It’s hard to overstate how big a deal this is. This is the district that produced Jack Kemp, for God’s sake. It’s been reliably Republican for years, and everybody figured that Jane Corwin would win without breaking a sweat.
But major kudos to Kathy Hochul, who saw her opportunity and took it. She saw that Republicans – Paul Ryan, specifically – were trying to destroy Medicare. She also saw that most Americans really hate that idea. So she turned the race into a referendum on Paul Ryan and the Medicare Destruction Act of 2011.
And Ryan lost. A reliably Republican district has flipped to the Democratic column, and Democrats have won the first big battle of the 2012 election cycle.
Tonight was a very good night for the Democrats, and for President Obama. It was a very, very bad night for the Republican party, which has backed itself into a nearly impossible corner. Congratulations to Congresswoman-elect Hochul, and thank you.
I thought I’d never have anything for which to thank Paul Ryan, but hey, here I am, corrected.
The Republican over-reach is coming back to roost. In New Hampshire’s Hillsborough State Rep District 4 (Special election on May 17th) Democrat Jen Daler won in the the Republican House Speaker’s District. She beat the House Speaker in his own home town.
Now NY 26 on an even bigger scale. The 2010 trend is over. The 2012 trend is going blue.
Hochul, the Democrat, doesn’t even live in the district, though she holds office in Erie County, part of which is in the 26th. That’s how bad the Republicans lost this race.
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That while the Sen. Scott Brown may be able to flip-flop his way to relative safety on the Medicare issue, all but six GOP House members have already voted to end Medicare.
There ain’t no flip-flopping that will save them on this one…
¿Could YOU make up fun neostuff like this?
¿Can you guess who did?
Happy days.
–JHM
The more they insist that it’s just Democratic “scare tactics,” and the more they keep describing Ryan as some sort of courageous hero, the more votes they lose!
Looks like Hochul 48%, Corwin 43%, Davis 8%.
Akthough this is a pretty conservative district, so the playbook may not require a conservative spoiler in other places.
The “Tea Party Guy” had previously run as a Democrat and pre-election polls had his supporters breaking more toward Hochul than Corwin as a second choice.
Keep in mind that this was a district that McCain won in ’08. Even if you add all of Davis’ voters to Corwin and the Green party candidate voters to Hochul, the Democrat still outperforms what you would expect given recent elections. And Hochul doesn’t even live there.
Yes, complicated. But he seems to have used the defunct Democratic party as a vehicle to get on the ballot and challenge the GOP guy from the (libertarian) right.
In any event, the lesson may be that Dems should focus on the Medicare thing, while stirring up Tea Party resistance to GOP compromise on the Medicare thing. Otherwise, we get “OK, we won’t cut your Medicare/Medicaid if you don’t raise our taxes” again,causing the issue to die on the vine AND causing the government to duck the debt problem.
Corwin was nominated on the Conservative party ballot line as well. That makes a difference in NY’s fusion style ballot. I don’t know how many votes Corwin got on that ballot line as opposed to the GOP line. That said, the Conservative party line is the go-to line of choice for New Yorkers who think the Republican candidate is too much of a RINO (particularly upstaters). Given that Davis did not get the Conservative nomination, it is reasonable to assume that his voters did not necessarily vote for him because they saw him as the most conservative choice in the election.
It’s probably true that Davis helped the Democrat, though it was a wide enough victory margin that Hochul probably would have won even if all Davis voters bailed. Davis had actually run as a Democrat a few times before, as sco notes, and was picking up some Dem votes in the polls. And presumably some of the Davis voters wouldn’t have voted at all without him as a candidate, so it’s difficult to give the GOP candidate those votes.
Medicare was definitely one of the reasons why the Republican lost here…though just how much it will matter in the campaigns will depend in part on how the GOP presidential nominee handles the issue. It will be a tough strategic choice. If the candidate embraces ending Medicare as we know it, s/he risks alienating the large numbers of Americans happy with the system. If s/he runs away from it, it makes those House members who voted for the Ryan plan look even worse. So it should be interesting.
But it’s one seat.