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The race to replace Army Secretary John McHugh has completely gotten away from the Republican Party. A schism between the GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava and Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman has exploded into view, with high-profile Presidential hopefuls taking sides in an effort to advance their conservative credentials. Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Hoffman is only the latest in a line of conservative stalwarts rejecting the candidate on the Republican Party ballot line. Scozzafava has done herself no favors recently with the bungled response to a Weekly Standard reporter, where she may have been in the right, but which just brought more conservatives in on the side of Hoffman.
Now we have a poll from Daily Kos, and not the first, showing Democrat Bill Owens leading the two other candidates, threatening to steal this seat with 35-40% of the vote.
Owens 35
Scozzafava 30
Hoffman 23
Most important, the poll asked those who chose Hoffman who their second choice would be, and Scozzafava took only 9 percent of the vote, with Owens getting 3%, 26% neither, and 62% undecided.
Scozzafava isn’t going to have much of a chance to turn this around because she’s underfunded, with much less money than the other two candidates. I would not be surprised if she ended up third by the time the election is held Nov. 3.
The overriding lesson from this race, which could end up giving a Congressional district in this region to a Democrat for the first time in over a century, is that the split between the reactionary, delusional paranoid conservative base and the rest of the GOP has started to reverberate around the country, as the party pulls even more to the right. They are almost taking themselves off the national playing field, in the most amusing schism since the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.
UPDATE: Eric Kleefeld has the full rundown of endorsers on the Republican side in this race. To be clear, Bill Owens isn’t someone any Democrat should root for. But this race has taken on a meaning far beyond that.
3 Comments
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I’m relatively happy to see a Democrar win here, although I’m sure Owens will soon be a headache for us progressives. Anyway, GOP disarray sure is fun to watch.
Yeah, Isn’t Owens a Blue Dog? I don’t know where I read it (ok I should use teh Google) but I thought he was actually supposed to be more conservative than Scozzafava. I’m not so sure we should be applauding this.
Owens is definitely a moderate, and I don’t think I’m cheerleading here. I’m simply noting this war inside the GOP. And, Andrew Gelman notes that Scozzafava is a conservative Republican, to the right of Republicans in New York State. She will not step out of the teabagger line if she manages to get in.