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Reporters should be careful to divine meaning from any special election, especially ones from concentrated Democratic or Republican areas. But Ed Lynch, a Republican in FL-19, spent the last month or so telling everyone who would listen – and a few who wouldn’t – that his campaign in the FL-19 special election to replace the retired Robert Wexler would be a referendum on the out of control Democratic Party in the wake of the health care vote. That passage was wildly unpopular across the country, Lynch maintained, and he would benefit.
The problem with this narrative is that Lynch had no money, his opponent Ted Deutch had lots along with name ID, and in a deep-blue district, that was more than enough to win easily.
State Sen. Ted Deutch (D) handily won tonight’s FL-19 special election over ’08 nominee Ed Lynch (R), and the AP called the race with Deutch leading, 62-36%. A conservative-leaning third-party candidate Jim McCormick (D) took 3%.
The race was never expected to be close, but some were watching to see if the health care debate would have an impact in this heavily-Dem CD. If appeared to have a negligible effect, as Deutch won with margins just slightly under the norm for Dems in the CD.
Republicans have still yet to win a special election in several years. The district went 65% for Obama and 62% for Deutch, who ran on health care and withdrawing from Iraq.
I gather we won’t hear much from conservatives about this race, though as I said, extrapolating from a special election just shouldn’t be done. All we know for now is that Democrats have a 254th member in the House of Representatives, compared to 178 for the Republicans. Three seats remain vacant: PA-12 (Murtha), HI-01 (Abercrombie) and NY-29 (Massa). The first two will be decided in special elections in May; the latter is likely to remain vacant until November.
UPDATE: I forgot about Republican Nathan Deal retiring to run for Governor in Georgia. So the split is actually 254-177 at the moment.
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Yeah, it really benefitted him. His ass only got beat like a gong instead of being put through the blades.
Expect the mainstream media and the republican party to spin this democrats win as some fluke. There reality is this Special Election was supposed to be a referendum on Health Care Reform and the democrats. So much for a referendum. I guess sanity prevailed over intolerance.
ot emptywheel live blogging the Holder testimony..about KSM trial etc
Holder Testifies Before Senate Judiciary Committee
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/
This was a trial run of two themes that the tea-baggers believed would be transcendent to Seniors, Jews, and Independents.
The first was health care…and the idea that Seniors will face cuts to Medicare and death panels. That failed. And in fact it may suggest that retirees are actually supportive of the health care bill as it applies to them.
The next is foreign policy and national security issues. Despite the differences between Obama and Netanyahu and the efforts by the Tea Party candidate to exploit the claims that Obama and the Democrats were weak on terrorism this theme also flopped. In some ways this district was one that was ideal to test how much erosion could be gained into older demographics which might be easily concerned about terrorism, in an area with fewer minorities and young.
Obama won 66% of the vote in this district…a drop to 62% in a midyear…that’s not much.
It flopped.
NY-29 … an American colony.
SD mentioned this morning that something like only 28,000 turned out to vote.
Guess the baggers will have to go back to pumping up fear about Secret FEMA Reeducation Camps. They are secret, so lack of existance evidence is no deterrent to pumping about them.
David Dayen has a fresh cross-post up: Another Bullet Dodged: Tommy Thompson Won’t Run Against Feingold In Wisconsin, Says Local Report
Even though the mentally challenged Repubtards keep pushing that “Death Panels” it isn’t getting any more believable. Sarah Palin keeps pushing it and all it does for her is make her look like a bigger idiot. It just gives her an excuse to talk about Bristol’s( Trig IS Bristol’s) retarded child for some sort of sympathy. I think this shows that Repubs thinking their going to win big in the next election is just wishful thinking on their part. The have no ideas. The have nothing. They are the party of nothing. Ok lies. They got lies. Lots and lots of lies. A whole big whopping bunch of stinking lies. With a side order of lies and lies for dessert.And a doggie bag with lies to go.
Such great news. If we can pick up another 20 seats or so this fall, we’ll have the repukes just about totally marginalized and isolated.
We have to be so thankful for this D majority. /s
This is great news for the R’s.
Then the D’s will be totally immobilized.
Please. That’s great that people have been duped by the great hype machine. This all hinges on the fact that fools think the healthcare overhaul was some great miracle. A “good thing”. They don’t understand the issues, nor do they care. Hey, we’re about a month out now from the healthcare reform law, so where’s this second wave of legislation to make it better? Lol. As if it will ever come.
Hey, we’ve also turned a corner on unemployment too (lol), so I suppose we should go out and vote for Democrats because everything is getting better.
Things are way better than when Republics had power.
I happened to be visiting my Mom yesterday who lives in Century Village in West Palm Beach. She is 88 years old, had an angioplasty in her leg on Monday (thank you Medicare), and insisted on going to vote on Tuesday (although I tried to explain to her that voting for the current crop of Democrats was just not worth the effort). I took her to vote and I will say that Lynch had a large presence of volunteers (none for Deutch), but it appears that it did not do him much good.
It seemed that it was low hanging fruit, and even with this the Baggers could not get enough people scared enough to vote for Lynch (or against Deutsch).
I don’t know if this means that the folks in that district are “happy” with the current Congress or the Health Care plan, or not…but whatever their concerns are it didn’t result in many supporting a blatant Tea Partier with volunteers on the ground.