Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Beyond Texas...

Lee Fisher and Robin Carnahan may be among the hidden winners of tonight's Republican primary for Governor in Texas.

A year ago at this time we found Kay Bailey Hutchison with a 25 point lead in the polls over Rick Perry. Now the main question is whether Hutchison will go ahead and lose outright tonight, or get blown out in an April runoff. It's been quite a precipitous fall for her.

There's no doubt that her Washington ties are a big part of the problem. Last month we asked likely primary voters whether they trusted Austin or DC politicians more to deal with the state's problems- Austin won out by a 78/3 margin...we never see that kind of imbalance on anything in our polling.

Hutchison's fall shows the perils of being a Washington politician in 2010, and Democrats are lucky to have two open Senate races this year in Missouri and Ohio where they have a candidate who's been successful in state government running against a Republican who's a consummate Washington insider. Roy Blunt and Rob Portman have the early poll leads but it could be a very different story come November once their roles in the Washington culture that voters despise have been fully communicated.

Those races will be a good measure of whether this is solely an anti-Democratic year, or more broadly an anti-Washington establishment year that will cause insiders of both parties some trouble at the polls.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

nope

its more about each party moving farther to right or farther to left. Hutchinson is losing because she is deemed to be too liberal on some issues ( abortion)

Unknown said...

Precisely. All across the country, the more conservative candidate leads. Doesn't matter if it's in a GOP primary (Perry v. Hutchison, Rubio v. Crist) or a general election matchup.

Looks like 2010 will be another "anti-incumbent" election like 1994, where every GOP incumbent wins and scads of Democratic incumbents lose.

StlDan said...

Bingo above^ Roy Blunt in Mo is a Rino but Robin Carnahan is a Liberal from a long line of Carnahan family politicians, Grandfather, Father, Mother and Brother have all been politicians from Mo. She is not an outsider but, just one of Missouri's own Kennedy family.

Christian Liberty said...

Hutchinson didn't lose because she was too Washington, she lost because she was too LIBERAL.

If Fisher and Carnahan want to learn from Perry how to win in 2010, they should not talk about state government; they should talk about state SUCCESSION!! They should talk about states' rights to NULLIFY federal law, opposition to Obamacare and Cap-and-Trade and wasteful deficit "stimulus", and Tenth Amendment rights to state sovereignty.

The best move Perry made all year was standing up for the right of Texas to exit its incestuous union with Washington. Either Fisher and Carnahan have to denounce the PROGRESSIVE agenda in Washington (their own agendas) or they will lose to more conservative candidates.

Christian Liberty said...

Furthermore, Carnahan is much too close to ACORN, the most corrupt organization of our time. (And there are more ACORN tapes in the can ready to be released: have popcorn ready.) In any battleground 2010 state, the candidate who denounces ACORN will beat the candidate who is close to ACORN every time.

 
Web Statistics