Too Close to Call in New Hampshire
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 15th, 2010 4:42 am by HL
Too Close to Call in New Hampshire
“Riding a surge of late-breaking support from conservatives and even mainstream Republicans who grew tired of his foes’ negative campaign tactics,” Ovide Lamontagne (R) “was desperately trying early this morning to hold onto a lead he mounted in initial returns and pull off an epic upset in the GOP U.S. Senate primary,” the New Hampshire Union Leader reports.
But the AP “showed that with half the vote counted, the long-time front-runner in the race, former Attorney General Kelly Ayotte (R), had pulled even.”
WMUR-TV: “Both candidates urged their supporters to wait for more numbers to come in before determining who won.”
Murkowski Doesn’t Sound Like She’s Done
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) will announce Friday afternoon whether she’ll run as an independent write-in candidate after losing in last month’s Republican primary election to Joe Miller (R), the Anchorage Daily News reports.
In a statement, Murkowski asserted that Alaska’s Republican primary “was hijacked by the Tea Party Express, an outside extremist group.”
Soul Searching Time for Republicans
Christine O’Donnell’s surprise victory in the Delaware U.S. Senate GOP primary “left Republicans in conflict, senior party officials openly fretting that the Senate is now out of reach and Democrats overjoyed that the opposition has handed them a late and desperately needed chance to reframe the national argument about the 2010 elections,” Politico reports.
“Aside from the political implications of the upset, the outcome prompted a round of deep Republican soul-searching about what it said about their party when a political pillar in Delaware like Rep. Mike Castle, a respected lawmaker who was considered a shoo-in for the Senate seat, could not even come within six points of defeating the controversial and still largely unknown O’Donnell.”
Mark Halperin: “She is the canary in the coalmine for a level of intraparty bloodletting that will likely cost the party one Senate seat in November. And if the GOP establishment doesn’t figure out how to build a bigger tent and still win elections, the price Republicans will pay will be a whole lot higher starting on November 3, into the new Congress, and when they try to beat Obama in 2012.”
Searching the Video Archives for Christine O’Donnell
Josh Green notes that Christine O’Donnell (R) — the newly-anointed Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Delaware — “is the best kind of fringe candidate — the kind with a history of random, long-ago television appearances.”
In fact, she was a regular guest on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher described as “Christian activist Christine O’Donnell.” The video clips are definitely worth watching.
