17 point blowout.
I have to agree. At some point, no matter how conservative she is, you have to question things like this: Mice with fully functioning human brains? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_4if1x1pH8
It certainly didn’t help her cause that Rove and the establishment,along with a few on this forum, kept telling the voters just how bad a candidate they thought she was. She was behind the 8 ball as soon as she defeated the rino Castle.
You make a valid point about it being more than Pudge Rove’s estrogen-triggered hissy-fit that did COD in. His hissy-fit cost her eight or nine points coming out of the primary when she should have had a substantial bump.
That momentum could have carried her to steadily building her base of support — excerpt for one major problem: not her, but her campaign staff. As many of us said when her inept communications advisers launched their first, totally off-message “gee-are-I-oh-so-cute” ad, COD needed to can the kids and bring in some adults.
She didn’t do it, and the inept staffers continued to burnish the exact opposite the exact opposite of the image she needed to portray: that of a mature, savvy, sophisticated woman ready to be a senator of whom the people of Delaward could be proud.
I believe that is the image COD herself presented in her appearances. But, she was unable to overcome her own staff’s pure idiocy.
“At some point, being a bad candidate counts for more, especially in a 17 point blowout.”
Agreed. We need to learn the lesson about flaky and undisciplined candidates if we are to be successful in 2012.
We need more Rubios, Johnsons and Toomeys, not Bucks, ODonnells and Angles.
Would she have won with support from Castle and Rove? Perhaps not.
She certainly lost after Rove trashed her right after she won the primary.