Agree. She’s was right on the positions but that’s not enough in elections where people are also judging the candidate personally. You can’t come off that...weird, especially if you’re a Republican.
I don’t get why a lot of conservatives seemed to push her as the face of the Tea Party. If anybody, it should be now Senator-elect Ron Johnson. Normal, every-day business guy actually pushed to run at a Tea Party event (unlike O’Donnell who was involved in politics before).
MSM ran an end-around. Notice they virtually ignored him to focus on the likes of O’Donnell. Why? Because he’s a much more appealing representative of the Tea Party.
YES. We don't need little girls telling us "I'm you!" like they're running for class president. We need accomplished regular Americans who have jobs, who work, who have homes and families and aren't interested in talking about masturbation and witchcraft when they're not spouting cliches when asked about foreign affairs.
The more our candidates ARE just like most Americans instead of TELLING us they are, the more we win.
MSM ran an end-around. Notice they virtually ignored him to focus on the likes of O’Donnell. Why? Because he’s a much more appealing representative of the Tea Party.
And they also treated Alvin Greene as a curiosity, not an emblem of a party movement they want to squash.
We have SO many potential great candidates, we need to tell the foolish and emphemeral ones "Sorry, we have more respect for the voters than to accept this."
“I don’t get why a lot of conservatives seemed to push her as the face of the Tea Party.”
Because she was “cute as a button’, a “junior size Sarah Palin”, “the new Mary Tyler Moore”, an evangelical “virgin”, etc. (all quotes from FR threads).
Blame it on the fact that many Tea Partiers are emotional rather than analytical; older and whiter; naive and easily impressed by a pretty face.
I can’t believe that O’Donnell even fooled Michelle Malkin.
The Tea Party needs to get real.
Fortunately he won and she lost. The one thing worst than a RINO is a real conservative that makes everyone other decent conservative look bad by association.
I think that Christine is called “tea party” because she got the tea party express endorse and the tea party express money before the primary. That tea party express activity was completely essential for Christine at that time, and when Palin jumped in, it was clear that Christine was a tea party brand candidate.
The truth is though, Christine is a Social Conservative. Her background is 100% Christian. There’s really nothing on her resume involving fighting for small government. In 2010, there’s really no “religious right” or “Christian Coalition” candidates running. The outsider candidates where the tea party brand. And so Christine was tea party brand.
I personally feel that the tea party should not be either Libertarian or Conservative Christian, but should include both. Christine is the perfect example of both tea party and Conservative Christian. She lost in a state with fewer conservatives than any state than Hawaii or Rhode Island.
That really shouldn’t be a shocker.
Another thing to consider off topic a bit, is that Delaware is not Pro Life at all. Not even close. And Christine is 100% Pro Life. It wasn’t explicitly an issue, but on almost every social conservative issue, Delaware is about 60/40, and Christine took the 40.
What a lot of us assumed was that her hardcore positions would get awesome turnout with Conservatives. I think that’s true. And then we looked at generic numbers (+15, +19) and then said “well, we’re so hardcore Conservative, our Conservatives will all be voting for us.” And then we said “look at that tidal wave”. Combine huge turnout with Conservatives with apathetic Democrats who weren’t voting, and we win.
There were a lot of anti Christines here. None of them made a convincing argument, or really any argument at all, that what did happen was going to happen. And what did happen (I think, haven’t seen data), was that the Democrat turnout was high in Delaware, not like in other states, but high, and they weren’t apathetic, but they were voting against Christine and Social Conservativism.
A lot of the “jokes” were really the left’s way of saying “oh, no, we know exactly what you mean when you say that separation of church and state isn’t in the Constitution. We don’t really feel like arguing that point. We don’t have to. We liberals all know that we put it there in 1947, and we know that it isn’t there, it doesn’t belong there, but we want it there. We’re going to tell moderates that you’re stupid, and it’ll work with some. But what is actually going to happen is that every single liberal in DE is as scared of you as the conservatives are excited, and those liberals most certainly do have a reason to vote against you.”
What we didn’t realize was that the jokes weren’t for them. They were scared about Christine, and they did vote against her.
Something very similar happened in Maine, but the Conservative tea party Governor LePage did win. Polls less than a week ago had LePage up 40 to 21 to 21. He ended up winning by 1.5 points. The liberal Democrats who were supporting the liberal Democrat Mitchell decided that “stop LePage” was necessary, and they all decided in the last week to support the Independent Cutler. Republican LePage got 38.33%, Independent Cutler got 36.49%, and the Democrat Mitchell got 19.12%. Hooray for early voting in Maine, because the big, rapid swing from Mitchell to Cutler took place in the last week, after a lot of early votes had been cast for Mitchell instead of Cutler.