Most folks on this site today, tomorrow, and the rest of this week will come here to slice and dice the election results in NY-23, NJ, and VA.  As Patrick's earlier column noted, the NY-23 situation (paired with the endorsement of Crist by the NRSC, etc.) has rankled many conservatives and has broken faith between the conservative faithful and the national party organizations.

There's no doubt that national party organizations have a great amount of resources and knowhow that can be of great use to a local campaign that is just getting its bearings.  Whether or not you agree with their recent play-calling, simply the financial resources and infrastructure alone do give national parties value in elections.  Yet a lot of what we've seen as big campaign successes these last few cycles haven't been born here in DC but rather came out of clever ideas and innovations by campaigns outside the Beltway. (On the other side of the aisle, look at the early Obama campaign as a great example.)

Which begs the question - how can the resources of the national parties be brought to bear in elections without eclipsing or smothering local efforts?  

Another hot topic here at The Next Right is on the topic of innovating in campaigns, at coming up with the Next Big Thing to help usher our candidates to victory.  What if the national party (RNC or either of the campaign committees) set aside some funds specifically to invest in innovations being tested at the local or state level?  Think of it like a national party version of venture capital funding - looking for potential Next Big Ideas or candidates with real promise who are underfunded and under the radar, giving them the seed money, and letting them implement fresh campaign thinking?  

This will probably get blowback from entrenched consultant types who make a killing each year running "tried-and-true" (and tired) campaign tactics.  I imagine that makes this idea even more appealing to many up-and-comers.  If, say, the NRCC were to offer to max out contributions to 15 candidates whose campaigns submit a proposal for something truly unique they want to do with their campaign, I can't help but wonder how much brainstorming that might inspire.  This wouldn't have to be terribly expensive in the end, and out of 15 ideas, maybe only one or two really uncover a great new method of voter contact or targeting.  But that's one or two ideas we didn't have before.

Right now, the national parties in many ways are like private equity firms, sweeping in to races that need "national help", investing money, hoping for a return on that investment.  That can work too and in some cases, when a local campaign is falling apart at the seams, there needs to be a national organization to pick up the slack.  But I think if our national parties started acting a bit more like venture capital firms - investing in good ideas, letting them flourish or fail, reaping huge payoffs when one succeeds - we might have a shot at spurring some innovation as well as finding a role for national parties that respects local control.

This is just a passing thought, and idea I haven't firmed up quite enough, but I wanted to throw it out there to The Next Right commenting corps to see if the idea resonates at all.

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.

For the better part of today, I have been reading reactions among the right to the news of Dede Scozzafava's withdrawl from the NY-23 race.  Probably the most oft repeated commentary I have seen is that the developments of this race once again prove that, "moderate Republicans rarely succeed, and true conservatism wins every time". 

Scozzafava dropping out is indeed a great thing for the conservative movement.  It represents a victory for the grassroots activists on the ground over a disconnected and out of touch Republican establishment.  But the analysis that says this proves "conservatism wins every time" is woefully misplaced, extremely lazy, and not at all grounded in reality.

This notion is an extension of rhetoric that has been used by Rush Limbaugh for years.  It has gained popularity as the "true conservative" (whatever that means) base has grown frustrated with what it sees as "squishy moderates" losing in national elections.  We heard it endlessly following John McCain's defeat in 2008, and had heard it previously when Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996.

But the reality is very different.  This increasingly popular notion is simply false, and lets take a look at why.

Since World War II, the Republican Party has run sixteen presidential campaigns.  It has won nine of those campaigns and lost seven:

• 1948 - Moderate Thomas Dewey (Loss)
• 1952 - Moderate Dwight Eisenhower (Win)
• 1956 - Moderate Dwight Eisenhower (Win)
• 1960 - Moderate Richard Nixon (Loss)
• 1964 -True Conservative Barry Goldwater (Loss)
• 1968 - Moderate Richard Nixon (Win)
• 1972 - Moderate Richard Nixon (Win)
• 1976 - Moderate Gerald Ford (Loss)
• 1980 - True Conservative Ronald Reagan (Win)
• 1984 - True Conservative Ronald Reagan (Win)
• 1988 - Moderate George HW Bush (Win)
• 1992 - Moderate George HW Bush (Loss)
• 1996 - Moderate Bob Dole (Loss)
• 2000 - Moderate George W. Bush (Win)
• 2004 - Moderate George W. Bush (Win)
• 2008 - Moderate John McCain (Loss)

Haggle about my definitions if you wish - but lets just say I am pretty comfortable labeling each of these men as I have put forth above.  The only one I even find debatable is George W. Bush - but that is mostly because he talked like a "true conservative" in 2000, but acted completely differently once in office, and the only bit of "true conservatism" in his administration was a large tax cut, and high defense spending.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand.  Republican moderates have a remarkable habit of winning nationally.  The only times they lost, they tended to have non-ideological reasons for losing. 

In 1948 Truman outlfanked Dewey with his whistlestop tour of America, connecting with the average American.  In 1960, Nixon went up against the transcendent John Kennedy, blew the campaign big time in the televised debate, and still probably won that election, were it not stolen by Kennedy's electoral shennanigans.  In 1976, Ford angered the country by pardoning Nixon.  In 2008, the entire country hated the Republican party, and Abraham Lincoln probably would have lost.

Every single one of those moderate losses - with the exception of McCain, and to some degree Dewey - were in extremely narrow elections that were decided by essentially one state.

Transversely, the only "true conservative" elected to the White House since World War II was Ronald Reagan.  Barry Goldwater got slaughtered, and every other "true conservative" couldn't even make it out of the primary.  Reagan's election is often pointed to as proof of concept on this theory, but was it about ideology?  No - in 1980 it was about economic malaise and American hostages, and in 1984 it was about an economic resurgence under Reagan's leadership.

Could "true" conservative candidates have won in '48, '52, '56, '60, '68, '72, '76, '88, '92, '96, '00, '04 or 08?  It is certainly possible, but if they did, it wouldn't have been because of their ideology.

This same analysis applies to more than just national elections.  Moderate Republicans often win crushing victories, and "true conservative" candidates often go down in flames.  But the opposite is also true - often moderates get absolutely spanked, while conservatives dominate.  Far too often we think elections are about ideology simply because we believe deeply in something, when they very rarely are.

But even if they are, the evidence in the last sixty years shows us that being a moderate does not even come close to dooming one's candidacy, and being a conservative hardly means you "win every time".

The victory of the conservative grassroots in rejecting Scozzafava in favor of Hoffman is a great thing.  I applaud it.  I happen to belong to a wing of the party that is fiscally to the right of Reagan, so I am hardly arguing for us to turn to moderates to solve our electoral problems here.

My problem is cheap, dime store analysis that is devoid of logic or rationality.  We should argue for more conservative candidates where more conservative candidates can win - but going with the superficial and inaccurate echo chamber soundbites like "conservatism wins every time it is tried" as the accepted explanation for an eventual Hoffman victory simply cheapens the conversation.

If we want to win, we need to understand why we win, and why we lose.  Such nonsensical rhetoric does not help us in that regard, so I suggest we stop saying it.  Real political analysis deserves better.

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.

Please enjoy the brisk fall air tomorrow evening in downtown Stamford, CT as we express our warm greetings to President Obama and Senator Dodd!

The prospect of merriment awaits as we cheerfully exercise that right to peaceably assemble guaranteed in our Consitution.  

SHINE A LIGHT ON CORRUPTION

Date:  Friday, October 23

Time:  4:30 PM to 6:30 PM

Place:  Hilton Hotel, Stamford, on Greenwich Avenue, at the corner of First Stamford Place

President Barack Obama will be speaking at a fund-raising dinner for Senator Christopher Dodd in Stamford on Friday.  The Hartford Tea Party Patriots, in conjunction with other conservative grassroots organizations, are planning a tea party rally nearby.  Please join us!  Bring your family & friends, your signs, your voices, and your flashlights.  You don't want to miss this party!Please open the attached file for a map with the rally location & directions.  Here's another link from the Stamford Hilton with additional information:  http://www.hiltonstamfordhotel.com/location_and_directions/ The hotel advises using the following address for GPS-generated directions: 151 Greenwich Avenue, Stamford, CT 06902. 

Be advised that if you have other committments you can choose not to attend. We wouldn't want to prove the President right and demonstrate Republicans are good at following orders.

If the public option passes in some form, thank the liberal blogosphere who put pressure on Democratic members of Congress to publicly threaten to derail health care reform if it wasn't included in the final bill.

The specter of Democrats reverse-filibustering their own President's plan is what has kept the public option alive, even if one could argue that "alive" is akin to a persistent vegetative state.

Contrast this to yes-man approach of the Congressional GOP in the early Bush years, and I personally find a lot to like about the Democratic model of the Congressional party serving as a sort of whip against the political expediency that will be the norm in any White House.

In 2005, I thought it would have been a good idea for conservative Republican members to publicly threaten to oppose any Social Security bill that did not include private accounts. There were multiple problems with this, not the least of which that the Congressional leadership was too spineless to bring a bill out of committee. But another was that conservatives in the House and Senate, with no strategic prodding or muscle in the blogosphere and the activist groups, never made the threat that would have rendered a "compromise" bill dead on arrival.

How groups like Open Left and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee are taking on the role of legislative strategy is very smart, and something we can learn from. How the right has fueled the tea party movement to feed into a sense of backlash in the country about the left's total control of government is also very smart, and may have the last laugh in 2010, but will it be enough to deal with the immediate task at hand, derailing a government takeover of health care? I'm not so sure.

Of course, this could all blow up in their faces. Having destroyed any possiblity of compromise, or at least defined "compromise" as something very, very close to an absolutist-left position on health care, the left-blogosphere has ensured that the only alternative to doing nothing at all is a very leftist final bill. And if that's the choice, doing nothing becomes a much, much more palatable option for the Blue Dogs. I'm personally unsure as to how they thread the needle of getting a public option passed with 60 votes.  

Still, it's valuable to understand what the left is doing and how it differs from the Congressional GOP "roll over" strategy on White House initiatives in the Bush years, in which we either actively collaborated on bad bills (Medicare Part D) or didn't make a serious push to make the good bills (tax cuts, Social Security) even stronger.

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. 

Poltico's Jonathan Martin reports: 

The surging campaign of third-party candidate Chris Daggett has turned the New Jersey governor's race into a dead-heat and left Republicans divided over the seriousness of the threat he poses to GOP nominee Chris Christie.

The Hill's Reid Wilson reports:

The House GOP conference is bitterly divided over a centrist New York Republican’s run for the House seat vacated by Army Secretary John McHugh.

Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, who backs abortion rights and has voiced support for gay rights, has drawn a challenger from the right who is running on the Conservative Party line. And though House leaders have urged conference members to donate, many have pointedly refused to back Scozzafava.

What do these two stories have in common? Everything. In both cases the local GOP establishment supported moderate, big government friendly Republicans who they thought stood a better chance of winning a general election.

In both cases the general election campaigns of these candiates are absolutely floundering.

The lesson: me-too big government GOP moderates are going to get washed away by the same anti-establishment wave that is going to remove mand Dems from office in '10.

To continue building its infrastructure, the center-right is going to have to start hiring talent from around the country. I understand the value of having most of your human resources in a dynamic, creative cluster like NoVa/DC, but it’s time to tap folks that don’t relish living in Termite Town. Besides, there are creative clusters in other places.

Telecommuters and remote workers aren’t going away any time soon. To remain competitive while extending their national reach, both partisans and non-profits need to think nationally. Virtual workforces are now possible. (Reason Foundation, for example, has people all over the country.) Novel, immersive conferencing environments like Teleplace are getting less expensive and improving collaboration across geographies. There are trade-offs to distributed workforces to be sure, but the costs are going down and the benefits are going up.

The next time you post a job, open your mind. Your best candidate may be in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, or Research Triangle, NC—and may want to stay there.