There’s been a lot of talk in the news recently about a special election for representative being held in a small and sparsely populated district in upstate New York. I mean, the whole district doesn’t even have as many people in it as my city, so it’s not an especially large or powerful district. It’s certainly not terribly important nationally.
It’s getting a lot of news coverage because some big-name Republicans have decided to weigh in on this relatively unimportant race and are choosing to back the Conservative Party candidate over the official Republican Party candidate who was chosen to run by way of a primary election (meaning the Republican voters there wanted that person and not the guy who is now running for the Conservative Party). Yes, the Republican candidate just isn’t conservative enough for some conservatives (mostly the tea bag type).
Personally, I think it’s much national ado about nothing and should probably be ignored by the national media. After all, the only people who should really give a damn about who gets elected to represent any district are the people who happen to live there, since that person will be directly influencing their lives (or not, depending on whether they do their job or not). In fact, the only thing I think is noteworthy about this battle royal between conservatives and mega-conservatives is that it might become a trend and may be the first example of the fracturing of the Republican Party into two even more weak and useless political parties. More power to them, I say.
I’m going to predict it will end up being a tight race with the Democrat winning in the end. With the Republican vote split, and Democratic voters likely to not vote for the conservative or the mega-conservative, it’s a very probable outcome.
That part of New York traditionally votes Republican. Been that way since Lincoln. The place is really poor, especially since deindustrialization took hold at the beginning of Reagan’s first term. The people need a lot of wealth redistribution to keep things running, so they are not particularly adverse to social spending; they just can’t bring themselves to dishonor their ancestors, even while the once impressive Civil War memorials are pretty much neglected in abandoned parts of town. That whole area and most of the Rust Belt is a telling tableau of just how little Big Money cares about some of the earliest and enduring examples of the original American Dream.
The Republicans got stupid out here (NM) last November and now our entire congressional delegation (all five members) are Democrats. Had been just two.
I suspect there are going to be some wild things happening in Texas soon. We have a number of strange, extremely right wing groups popping up that are guaranteed to split the Republican vote and get none of the Democratic or Independent vote, so it should be interesting to see what happens when elections roll around again.