Category: Christine O’Donnell

PRIMARY ELECTION RESULTS HQ UPDATE: O’DONNELL WINS!

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States:

Delaware

DOVER, Delaware
UPDATE 10:40 p.m. ET — In an impr0mptu press conference following her victory speech, Christine O’Donnell was asked about reports that those treacherous bastards at the NRSC won’t support her campaign, and replied far more graciously than I would have: “For the greater good, we’re putting this [e.g., Castle’s smear campaign] behind us,” she said. “Together, we can win.”

UPDATE 9:25 p.m. — It’s a real celebration here now. The music right now is deafening: U2’s “Beautiful Day.” Here’s video of earlier, when the first results were reported on TV:

UPDATE 9 p.m. — Christine O’Donnell has won the Delaware GOP Senate primary, defeating Mike Castle, Allahpundit, Charles Krauthammer, and Jim Geraghty.  With 75% of precincts reporting, O’Donnell leads 53%-46%. Dan Riehl is reportedly offering pudding to Ace of Spades. The DJ here is playing Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.”

UPDATE 8:34 p..m. –Cheers of “Go, Christine!” here at the Elks Lodge that is O’Donnell HQ, as she leads with 55% to 45% for that worthless RINO with 14% of precincts reporting.

PREVIOUSLY: I’m at Christine O’Donnell campaign victory headquarters at the Elks Lodge. No fewer than seven TV satellite trucks are in the parking lot. I’m seated at the press table between Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller and Robert Costa of the RINO-endorsing National Review.


Maryland

Official State Results

Update 10:00 PM
Senate:
Eric Wargotz, 34%
Jim Rutledge, 32%

Governor:
Robert Ehrlich, 78%
Brian Murphy, 22% (Sarah Palin endorsement)

MD-5 (Steny Hoyer-D, incumbent)
Charles Lollar, 64% (Oooh rah!)
Collins Bailey, 27%

Update 9:10 PM
Senate:
Jim Rutledge, 35%
Eric Wargotz, 32%

Governor:
Robert Ehrlich, 82%
Brian Murphy, 18% (Sarah Palin endorsement)

MD-5
Charles Lollar, 64% (Oooh rah!)
Collins Bailey, 26%

New York

Official State Results
Update 10:00 PM
Governor, to run against Andrew Cuomo (yeah, Ruling Class!)
Carl Paladino 72%
Rick Lazio 28%
7% reporting

NY-1
Randy Altschuler, 46% (yet another success story for this blog.)
George Demos, 31%
Chris Cox, 22%
17% reporting

NY-23
Douglas Hoffman, 55%
Matthew Doheny, 45%
4% reporting


Wisconsin

Official State Results

Greetings from Delaware!

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DOVER, Delaware — Allahpundit is mystified by the GOP Establishment’s pronouncement that it is “cautiously confident” of a Mike Castle victory. Well, after their all-out slime attack on Christine O’Donnell, anything but a Geraghty-pleasing Castle landslide would be . . . well, a small wonder.

“Small wonder” being sort of a nickname for this tiny speck of a state. Surprisingly, parts of Delaware are still rural. Ten miles west of Dover, near the town of Hartly, you see Amish buggies riding past cornfields. And guess what was the first campaign sign I saw after crossing the border from Maryland?

It’s like some kind of an omen, I tell you! Also, I heard two O’Donnell commercials on the local talk-radio station. Even Ace of Spades is now predicting a O’Donnell victory, although my best source with Team Christine here — who doesn’t want to be identified — says, “It’s gonna be a long night.”

Polls close at 8 p.m. ET here, and  Primary Election Night HQ will soon be in operation. Say a prayer.

UPDATE: PRIMARY ELECTION RESULTS HQ

Delaware Fever: Catch It!

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OK, how crazy has the Delaware GOP Senate primary gotten? Crazy enough that it prompted one ill-informed reader to send Michelle Malkin an e-mail accusing her of supporting Mike Castle and — wait for it — also saying that Allahpundit is her husband.

Never mind the absurdity of that last one. The ill-informed reader’s assertion that Malkin is a RINO-hugger contradicts all known facts about The Boss Emeritus. Not only did she endorse Christine O’Donnell two weeks ago, but Malkin is so hardcore that she was one of the very few prominent conservatives who supported J.D. Hayworth against John McCain in the Arizona GOP primary.

Malkin doesn’t usually make a big deal out of stuff like that because she seldom engages in Red-on-Red action, preferring to concentrate her fire on Democrats. By contrast, Dan Riehl has spent the past two weeks going after Castle and Castle’s supporters with a bloody vengeance. Over the weekend, however, things got so crazy that even Dan urged everybody to calm down.

Let’s be clear who is responsible for this vituperative environment: Mike Castle, his campaign consultants, Delaware GOP chairman Tom Ross and the national Republican Establishment. 

Just as when they tried to fix the Florida primary for Charlie Crist — “Those treacherous bastards!” — the Establishment’s cliquish favoritism angered and alienated the grassroots. O’Donnell’s candidacy thus became a rallying point for those who have tired of the top-down control approach to politics that became standard operating procedure for Republicans during the Bush administration, when the Rove-Mehlman axis called the shots and expected everyone to fall in line.

Such centralization of political authority might have been tolerable if it had actually led to the promised “Permanent Republican Majority.” Instead, it gave us Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid in 2006, then gave us President Obama in 2008.

So this online fight in Delaware isn’t about who’s a “True Conservative.” It’s about whether we are going to let the GOP elite do our thinking for us.

The problem with the GOP elite is not that they’ve got all the money and prestige. The problem isn’t that their egos are swollen with the arrogance of entitled privilege. The problem is that they’re politically incompetent.

Rather than admit that it was a foolish blunder to anoint a septuagenarian RINO like Mike Castle, the clueless clowns of the GOP Establishment doubled down and went negative on Christine O’Donnell. Thus it is the Establishment defeatists who have dictated this kind of doom narrative to the MSM:

With an assist from Sarah Palin, tea party activists in Delaware are trying to defeat the Republican candidate with the best chance to win Joe Biden’s old Senate seat and nominate instead a candidate Republican leaders say has no chance of winning the general election in November.

So how’s the “nuts and sluts” attack on working out for the Establishment? Here’s a text message I received this morning from an O’Donnell supporter in Delaware:

“Just spoke to a friend working polls in district in Wilmington stronghold of Castle. He says so far voter turnout is slower than usual. This is very good for Christine. Many have told him they’re turned off by Castle tactics. Leads me to believe many have stayed home. Those would typically be Castle votes.”

Will Christine win tonight? I don’t know. It would be the biggest miracle upset of the year. We have been supporting Christine O’Donnell since Smitty blogged about her in March, and we’re going to fight to the finish.

The polls close at 8 p.m. in Delaware, and I’m leaving at noon to make the 150-mile drive to O’Donnell HQ. Hit the tip jar!

PREVIOUSLY:

‘Destructive’! ‘Capricious’! ‘Irresponsible!’

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No, Charles Krauthammer was not talking about Meghan McCain’s Dirty Sexy Politics:

Thanks to The Right Scoop for the video. Note that Krauthammer states as a fact that Christine O’Donnell will lose the general election. But why, then, did Krauthammer support John McCain, who lost so disastrously in 2008?

Krauthammer’s certainty that Mike Castle would be a “shoo-in” is equally questionable. If a Tea Party Express ad buy totalling something like $200,000 can put Castle in jeopardy of losing the GOP primary, exactly why should we believe that he is an invincible electoral juggernaut for November?

If O’Donnell pulls off a miracle upset Tuesday, it would be a continuation of the same pattern we’ve seen with Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist, Sue Lowden, Jane Norton and Lisa Murkowski: John Cornyn, the NRSC and the entire national Republican establishment lining up to tell us that their hand-picked pets are surefire winners — and yet they couldn’t even win their own primaries against underfunded challengers!

BTW, I’m hoping to rent a car and drive to Delaware to blog Tuesday’s results. Please hit the tip jar.

Why Christine O’Donnell Is Surging: Three Ads From Tea Party Express

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O’Donnell’s unexpected last-minute surge in the Delaware GOP Senate primary has caught some people flat-footed. How did this happen? It’s simple: For the first time, RINO Mike Castle is being called to account for his record with a series of hard-hitting ads (two on TV and one on radio) from the Tea Party Express:

Let’s not overlook everything that everyone has done to help make this a competitive primary. Mark Levin has done yeoman’s work and Sarah Palin’s endorsement was crucial. But those who kept pushing the same tired bandwagon argument — “Castle can win, O’Donnell can’t” — were doing so without considering what might happen when, for the first time in his career, Castle had to defend his record against this kind of conservative ad campaign.

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL for U.S. SENATE

Polls Are Not Predictions

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Paul Mirengoff of Powerline — a nice guy, whom I’ve met a few times — defends himself against Mark Levin’s criticism over the Delaware GOP Senate primary. Rather than to get into the middle of that, let me pull out a few phrases from Mirengoff’s post as illustrative of a more general dispute:

I then argued that, by supporting Christine O’Donnell in the Delaware Senate primary despite the likelihood (demonstrated by polls) that she would lose the general election, whereas her centrist opponent in the primary would likely win . . .
O’Donnell was routed when she ran for office in the past and currently is well behind the presumptive Democratic nominee in the polls. . . .
. . . polls, coupled with the state’s recent electoral history and O’Donnell’s prior poor showings, provide strong evidence that the O’Donnell is unlikely to win in November . . .
. . .my posts about the Delaware primary didn’t take a position adverse to O’Donnell until polls began to show her trailing the Democrat by double digits . . .

Other examples abound, but I think you see the point here: Mirengoff has allowed poll numbers to dominate his view of the Delaware primary and he is certainly not alone in doing so.

Yesterday afternoon, I returned to the Crystal City Sheraton after the 9/12 March and met an O’Donnell supporter who was almost frantic with distress. Someone on the Internet was trumpeting an outdated poll showing Christine trailing Mike Castle by 30 points. “We need to push back against this,” said the O’Donnell supporter.

Well, I had no time to blog at that point and thus couldn’t join the pushback effort. But a couple hours later, while I was working on my American Spectator column about the 9/12 March, the PPP poll went online:

It looks like there’s a real possibility of a major upset in the Delaware Senate primary on Tuesday night, with insurgent conservative Christine O’Donnell leading longtime Congressman and Governor Mike Castle 47-44. That 3 point lead is well within the poll’s margin of error. . . .
It’s clear that Castle’s popularity has taken a sharp turn in the wrong direction over the last month. . . .

Anti-O’Donnell readers must ponder this question: If the poll numbers in the GOP primary could shift so rapidly — if Castle could lose this much ground in the span of a month — why should we put faith in what polls tell us about the general election match-up against Democrat Chris Coons?

Paul Mirengoff has a lot of company among Republicans who have allowed this polls-as-predictions thinking to cloud their judgment about Delaware. This is an example of how the bandwagon mentality sometimes dominates political discourse. I’ve seen this type of argument used in policy discussions as well: “X percent of Americans believe global warming is a serious problem, therefore conservatives must propose policies to deal with global warming.”

Public opinion is a moving target, and the purpose of politics is not merely to react to public opinion, but to change public opinion. You will never win a fight if you walk away from the fight, and that’s what happens when you say to yourself, “Well, Delaware is a liberal state; there’s no point even trying to elect a real conservative there.”

Conservatives ought not succumb to the defeatist argument that we should retreat, ceding political terrain to our anatagonists, simply because they are strong and we are weak. When will we be stronger?

If Republicans can’t elect a conservative in Delaware this year, at what future point will such a victory be possible? In 2012? 2014? Ever?

Am I the only one who sees that this kind of helpless passivity toward the presumed liberalism of “Blue States” is a sure-fire formula for slow-motion political suicide?

Stand up and fight! WOLVERINES!

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL for U.S. SENATE

Delaware Senate Primary Update: NRA, DeMint Endorse Christine O’Donnell

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Once Sarah Palin endorsed, the avalanche was on:

The National Rifle Association endorsed conservative commentator Christine O’Donnell Friday in Delaware’s Republican Senate primary.  The Tea Party-backed O’Donnell is looking to upset Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) on Tuesday.

Via Memeorandum and also CNN:

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint announced Friday night his endorsement of the Tea Party-endorsed candidate.  . . .”I’m proud to endorse Christine O’Donnell for U.S. Senate in Delaware,” DeMint wrote Friday on his Twitter page. “She will stand strong for the principles of freedom.”

Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post:

What is clear now is that if O’Donnell wins — and that remains a long shot — Palin will receive the lion’s share of credit and grow even stronger among grassroots activists as 2012 gets ever closer.

Well, certainly Palin’s influence would be enhanced, but it must be pointed out again that co-blogger Smitty first called our attention to Christine O’Donnell back in March. It was obviously the Smittylanche that made the crucial difference here.

By the way, if anybody has any news of Friday’s Sussex County rally for Christine, please share it in the comments, with links.

Delaware Republican Party Files FEC Complaint Against Christine O’Donnell UPDATE: RNC Robocalls for Castle?

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What kind of campaign does the GOP establishment wage against challengers? Scorched earth:

The Republican Party of Delaware has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing one of its own Senate candidates of illegally collaborating with the Tea Party Express.
Attorneys for the state party asked the FEC to launch an immediate and thorough investigation into conservative GOP candidate Christine O’Donnell “to remedy the alleged violations and to ensure that these violations immediately cease and do not reoccur,” according to the complaint filed Thursday. . . .
The complaint alleges that the O’Donnell campaign is “knowingly accepting illegal campaign contributions from the Tea Party Express PAC.” . . .
Delaware State GOP Chairman Tom Ross offered this statement:
“Christine O’Donnell needs to immediately call upon her third party supporters to cease and desist this illegal behavior,” he said. “This type of behavior has no place in our political process, and O’Donnell should denounce these illegal ads. Donors deserve to know whether they made an illegal donation so they can demand a refund and get their money back.”

When you take on the establishment, this is what you can expect in return. And when the grassroots are asleep, the establishment becomes arrogant.

UPDATE 11:10 a.m.: Angel Clark of the Examiner reports:

The RNC has allegedly been making “robo-calls” to voters in Delaware informing people of Castle’s fiscal conservatism. Many already frustrated Delawareans are now becoming angry. They are attempting to call the RNC office today and let them know that Delaware is tired of their establishment candidate (202-863-8500).

Clark also reports: “The Tea Party Express is holding a rally tonight in Sussex County. The 9-12 Delaware Patriots sent out some of the rally information. . . . Friday, Sept 10th at 5:30 pm – American Legion Post #28, 3178 Legion Road, Millsboro.”

 Stand up and fight! WOLVERINES!

UPDATE 11:30 a.m.: Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator talks about the Wall Street Journal and National Review as instruments of the Ruling Class. And the ever-fearless Dan Riehl isn’t afraid to argue with Glenn Reynolds.

UPDATE: Via C4P, audio of Sarah Palin’s call-in to Sean Hannity’s radio show endorsing Christine O’Donnell:

Also via C4P, Mark Levin discusses the endorsement:

Let us note that this conflict over the Delaware GOP primary finds three of the most influential conservative talk-radio hosts — Levin, Hannity and Rush Limbaugh — on the same side as Governor Palin. Think they’ll remember that? Think that will make a difference beyond 2010? Just askin’ questions . . .

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL for U.S. SENATE