National

Bill Owens, the Democrat, wins the 23rd Congressional District race in New York.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/democrat_b...

They haven't counted the rural Teabagger vote yet!

Yea, don't forget those far out nut cases.
The ones who are unafraid to stand up to the left wing kooks.

If I was Douglass Hoffman, I'd contest it no telling how many fraudalent Acorn votes were placed in it....

Isn't this the race where the GOP and teabaggers fought vigorously to defeat the Republican candidate? Glad to see that their efforts and over-the-top spending were successful!

To me, this was a far more important race than Virginia or N.J. Hasn't it been since the Civil War that a Democrat was elected? I think it is quite telling about the 4 R's (really ridiculous religious right ...not to imply that ALL republicans fall into this category.

Granted the democrat won because of the republican fiasco in New York. However if I were a democrat I would be worried about the shift of independents that voted for the republican governers in New Jersey and Virginia that caused their victories. Maybe the democrats are going to much to the left with Pelosi, and should watch what they do before the next general election?

If you read the exit polls it had nothing to do with Obama or Pelosi, it was concern over the economy at 89% NJ and 85% Va...and that was from ABC news not one of the more biased channels.

Trojanron or Trojanwrong

Exit polls showed Obama was popular with the voters in both NJ and VA. In VA, those who voted were McCain voters. They voted for McCain by a six point margin. They are not the same voters who voted for Obama who won VA by 7 points.

So, there was no shift, merely different voters.

Also, both these republicans ran as moderates and had good things to say about working with the President.

Only the Teabagger lost in NY-23. That is probably the most telling race in the country. As the GOP gets more and more extreme, NY-23 is its future.

Also, I believe New Jersey has one of the highest property tax rates in the nation. I'm not surprised the voters went with Christie in New Jersey. I really believe that Virginia and New Jersey voters voted the way they did because of their local issues. I was actually surprised the democrat won in that 23rd district of NY. Dede Scozzafava, who originally was the Republican candidate dropped out. She seemed to be forced out by the more conservative right. She gave her support to the democrat in the race and that probably helped him win.

A key factor, as in most elections, was independents: Obama split Virginia independents with John McCain in 2008, en route to becoming the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1964. McDonnell, though, won independents by a thumping 66-33 percent.

Corzine, too, lost independents in New Jersey by a wide margin, 60-30 percent – the reason he lost a state where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 10 points.

http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/Politics/election-2009-...

The independents did break for the republicans....

You are correct. I think we are going to see the numbers of independents swell in the coming years as voters grow more and more dissatisfied with both the democratic and republican parties.

I agree.

There's a lesson here that both parties (including both wings of the Republican party) have missed:

Corzine was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. He was an unpopular governor to begin with, but as someone who made about $400 million dollars out of Goldman Sachs, no amount of Obamagic would put him over the top.

One thing that crosses party lines, ideological lines, even teabagger/moveon.org lines is revulsion at the amount of taxpayer $$$$ going to the Banks and to Goldman Sachs in particular. Goldman is going to make over a $billion just from the demise of CIT while the taxpayers lose that much. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots, and if Obama doesn't take a census of Goldman Sachs leaches in his inner circle, they're going to suck every last drop of that Obamagic right out of him.

Comments by polling expert John Judis...contains a very important lesson for the GOP.

New York’s 23rd District: Republicans had certainly expected to inherit the seat in upstate New York’s 23rd district, which was vacated by Republican John McHugh when Obama appointed him Secretary of the Army. Congressional districts shift but this area had been Republican since the Civil War. Still, there were danger signs. Obama had won the district by 52 to 47 percent in 2008, and the Republicans who had held its seat in recent years were moderates like McHugh, who backed abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and the expansion of the children’s health program. Dede Scozzafava was the choice of these moderate Republicans, but she was opposed on the right by Doug Hoffman, a dour accountant who was primarily interested in cutting spending and taxes, but who also courted the social conservatives that the pro-choice Scozzafava alienated.

National politics entered the race when the great rightwing conspiracy--which includes tea partiers, Richard Armey’s Freedom Works, the Club for Growth, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh--adopted Hoffman. These people don’t represent swing voter disapproval of Obama, but a sectarian mentality borne out of political frustration and marginality, out of a feeling that America is inexorably heading in the wrong direction and that they alone can stop it. They don’t want to defeat Obama, but to topple him, and they saw in Hoffman’s election, and the ouster of a moderate Republican, a chance to make a statement.

They helped pour money into Hoffman’s campaign. The Club for Growth alone spent $340,000 running ads for Hoffman. With their backing, Hoffman pushed Scozzafava out of the race. She lacked funds or impassioned followers. But Hoffman and his supporters misjudged the district. When Scozzafava endorsed Owens, many of those who would have voted for her backed Owens, and he won the race. Upstate New York, which used to be solidly Republican, now boasts a single conservative congressman. New York, like New England, has become solidly Democratic.

If the results of New York’s 23rd are placed alongside those of New Jersey and Virginia, there is a clear lesson for the Republicans. In New Jersey and Virginia, the gubernatorial candidates ran to the center. Christie is a moderate, and McDonnell at least pretended to be. And as a result, they got the swing vote of independents and moderates. In New York-23, a diehard conservative backed by rightwing groups repudiated the center and lost to a neophyte Democratic candidate who probably could not have beaten Scozzafava in a one-to-one contest.

Democrats have reason to worry about candidates like McDonnell--particularly if the unemployment rate continues in 2010 to undermine Obama’s standing among voters. That is the message that the Virginia election sends. But Democrats don’t have to worry about a party dominated by Armey, Beck, Palin, and Hoffman. That is the message of New York’s 23rd.

John B. Judis is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Dated but worth reading

Former OK GOP Congressman Mickey Edwards
The Iconoclast
Oct 31 2009, 1:31PM

A Battle for the GOP's Sole

To some, the election contest in New York's 23rd Congressional District is a thing of high drama, with the advocates of competing political perspectives engaged in a mighty struggle to shape the outlines of a resurgent Republican Party. It is a battle, we are told, for the very soul of the GOP. The truth is, it's more like a battle for the party's sole, a low-minded race to the political bottom.

The part of that race that has captured the greatest attention is the Republican "primary." One of the candidates in this sad story is running on the Republican Party ticket and the other as the nominee of the "Conservative Party" but that's a technicality: in a real sense, it's an intra-party fight being waged between high-profile Republicans (and, in the grand tradition of a circular firing squad, one that might well result in the election of the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, who is the likely beneficiary of the Republican blood-letting and would have no prayer of victory without it).

These are the camps. On the one hand, those who support the official Republican Party candidate, Scozzofava, despite her open support of positions anathema to many Republican activists--gay marriage, abortion, eliminating secret ballots for workers pressured to join a labor union. In Scozzofava's corner are a peculiar band of Republicans who seem not to care a whit for who she is or what she believes. Like Newt Gingrich, one of her more prominent supporters, they care nothing about issues, values, philosophy of government, or any other similarly trivial concern. No matter what she believes, they believe she can win. And all they care about in this perpetual war between the political version of the Jets and Sharks is victory, no matter to what purpose. It is triumph, and its attendant spoils, that define the game.

Then there are those who do care about views, values, philosophies, ideas, directions, priorities, and the like. Unlike the Gingrich crowd, which is single-minded in its pursuit of the spoils of political war, these people, supporting the "conservative" alternative to the Republican candidate, are more high-minded. So high-minded, in fact, that they not only believe strongly, they believe others should believe strongly, too, and in exactly the same ways. Whereas the Gingrich crowd is without scruple, the Sarah Palin-Tim Pawlenty crowd which is supporting Doug Hoffman has nothing but scruple, and apparently believes in its scruples so fervently that no departure from them is to be tolerated. To them, a Republican who supports "choice" in abortion or state-sanctioned relationships between gay couples is no Republican at all, despite the fact that the founders of the modern conservative movement were strongly libertarian in their belief that what people did in their private lives was, for the most part, none of the government's, or their neighbors', business.

To be clear, so long as we live with a political system dominated by two rival power-seeking private clubs, it is perfectly acceptable - even appropriate - to battle over the kinds of candidates one's club will put forth. In my own first race for Congress I was endorsed by national conservatives who raised money for my campaign and came to Oklahoma to speak on my behalf during a hotly-contested party primary. But the Republican Party also supported far more liberal candidates in those communities which shared their values (one, Silvio Conte, a liberal from western Massachusetts, became the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee and a de facto member of the party leadership; when Conte walked onto the House floor for votes, Republican whips would point out the party's position but in some cases suggest that he would probably want to vote differently). Where the campaign in New York departs from either of those models is in the extreme positions staked out by the two rival camps: on the one hand, those who, in the tradition of "yellow dog Democrats", who would vote for a dog if it were of the right party, there is the Gingrich band which is committed to party dominance and nothing else; on the other, the Palin brand of Republican with its checklist of "acceptable" positions and its intolerance for diversity.

This, then, is the battle for the GOP's "soul" - a war between "no principle" and "no diversity". If this election is truly a microcosm of the "debates" within the Republican brain, perhaps Joe the Plumber was not as unrepresentative of the party's intellectual center as I had hoped.