NY-23

I'll skip down to the money quote, or quotes:

Ryan said an important factor in the decision to concede was the unexpected -- and erroneous -- close vote in Oswego County, where polls had Hoffman with a double digit percentage point lead heading into Election Day.

"That’s the thing that threw us off," Ryan said.

Oswego County elections officials blame the mistakes on "chaos" in their call-in center that included a phone system foul-up and inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results. Of 245 races in the county -- not including the congressional and court races -- 84 had incorrect totals reported election night.

In the congressional race, more votes were cast in Oswego County than any other in the 11-county district.

The district’s second biggest voter turnout was in Jefferson County, where Hoffman also has benefited from a turnaround since election night, gaining about 700 votes. Owens led Hoffman by 300 votes on the final election night tally. But after recanvassing, Hoffman now leads by 424 votes, 10,884 to 10,460.

Jerry Eaton, the Republican elections commissioner for Jefferson County, said inspectors found a problem in four districts where Hoffman’s vote total was mistakenly entered as zero.

[Disclosure: I worked with the Doug Hoffman campaign. However, the views here are my own. I have not discussed this at all with the Hoffman campaign.]

The bottom line on NY-23:

• Doug Hoffman just won the Republican Primary. The general election is next year.

• There are two broken, corrupt, arrogant political parties we need to defeat.  We beat the Republican establishment in 2009.  We'll beat the Democratic Party in 2010.

• NY-23 is not really about Conservatives VS Moderates.  It is about the Establishment VS the Movement.

What happened in NY-23:

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that blue state Republicans had to nominate a "not too hot, not too cold" candidate - what my friend Max Borders called a Keynesian political strategy of tweaking the policy variables until you get a candidate whose positions seem most appealing to the most people.  Like Keynesian economic tinkering, it all works very well....until some fundamental shift reveals the underlying artificiality, and it all falls apart.

Political parties gain power by standing for something appealing.  But when a party gains power, it loses definition.  Rather than standing for something appealing and well-defined, they try to stand for anything appealing enough to win.  But you can only tinker so much before you destroy the brand that people had elected, and then you become the minority again.

The minority is where Parties and movements go to be reborn.  There, they have to figure out who they are, and what their mission is.  You can't storm the castle until you're all facing the same direction and focused on the same goals.  Sometimes - as in NY-23 - that involves telling the establishment "Thank you, but our mission is in another castle" (If I might borrow political wisdom from Super Mario Bros).

The establishment GOP - the NY GOP, the NRCC, the RNC and a few prominent Republicans - got behind another establishment GOP type in Dede Scozzafava. In any other recent year, she would have sailed through.  Not in 2009.

The public - including moderates, libertarians and alienated Republicans - has grown much more nervous about Democratic governance.  The Tea Party movement is just one manifestation of the sparks that are flying, but it goes far deeper than that, and the establishment GOP has been oblivious to, or dismissive of, these sparks. With Dede Scozzafava, the establishment Republican Party threw gasoline on top of the sparks and a brushfire erupted.  The result was the quintessential "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" campaign of Doug Hoffman.

What NY-23 Is About

The story of NY-23 is not "conservatives beat moderates" or "conservative loses to Democrat".

The story of NY-23 is "the Right starts dismantling the Republican establishment."  This is about how the Republican Party is defined and who defines it.

Right now, the movement wants the Republican Party to be defined by opposition to big government. Gradually, as new leaders arise, we will demand that the Republican Party be defined by its own solutions, as well, but rebuilding is an incremental process. We can hammer out the policy agenda and the boundaries of the coalition later.

For now, our job is to disrupt the establishment GOP.  If we beat Democrats while we're at it, great. But the first priority is to fix the Drunk Party - the Living Dead establishment Republicans. They're history. They just don't know it yet.

NY-23 was the first shot in that war.  It was a direct hit.  Next year, we start storming the castle.

As a Vice Chairman of the New York State Conservative Party, I have been involved in the Special Election to replace Congressman McHugh from the beginning.

Personally, I opposed Dede because she is radically pro-abortion, a rare Republican who voted twice to legalize gay marriage, in favor of card check, refused to rule out the public option, and supported Obama's stimulus. When I warned friends in the national Republican Party that she is way to the Left of the voters in this district they refused to listen and dumped a million dollars into her race. I also speculated that if she won she would likely switch parties.

Today's, news that she endorsed the Democrat did not come as a surprise to me. Throughout this race I have been disappointed about how tone deaf most national Republicans have been to the millions of Americans who see candidates like Dede as the problem and not the solution.

Local Republicans (outside of New York where moderate Republicans have virtually destroyed their party) in Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere took it upon themselves to endorse our candidate Doug Hoffman . They understood what Newt, the RNC, and NRCC failed to comprehend: Millions of Americans feel that their country is being subverted by big government liberals and they are not interested in winning elections with the wrong candidates.

The national Republicans are so clueless that they praised Dede for suspending her campaign. Until the end they did not know that she is a Left wing opportunist not a loyal Republican.

On Friday, a leading Republican in the House asked me what the Republican Party should do to win back the trust of conservatives. I said run conservative candidates and continue to build a record of opposing Left wing policies. This Republican expressed a fear that third parties will emerge across the country. I told him a third party movement will materialize if the Republican Party does not embrace the majority of Americans who consider themselves conservatives.

 Today's Washington Times has a story by Ralph Hallow about NY-23. One of the things Ralph discussed was Newt Gingrich's struggles with the race. He quotes Newt:

He said Mr. Hoffman's "rise is a result of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, the Club for Growth, Gov. [Sarah] Palin and [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Pawlenty and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and virtually the entire national conservative movement joining with Mike Long, whose Conservative Party, a very established organization, which won its first big race 39 years ago."

It is striking to me that Tim Pawlenty is the only presumptive 2012 candidate in that list, unless Sarah Palin really gets in, but there are no indications that she is. After a Presidential primary in which Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee fought out for the conservative mantle (to a stalemate, I might add), they both were absent from this battle.

You see, NY-23 is the first big fight of the 21st century for the conservative movement. It is important to remember that this movement is about moving the to the right by moving its governing coalition to the right. That means, by definition, the Republican Party because it is the vehicle of the center-right coalition in American politics. There can be no doubt that, whatever the result on Tuesday or afterwards, that the leadership of the GOP has been chastened. Marc Ambinder's analyzes the race and concludes that Scozzafava's social liberalism was necessary to create the conditions on the ground for the Conservative Party to reach out to national groups. However, ultimately, the Club for Growth, responding to her positions on card-check, the stimulus, etc., funded Hoffman and really made this happen. In other words, the two key components of the conservative movement came together in perfect complimentarity.

So we have the definitional fight for the conservative movement, post-Bush. And only Pawlenty shows up at the fight? But for the movement, the question is as much "are you with us on the fight" as it is "are you with us on issues". Let's consider how this impacts Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, both of whom declined being in the fight over the last several weeks.

Let's take Huckabee first. Mike Huckabee not only didn't endorse Doug Hoffman, Huckabee took $20,000 away from Hoffman's GOTV effort (which tells me that he isn't running, but ...):

Huckabee, who according to Upstate Committee sources is receiving a five-figure fee in excess of $20,000 for his appearance, has refused to personally endorse Hoffman, who is pro-life and signed the "no-tax" pledge in August before his announced candidacy, and has informed Hoffman that HuckPAC will not support him either. Some Conservative Party officials believe Huckabee's fee is intended for his PAC. Ironically, the dinner is held to honor conservatives who exemplify conservative principles.

This offers a(nother) critique of Huckabee from the movement perspective. Huckabee is particularly vulnerable here. In 2008, no electorally significant critique damaged Huckabee within his base of evangelical voters. Why? I think that Ramesh Ponnuru nailed it in a discussion of Romney's campaign:

Romney’s problem was not that he is a Mormon. It was that he is not an evangelical. A strong plurality of evangelicals “would have backed Huckabee against anybody — Mormon, Buddhist, or Catholic,” says another former Romney adviser. “They were voting for one of their own.” To attribute Romney’s loss in Iowa to anti-Mormon prejudice from evangelicals, he says, is like attributing Romney’s victories in Utah and Nevada to Mormons’ hostility to people from all other faiths. But this adviser reaches the same conclusion as his colleagues who blamed anti-Mormonism: Romney should not spend as much time and resources on Iowa next time. 

In other words, the options for Huckabee voters were to go to Romney. Not going to happen. But guess what? Tim Pawlenty is an evangelical. Indeed, during the VP speculation in 2008, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody argued, "Pawlenty may be the one guy to help McCain with working class moderates AND socially conservative Evangelicals." So he can genuinely compete with Huckabee or someone similar to his right.

Ramesh notes that Romney ran as the candidate of the conservative movement (and I would point out that Fred Thompson's candidacy was about the fundamental mismatch of Romney the man and Romney the candidate of the movement):

All these advisers may, however, be looking at Romney’s options too narrowly. Romney’s strategy in the last campaign was not to run as the social conservatives’ candidate. It was to run as the movement-conservative candidate. Throughout the primary he claimed that he best represented what he called “the three legs of the stool” holding up conservatism, with the legs representing conservative positions on social issues, economics, and foreign policy. The attempt to rally his party’s right made a certain strategic sense. Giuliani and John McCain started the primary season with higher profiles than Romney and, in different ways, represented the party’s left wing. Running to the right thus presented Romney with an opportunity.

Romney, in not playing in NY-23 has, in some important sense, laid the groundwork for a(nother) criticism of him as the candidate of the conservative movement. How can he be the candidate of the movement but duck out on the first major fight of the movement. (2nd, if you count healthcare, which doesn't cut nicely for Mitt...) Can he really run from the same location that he had earlier? No. This suggests that he is taking the route that Ramesh almost recommends by moving to the left end of the party and/or the establishment. (I distinguish between these)

This time Romney could follow a different path. There are no prospective McCains or Giulianis, no heavyweights from the left or even the center of the party. Instead of running as the movement conservative in the race, Romney could run as a party-establishment candidate who is acceptable to the Right. That strategy wouldn’t require him to move left on the issues. But it would entail, among other things, taking fewer jabs at the other candidates for not being conservative enough (jabbing them for having bad ideas would still be in season). It would entail advertising Romney’s conservatism less. The policies could still be conservative — but he would promote them as good ideas more than as conservative ones. 

 I don't know how this plays out. Romney running from establishment/left of the party, and Pawlenty running to the right? Perhaps. There's another angle that Ramesh notes:

To be a strong candidate, finally, Romney has to address one weakness that has not gotten much attention: his lack of appeal to middle-income and low-income voters. The exit polls from the primaries tell a consistent story. In Iowa and Florida, he won pluralities only among those voters who made more than $100,000 a year. In New Hampshire, voters had to make more than $150,000 before they started favoring him. Michigan, where Romney’s father was governor, was the great exception: Romney won among every income group above $30,000 a year. If Romney can’t find an economic message and a way of making it that appeals to middle-class voters, he may as well save his money and not bother running.

Again, we have Pawlenty's strong suit: reaching out to the middle class and working class.

The field is set. A working-to-middle class Midwestern candidate with strong evangelical roots running against a white-shoe Northeast wealthy candidate with strong western roots. This will be an interesting battle.

What follows may be akin to one of those crazy ideas Dick Morris used to come up with in the Clinton White House, only one in ten of which turned out to be workable -- but when they worked, oh man, did they work.

The key fact that sticks out in my mind about Doug Hoffman's incredible momentum in NY-23 is that his election would not have been possible had he been the Republican nominee. The fact that we may be about to elect a non-squish from New York has everything to do with the fact that he is running as a third-party independent, and not a Republican (even if the Conservative Party is an auxiliary of the Republicans in most elections).

Hoffman as a Republican would have been too obvious a target and the subject of a relentless barrage of negative TV, websites, mail, and phones branding him as outside the mainstream, anti-choice, anti-worker, etc. But politically, Hoffman has managed to avoid all that until five days out, when it's now clear he's the frontrunner. And as Chris Cillizza points out this morning, Hoffman's success in the polls is built on the back among strong support among independents and (primarily) not Republican regulars disgusted at Scozzafava.

This got me thinking: How many points is an Independent party label worth, assuming you're able to vie for Republican votes in a general election? 5? 10? We know that in races with a plausible third party, that candidate automatically tends to earn more independent and moderate support even if they are ideologically indistinguishable from a Republican (Hoffman) or a Democrat (Chris Daggett in New Jersey).

We also know from Daggett's run in a strong-party, machine state that American politics is entering a phase of third party strength which we last saw in the early '90s with Ross Perot and culminating in the Republican Revolution of '94.

This led me to tweet the following this morning:

Brainstorm: what if Republicans were to withdraw from a series of hot Congressional races and run as conservative independents a la #ny23?

I am not one to believe that a situation exactly like Hoffman's is recreatable across the spectrum. Certainly, we would not want to have to take out every slightly wobbly Republican nominee (Scozzafava's problem was that she was very wobbly) with a third party conservative. With 435 House races on the ballot in 2010, the conservative movement won't have the energy to concentrate its Death Star gamma ray on hapless local establishments in every district.

But what if it were to happen peacefully? Or as a concerted strategy to gain votes?

What if you were to have promising Republican candidates running in Democratic-lean seats say, a few months out from the election, "Let me tell you something. I'm just as sick and tired of the Republicans as I am of the Democrats. So, from this moment forward, I'm running as a common-sense, Independent conservative for Congress."

From one perspective, this would not be helpful to efforts to tie the Republican brand to a broader sense of popular disgust at the Obama/Pelosi overreach. On the other hand, it might be a way for conservatives to invade the center, and thus control the high ground politically.

If you're a party person, don't dismiss this just yet. Say you're the NRCC and you haven't found a good recruit against a vulnerable House Democrat. Say the Republican nominee is a joke, or the incumbent is unopposed. Three months out, you go to your star recruit who turned you down a year ago and ask him to run as an independent. It's a three month campaign as opposed to an 18-month campaign. They don't have to quit their law practice or small business. They enter in the last few miles of the race, and you put serious pressure on the joke nominee to step aside, or put out word through local media and talk radio that this is the guy.

Now, I know one could raise myriad issues here. Ballot access for one. The reflexive aversion to third parties. The relative infrequency of unchallenged vulnerable Democrats, especially because 2010 won't be 2008 or 2006. And the prospect of bloody intra-party battles after the nomination has been settled.

All of these risks are arrayed against a few salient facts. First, the rising disgust at incumbent politicians that will play out over the next couple of years, accompanied by a "pox on both your houses" sentiment. Second, a proven history of entire party blocs picking up and moving to third parties when they need to (NY-23, or Joe Lieberman's 2006 re-election). There are two possibilities for an ideological third party candidate -- they can either flop and pose no serious threat (which happens the vast majority of the time because the candidates are nobodies) or dominate (if they are credible).

In a handful of races, perhaps in places where we can't win with the Republican label alone, it might be more useful for the general election to be a strong Independent versus a Democrat rather than a Republican versus a Democrat. At one extreme of the Cook PVI, let's stipulate that the general election against Charlie Rangel was waged with a Puerto Rican small business owner running on the No More Corrupt Politicians Party line with behind the scenes, logistical support from the GOP. At a minimum, that person would stand a better chance than a Republican in that district.

I'm a strong party guy, but I also believe in Sun Tzu's maxim that you do the unexpected to throw your opponent off balance. Strategically unleashing a swarm of conservative independents may be one such strategy for 2010.

The special election in New York's 23rd District is all the buzzz for people spent on reading about ObamaCare.

I myself am perplexed at why the RNC wants to sustain the beat down it experienced last November.

Last night, one of my more moderate friends asked me, "Would you rather have a Scozzafava win or a Democrat?"......

It's a legitimate question.

I tend to be more of an old-school Reagan conservative in my thinking. 

It's not about the party name to me, it's about the principles of the person collecting my tax dollars after election day. 

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in electing people based on what they're actually going to do versus what their label is.

To me it's as simple as this: I want someone who is going to take their grubby hands off of my 70 hour-a-week, hard-earned dollars.  I want someone who is going to defend the values that I live my life by, and I want someone who is going to defend life. 

And anyone who deviates from these policies is not good enough to represent me, Republican/Democrat, or Liberal/Conservative.

To the general population, these principles fall into the category of conservatism.  So, Republican or Democrat, I want the candidate running to win who represents my views.

The biggest debate contrived from the hustle and bustle of this race points back to what the principles of the Republican party are/should be.  In my mind, Conservatives are NOT an extremist wing of the Republican party, contrary to MSM spin and "pale pastel" moderates.  I would say that if I had to put myself into a category it would be conservative. 

I believe many Americans desire less government intervention, less people telling them how to live my life or what to do with their money. 

These are not extreme ideas.  In fact, I'm pretty sure it's a luxury of the American people in general to favor less government.

The GOP has not picked candidates dedicated to these goals in a long time, and that is why the Republican party does not know what it stands for....

It's also why we need to start electing common sense, Reagan-type conservatives to represent that constituency.  That's why my support is going to Doug Hoffman.

We need to set a precedent on what the GOP stands for by showing consistency in our candidate picks -- by electing the Doug Hoffmans of the country.

The Sienna poll of New York's 23rd Congressional district released Friday found Democrat Bill Owens pulling into the lead with 33 percent, followed by liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava at 29 and Conservative Party hopeful Doug Hoffman at 23. 

Combined, the Republican and Conservative lines lead the Democrat 52 to 33 percent. And in a normal election, that would be that -- maybe 95% of the time the Conservatives cross-endorse the Republican. 

Scozzafava's particularly egregious liberal record -- pro-card check and pro-stimulus -- rendered that impossible. And so we are faced with a center-right vote that's nearly evenly split, enabling a Democrat (who many believe to be more conservative than Scozzafava) to squeak by.

It is a simple, indisputable fact that the Republican and Conservative voters of NY-23 will have to rally around one candidate to prevent a Democratic pickup. And that candidate should be Conservative Republican Doug Hoffman.

Sadly, the RNC and NRCC are doubling down on a flawed candidate with little chance of generating any significant momentum in the last 16 days. In many ways, this should be a situation like Bernie Sanders' many elections in Vermont, or Joe Lieberman's election in 2006, where there should be no harm and no foul in supporting a viable, like-minded independent over a non-starting major party nominee. 

Instead, this looks set to go down as yet another misfire by DC Republicans, drying up the small donor base to the committees with a shortsighted "all Republicans are created equal" approach to supporting liberal Republicans when perfectly acceptable conservative alternatives exist. 

I'm not one to suggest that the party should go out of its way to anoint candidates who can't win in blue states. Rather, I am suggesting that there is a pragmatic case for the NRSC and NRCC to stay neutral in more primaries or support conservatives in a way that doesn't lose elections -- and makes it more likely that Mitch McConnell will prevail on the Senate floor more often. 

Take everyone's favorite example, the Florida Senate race. There is no doubting the fact -- even amongst conservatives -- that Charlie Crist is practically unbeatable in a general election. Let's peg his chances against Kendrick Meek at 95 percent. 

The problem is that Marco Rubio is no slouch in this department either. The polls I've seen have him up double digits over Meek. Assume that Rubio's chances in a general election are between 80 and 85 percent. 

Looking at electability only, Crist would still come out ahead. But that doesn't necessarily give Senate Republicans their best outcome. Notice I said Senate Republicans, not conservatives. 

Naturally, the national party is going to go for the "W" wherever it can in order to bolster its number of seats. And if this were the only thing that mattered, electability alone would be king. 

The problem, as we are finding out in the health care debate, is that it's not enough to have 60 Democrats to break a filibuster, or 41 Republicans to sustain one. How your members vote in that process matters to the outcome. In deciding which candidates to support, the national party committees -- not just activists -- should be looking at whether the candidates are likely to support leadership on key floor votes. If Rubio is just 10 or 15 percent better than Crist on key votes, Crist's electability advantage is nullified from the perspective of Leader McConnell and the Senate Republican Conference. 

To me, this could go either way given that Crist is not liberal in the way that Olympia Snowe is, and that his maverickness has always been more about staking out a particular brand in Florida than currying favor with a liberal electorate. But even so, the PR advantage of having a high-profile Hispanic conservative with a potential national career ahead of him tips the scale in Rubio's favor. 

The same would go in California. Carly Fiorina does not have a particularly strong electability advantage over Chuck DeVore, and her celebrity CEO past renders her vulnerable to rookie mistakes and greater scrutiny of her private sector activities. It would be one thing for the NRSC to support Fiorina if she were polling 10 to 15 points better than DeVore against Boxer, but she's not. 

In deciding whether to support conservatives like Hoffman, Rubio, and DeVore, there is a reasonable middle ground between craven winnerism and a kamikaze strategy that ignores electability. The committees should factor in adherence to core Republican principles (in addition to electability) because the job of a political party is not just to win elections, but to win votes on the floor. And though the impact of an errant member is much less in the House than it is in the Senate, Scozzafava's not-so-veiled threats to switch parties if she isn't treated nicely should render her completely unacceptable to Michael Steele and Pete Sessions, who should make it clear that they won't be blackmailed.