Posted on 06/11/2014 5:32:28 AM PDT by US Navy Vet
DAMMIT South Carolina, CLOSE YOUR PRIMARIES!
I am referring to groups like Senate Conservatives Fund rather than state politicians and such. I doubt Linda has much pull with them.
And its not even as if SCF is too cautious about its endorsements. They backed big longshot in Louisiana, Col. Rob Maness.
Yep. IMO the best role for the tea party is to build a coalition around the best conservative candidate—and them back him or her through to election.
Tossing lots of marginal candidates out there without a focus on bolstering the single best one is a losing strategy at all levels of politics.
They still did not keep him under 50
So how is that Lee’s fault? How is that “bungled?”
And I’m not talking about “state politicians” either….talking CONGRESS and SENATE as well.
It shouldn’t take term limits.
there IS NO Tea Party per se…..it’s ALWAYS been a mindset. An individual freedom and limited government mindset. As such, there is no way to “herd the cats” when 2,3,4 candiates with some TP cred enter.
Money does not always win. See Virginia, Brat D Cantor.
I guess the bottom line is now Trammell against Brat in the general. Let’s hope turnout is high and Brat keeps his momentum. I assume it’ll be one heck of an ugly campaign. And Cantor says he will run as a write-in. Which will takes voted from Brat.
Cantor lost, fair and square.
Cantor is one of the US Chamber of Commerce’s star Amnesty Whores that has become a lame, (but still very dangerous), duck, and there are many, Many more Amnesty Whores to go.
It is time, - - - - time for a change.
Look at the money!!! The Tea party is trying to win on the cheap. Typically, the RINO spends millions and the TP candidate has a few tens of thousands. Only in a few special circumstances where the RINO is particularly clumsy can that differential be overcome. Politics takes money; gobs and gobs of it. We’re just not putting forth the financial effort to get the job done.
It is a bungling when you run against the least popular incumbent Republican on the slate, and you cannot get the SCF to endorse you even when they back longshot no-names like Milton Wolf and Rob Maness.
Bright was a sitting legislator. The other guys in this primary to challenge Graham were weak. Whichever way you slice it, Bright had the best case to make. Bright might have done well with little money, but why were his funds as bad as they were. Raising money is also vital to running a successful campaign. He failed in this regard.
We lost a chance to unseat Graham who has been as bad as John McCain in the senate. You can blame situational factors, but there is no escaping some blame on the candidates we were fielding as well.
Cantor’s been in a short while.
Graham’s been in since he claimed the Clinton impeachment a success, which it was not.
experience and backing, seeing what was coming ahead made Graham batten down the hatches.
Cochran too, though he is old, which makes his defeat significant in a different way.
Graham and McConnell will either shut up about their agenda or get elbowed out of the way, off committees, perhaps.
They are old enough to know where their true power comes from in the end - voters.
Graham had six weak opponents.
If he didn’t have anything to do with that, he could have.
Agreed. Grahmnesty took advantage of an ancient principle:
"Divide and conquer..."
SC conservatives should look to Texas to see how it's done: There's a reason we're called, "the TEA Party" here.
Unifying to squelch individual candidate pettiness and field one good candidate has always been a viable strategy.
IMHO, it was too many greedy, "my way" SOBs on the ground in SC who handed the win to Grahmnesty...
Oh. Run a whole bunch of ‘conservative’ candidates. That’ll do it by watering down the votes.
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over against and expecting a different result.
Multiple conservatives didn’t work in 2008 or 2012 at the presidental primaries level.
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Many of us were shaking our heads when McCain won another term a few years ago.
Incumbency, at the Senate level, is difficult to defeat.
Why did the challengers lose? Too many for one thing. There were 5 or 6, and that led to too many advertisements, too many nuanced positions, too many similarities to discern a difference from the incumbent.
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We will see similar in the 2016 GOP primaries, if the nearly two-dozen wannabes jump in.
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Many of us would NOT be surprised to find out that Graham’s team and/or supporters may have ‘hired’ some of the contenders to water down the vote numbers.
But there are, officially, lots of ‘tea parties’. They should simply be coordinated by regional level to hold plenary sessions to provide pre-plenary endorsements.
*pre-primary endorsements*
The problem is then focused on how is the coalition to be built and the most agreeable of the conservative candidates to be chosen?
In my mind, the solution is a conservative secondary. That is a bone breaking, blood letting winner take all conservative process that selects one candidate for the primary.
Come the primary, there is conservative solidarity. The problem is that rather than submit to such a process, many singleminded conservatives simply take their foot ball and go home if their narrowly focused candidate loses
Cantor did not have townhall meetings. A few years ago when we had a statewide Tea Party convention in Richmond, Cantor was one of the few politicians who did not show up. He is arrogant and aloof. No doubt, he screwed up tactically because he underestimated the challenge and had no inkling that there was growing discontent among his constituents. Cantor was overconfident and very vulnerable. Dave Brat was the first credible candidate to challenge him.
Cantor's tone deaf statement a few days before the election on the massive surge of "children" coming across the border put the nail in his coffin. His reaction that the GOP could work together with Obama on specific immigration issues was the last straw.
Cantor is an example of a politician who had become so disconnected with his constituents that he thought he could do anything he wanted without political consequence. And to make matters worse, he was challenged by a bright, articulate candidate who despite being outspent 22 to 1 was able thru grassroots volunteers to mobilize the votes to win.
On the issue of immigration, Dave Brat has provided the GOP with the template on how to make immigration a winning issue. Brat is the first one to link immigration, legal and illegal, with unemployment and declining wages. He just used commonsense that if you have a surplus of labor, it makes no sense to continue to bring in more labor, which increases unemployment and depresses wages. As an economics professor, he could easily make the case.
Brat went after the Chamber of Commerce and the corporate lobby. He was putting into practice what Jeff Sessions has been advocating, i.e., Becoming the party of work
When Americans went to the polls in 2012, the following was true: Work-force participation had sunk to its lowest level in 35 years, wages had fallen below 1999 levels, and 47 million Americans were on food stamps. Yet Mitt Romney, the challenger to the incumbent president, lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.
And what did the GOP’s brilliant consultant class conclude from this resounding defeat? They declared that the GOP must embrace amnesty. The Republican National Committee dutifully issued a report calling for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that would inevitably increase the flow of low-skilled immigration, reducing the wages and living standards of the very voters whose trust the GOP had lost.
Over the past four decades, as factories were shuttered and blue-collar jobs were outsourced or automated, net immigration quadrupled. Yet the corporate-consultant class has pronounced that an insufficient level of immigration is the problem. A more colossal misreading of the political moment has rarely occurred.
Just a question outta curiosity.....can Bright run as a write in?? It’s been suggested by Fox News idiots that Cantor should run as such... Can it be done in SC?
A “conservative secondary”? I think we’re talking about, essentially, the same thing?
BTW, so many ‘tea parties’ are themselves corrupt, self-aggrandizing businesses that I would exclude any role or participation by any groups with paid leadership.
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