Way back when, long about last week, I maintained that, given a vote, I would have gone for Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP senate primary. Sure, his beliefs probably are not as close to mind as his opponent, Christine O’Donnell, but he’s probably as close as I could get in such a state, and most polls had consistently shown him to be as near a shoo-in as imaginable. And anyway, it’s not like he was as out there as Lincoln Chaffee. Throw in the fact that he didn’t seem to have near the baggage as Miss O’Donnell, and the decision didn’t seem that hard.
But now I’m having second thoughts, particularly after a slew of favorable polls (collected at www.realclearpolitics.com) for the GOP were released yesterday.
One of those polls, which actually wasn’t so GOP-friendly, was one taken Saturday by Fox News/Rasmussen of the aforementioned Delaware senate race to fill Vice President Joe Biden’s old seat between Miss O’Donnell and democratic nominee Chris Coons. It showed Mr. Coons up by 15 LVs (likely voters). That’s actually an increase of 4 points from the poll Rasmussen conducted the day after the primary. No real surprise, although many in the republican establishment are probably still cursing through pursed lips at losing what looked to be the surest pickup of the Triple Crown (President Obama’s old seat in Illinois and that of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid being the other two).
As my wife and I sat down to work and read after putting our girls to bed last night, I flipped on the TV to CNN’s AC360 (since we keep our TV-viewing to a minimum, CNN is the only news network in our satellite subscription package). They were still hammering Miss O’Donnell about her “checkered past”, as they like to call it. If I were going to donate to her campaign, I’d like to see her address some of that myself. But then we wondered why they were focusing so much on her. She’s down 15 in a very blue state. Even given the bias in the mainstream media, don’t they have something better to cover? I thought to myself ‘I bet the other so-called controversial (you know, because they believe in the constitution and stuff) tea party candidates like Sharron Angle & Rand Paul are happy about this’. RedState’s Erick Erickson expressed a similar impression a few minutes later. Even if Miss O’Donnell eventually loses this race, which is where I believe the safe money resides, she might at least go down as a martyr because of the media fire she drew away from other tea party/constitution candidates.
A couple other poll results that grabbed my attention yesterday came out of the senate races in Wisconsin and West Virginia.
The race in Wisconsin exemplifies, as well as any, what the political climate is like. There are probably not one or two issues on which I agree with Senator Russ Feingold, but he’s a principled liberal. Because of that, I respect him. When he votes against his party, it’s usually because their position isn’t far enough to the left. I’ve never had the impression that he votes the way the wind blows. This was the man after all, the ONLY senator, who voted against the Patriot Act. Agree or disagree, he stuck to his principles.
He has been in a tough race this year, usually finding himself up only a couple points. That changed last week when Rasmussen found him down by 7 points. Then a whopper this weekend; it increased to 11 points in a poll taken by … The Daily Kos, the pioneering liberal netroots blog!
West Virginia, in the meantime, is holding a special election this year to fill the seat of the late Robert Byrd, the longest serving senator in the history of the world. Polling in this race has regularly shown democratic Governor Joe Manchin with a lead just shy of double digits. Businessman John Raese, previously a 2-time loser in senate races, had managed to knock off a point or two in recent weeks, but was barely moving the needle … until yesterday. Public Policy Polling showed him up this weekend by 3 points, roughly a 10-point swing.
The recent trends in those two races got me to thinking; did O’Donnell’s victory have the effect of a national pep rally, or at least that of an encore at a rock concert? Was it the ultimate confirmation of what Florida senate candidate Marco Rubio said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show yesterday, that there is definitely a national aspect carrying his race, along with that of Joe Miller in Alaska, the aforementioned Mrs. Angle and Mr. Paul of Nevada and Kentucky, respectively, and others? Has a sense of “If this has touched a state as small and as blue as Delaware, certainly something must be going on” swept across the country?
I told my wife it kinda reminded me of that scene at the end of Star Wars when Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Darth Vader “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” I would not be shocked if this national wave actually sweeps Miss O’Donnell into office. But even if it doesn’t, conservatives ought to be thankful for the side benefits derived from her primary victory.
