New Hampshire 2012: The graveyard of RINOs?

HOT AIR ^ | 12/30/2010 | Allahpundit

[spintreebob]

It is always nice to have more data. Especially lacking is data over time to measure how much the Tea Party is a flash in the pan vs a protracted struggle like the Revolutionary war that took many years to win.

But we do have large amounts of primary data where Tea Party candidates ran for small and big offices. Some ran in naturally conservative districts, others in swing districts, others in liberal districts. Some won, some lost. Those who won went on to the general election. Some won, some lost. Some did better than normal for that district. Some did not do as well as normal for that district.

And of all of those candidates, some ran heavily social issue message. Some ran heavily economic message. Some ran multi-issue.

Speaking just for me experience in Illinois, it is much easier to win on economic issues for two reasons.
- Economic issues are not a emotional or stressful. Voters who lack passion for your social issue feel uncomfortable around someone who is passionate on a social issue. Voters almost always avoid stress and vote the way that is least stressful.
- Even more important, voters who agree with you on the issue just can’t believe that your candidate is the real deal on social issues. Trying to convince them otherwise takes a horrendous amount of time... and in any campaign time is the resource in shortest supply.

People not yet with you or your candidate are more open to hearing and considering economic options. It doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable in the same way that gays, abortion, immigration do. (Guns is a different kettle of fish.)

At least in IL the chief role of social issues is to convince social issue activists to work for a candidate that agrees with them on their social issue but then appeal to voters on the economic issues, not the social issues. They get their candidate elected, but not on their #1 issue. That is precisely what happened with the success of the Tea Party. Never have so many pro-life candidates won election in one cycle. Yet none of them won on pro-life. They all won on economic issues.

It would be interesting if someone could document this statistically. List the 1,000 most Tea Party like candidates in the primaries. List what issues they ran on. Consider other factors of organizing ability, support from regular Republicans, money, etc. And then list which ones did better than normal and which ones worse than normal for their district.

Take IL as an example. Kinsinger, Hultgren and Walsh were all Tea Party types, the outsider against the regular GOP establishment. I know for a fact that the Kinsinger and Hultgren campaigns went out of their way to emphasize economics (and heroism in Kinsinger’s case); and to avoid the social issues although they are extremely pro-life. Kinsinger and Hultgren easily won.

Walsh won by only a couple hundred votes. He was opposed and ridiculed by the media and GOP establishment in the general election. He had no money. The only thing he had was the “Tea Party” ... The Palatine Tea Party members and the RALC-Republican Assembly of Lake County which was Tea Party before there was a Tea Party and is extremely anti-establishment Republican and forbidden by the GOP State Chair to use the word “Republican”.

So identify which unpaid volunteer door knockers worked the social issues and which the economic issues, and which did well in their precinct and which did not. That is one way to find out the truth of these hypothesis.