Last election almost half of these positions were empty. Only those who are elected get to vote on party leadership. You are also in a position to impact the voters in your precinct in favor of your candidate. It only costs about $10 to register.
The other problems are getting the conservatives to agree on a candidate, and getting people to ignore the media propaganda machine/polls/hype.
The issue of electability can not be allowed to trump experience. That's how Obama got elected. The candidate must have experience as well as electability. Imperfections will exist for any candidate, because no one is perfect. Conservatives must also come up with a process to agree on a candidate, at least as soom as the GOPee.
Things to think about. Thanks for the contribution.
Every state is a little different on party organization, but Greeneyes is essentially right in what I've cited him saying below.
So are the people who have pointed out that conservative Republican activists took decades to bring the GOP to where it is today. Things used to be much worse than they are now, and we need to think in terms of decades, not months or even years, if we want to have an influence in making the Republican Party consistently conservative on the national level.
Still others have correctly pointed out that third parties historically have done nothing but wreck the electoral chances of the major party closest to them ideologically. I don't have a problem with encouraging Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson to go third-party to split the Democratic Party's votes, but I have major concerns about the damage a conservative third-party movement will cause, not only to the presidential race but all down the ticket as good senatorial, congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative candidates get buried due to split votes at the top of the ticket.
That doesn't need to happen — lots of third-party advocates will correctly point out that you can still vote Republican for other positions down-ticket — but it **WILL** happen if Republican turnout gets depressed due to a perception that President Obama will be re-elected by huge margins due to a conservative split.
The one exception in United States history is the Republican Party, which was essentially a third-party movement which replaced the dying remnants of the old Whig Party, but the fact is that the Whigs were basically dead anyway, something was going to rise up to take their place, and Republicans were the right group at the right time to step into a vacuum that today does not exist. Even if the parallels were better, we're talking about events a century and a half ago in an era when virtually nothing about politics resembles what we have today.
I'm painfully aware that if Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee, many of us will be placed in a horrible position. I'm not going to say what I would do in a hypothetical case like that — I'm not naive, I do deal with cold hard truths when I have no choice, but I don't deal in hypotheticals — and the best way to avoid putting us in a position like that is not to nominate Romney at all.
Let's focus first on defeating Romney so the worst-case scenario remains hypothetical. I can live with Gingrich or Santorum. I don't think Romney will win even if nominated, and this third-party debate is only one indicator of how much damage a Romney nomination will do to Republican turnout.
The one good thing these third-party discussions do is warn the Republican Party's top leadership that nominating Romney really is dangerous. I don't think they're taking third-party threats seriously yet. If we move into a brokered convention, those threats may become deadly serious, and I'm not convinced they won't play a role in convincing people in the Republican leadership that they have to deal with conservatives or face defeat in November.
127 posted on Sunday, March 18, 2012 5:43:15 PM by greeneyes: “Easier to take over the Republican Party than it is to start a new party. You have to start by electing committed conservatives as precinct chair. If conservatives don't fill these spots you have no hope of controlling the party. Last election almost half of these positions were empty. Only those who are elected get to vote on party leadership. You are also in a position to impact the voters in your precinct in favor of your candidate. It only costs about $10 to register. The other problems are getting the conservatives to agree on a candidate, and getting people to ignore the media propaganda machine/polls/hype. The issue of electability can not be allowed to trump experience. That's how Obama got elected. The candidate must have experience as well as electability. Imperfections will exist for any candidate, because no one is perfect. Conservatives must also come up with a process to agree on a candidate, at least as soom as the GOPee.”