Tribs story on the Keyes debacle and recriminations ends with this:
Privately, some Republicans were blaming Keyes’ presence near the top of the ballot for Crane’s defeat. But state Sen. Dave Syverson of Rockford, a state Central Committee member instrumental in bringing Keyes to Illinois, said he doesn’t think Keyes hurt the party.
McKenna appears to be headed for Party Head which is probably not a bad choice.
Mazullo gets the problem with Keyes at least.
U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, the Republican from northwestern Illinois who played an instrumental role in importing Keyes, quietly apologized to fellow Republican members of the Illinois congressional delegation in recent weeks, according to GOP sources.
Let’s send Keyes to Ohio. Maybe he can help the party there.
While I haven’t come to any conclusions about where the IL GOP is headed following this year’s results in Illinois, I do think the “Keyes debacle” was not as bad as expected.
1) Keyes finished at 27%. Much higher than he polled in most polls. Perhaps it was the “I’m too embarassed to admit to the pollster I’m voting for him” phenomena, or perhaps, his debate performances at the end, which received much attention due to the expected spectacle they’d be, actually swayed some folks. I’m not saying Keyes was flawless, but as a college debate coach, I was disappointed with Obama’s less than flawless performance in all 3 debates.
2) Keyes won a majority of the voters in his party, according to the party ID data at cnn.com. Not a big majority (56%), but again, more than the minority of voters of his party who said they were planning to vote for him in some of those later summer/early fall polls.
To be honest, based on the coverage of the campaign and the polls, one might have expected it to be a much bigger blowout in Obama’s favor. What scares me as a Democrat is the fact that in the end, Keyes did better than most had expected.
Keyes might win the governor’s race in Ohio.
” That may prove difficult, in part because the party has few budding stars and because Keyes, who lost by a 43-percentage-point margin, has promised to stick around Illinois and not return home to Maryland where he lived until recently. He said he wants to help guide the state party ever rightward.”
Hmm. As an Illinois resident, I don’t know how I quite feel about that.
Stop bitching – you should all be happy.
Image facing some sort of IL version of Rove instead.
Bush & Rove Inc began their “revolution” at the state level — Rove’s history suggests we should be vigilant…I don’t think we should rest on our laurels simply being thankful Illinois is blue for now.
I doubt anyone is resting on their laurels. IL’s legislature is still right-wing, and the governor’s office could go to a bigot in 2006 very easily. There’s also Bean’s district to protect.
The real problem is complacency among the faithful voters, the people who just show up and vote. They need to be woken up and shown the full picture on these candidates.
I fail to see how 27% was a surprise for Keyes. Illinois still has a strong Republican voter base. Many of them were going to pull the level for him no matter who was on the ballot. The fact that Republicans got a lunatic (Schock) elected to the state house shows that there were many bigots out there roaming around.
I think Keyes’s 27% is more a reflection of Obama’s ceiling than a right-wing nut’s floor. What I mean is that Illinois is ideologically diverse enough that it’s hard to break over 65% for any candidate. That leaves 35% for the opponent, even if that opponent is a bag of excrement.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, they ran Alan Keyes instead.
The true surprise for me is that the anti-Obama vote didn’t split for Jerry Kohn. It was a bad year for third parties all around the country. I would attribute that to the sharp contrast in the Presidential race, and a realization that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000. Conservatives figured that out as much as liberals, and I think they were highly unlikely to give their votes to a minor party.
Rove has had no luck in solid blue states. He’s done well in states that were very conservative or swing. Even in this election, Bush lost by 10. Rove’s a smart guy, but he can’t beat the demographics.
Adri: re-reading your post, I realize you are comparing the ultimate result with some of the first polls that came out. Keep in mind that the first polls did not screen for registered voters, let alone likely voters. They really were more for amusement value.
AP: that’s a great point about Karl Rove. I hope you have a chance to expand on it in a regular post.
Given how badly this election turned out, I’m as willing as the next guy to take some pleasure in Keyes’ overwhelming loss.
Unfortunately, however, the IL-DEMs continue to underperform relative to their share of the electorate. A successful IL-DEM party would have retired both Hyde and Weller. An aggressive IL-DEM party would have gone after Biggert or Hastert.
While the Democratic party holds nearly all branches of IL state government, there isn’t a single congressional district that voted for Bush (in 2000) by more than 55%, while there are 4 Dem districts that voted for Gore by over 75%.
Mark,
I’ll be addressing this very soon. But good points and I agree.
Maybe Keyes, the winner of the vacant lot vote (there appeared to be more Keyes yard signs on vacant lots than residences), should go national instead. Start him complaining now that Shrub isn’t doing enough to drop the gay bomb. Let him say that because of this, there’s no difference between the two parties and everyone should vote for him instead.
Someone should be the right’s version of Nader.
I’ve heard talk around the blogosphere that we ought to fight back in the blue states and get rid of congressmen who aren’t really passing leglislation in the best interests of our state, or our country.
Any chance we could set our sights on Hastert in 2006? He’s been spouting the wingnut gospel lately. Beating him would be a very long shot, but embattling him and weakening his base would be worthwhile.
Are there other targets? I’d like to see Tim Johnson taken out in the midyears. We had a decent candidate this year, but he didn’t get enough publicity or funds.
Maybe Keyes, the winner of the vacant lot vote (there appeared to be more Keyes yard signs on vacant lots than residences)
Don’t forget the signs on the interstate medians! He got the roadkill vote, too!
Rove has no luck in blue states ?
Check the stats from 2004 – Reps improved their numbers all over the place including Illinois.
There’s hardly any difference in Illinois results. The percentage gap is slightly lower, but that is because of the higher overall turnout.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/scorecard/
The changes overall are quite marginal.
Panicking that a great Republican tide in Illinois is coming is not understanding the larger demographic trends at work.
More importantly, most of Rove’s effectiveness has been in places like Alabama and Texas.
People like him and Norquist can brag all they want, but ultimately, they are carefully tailoring election issues in specific places that win. They aren’t changing the underlying demographic relationships.
Hastert is set for life, or until he does something that normal people (i.e. people who aren’t checking out blogs and political news obsessively) actually think is deeply deeply stupid. And his spouting LaRouchie stuff about Soros doesn’t count because nobody with normal interests really knows who George Soros is.
We can’t even make him suffer for trying to ram this highway he wants down our throats, no way we can make him pay for talking about a weird agenda (national sales tax?) and stuffing his foot in his mouth.
The district runs deep into northern illinois with a ton of rural turf where no dem would do better than 25%
If you want pickups in Illinois maybe Cegelis can be a new Bean or get Renner to reload for one last shot (doubtful since ’06 might be a bad year to be a Dem in the burbs and for certain downstate)
Rich:
Why do you say that 2006 will be a bad year to be a dem in the burbs or downstate?
Ehh…It’s fun to live in Hastert’s district back home. But…Zamora did win 31% vs Hastert with basically no campaign. It’d be nice to actually make him stick around a little in the months before an election.
Vince: As an Illinois resident, I know exactly how I feel about Keyes hanging around to “help” us–approximately the same way I felt about his wingnutty candidacy.
David hits the nail squarely on the head when he says Zamora had “basically no campaign.” I didn’t even know there was a Democrat running against Hastert until someone (possibly picking up on something I said here or over at Chill’s place) from the campaign sent me an e-mail. I didn’t even see Zamora signs until the week before the election, and not many then. That’s not how you take down somebody as big as Hastert (metaphorically or literally speaking).
The thing is, love him or hate him, you have to admit that Hastert brings it home for his constituents. I loathe the man and everything he stands for, but my employer is quite happy with the federal earmarks we’ve been getting thanks to the fact that we’re in his district. That’s a hard advantage to overcome.
Arch, I know Ruy Texeira is fond of the argument that demographics will cause the Democrats to prevail… eventually.
I say, “that’s bullshit.”
1. “White” is not a static category. It is quite capable of absorbing ethnics that aren’t Black.
2. It’s a “do nothing” political strategy. Dems need a message. With a good message Dems can win; without a good message you can wait-and-wait for the demographic train to bail-out the party. But it might not arrive.
But Ruy, and I both argue you need a message to go with that–but that the current message with the appropriate framing by institutions we are building like Air America and Media Matters and the Center for American Progress are exactly the way to do that.
Although I know most people write Alan Keyes off, and in fact take joy in the idea of him staying around for the negative effect he will have on the IL GOP, we need to be a little bit careful here. I am convinced that Christine Cegelis would have gotten even more than the 44% she did get against Henry Hyde had it not been for Alan Keyes actively recruiting, registering, and getting his people out to the polls in DuPage county. I haven’t sat down to crunch the numbers yet, but there were precincts that showed a very large increase in registered voters that we couldn’t explain, and I think they were Keyes voters.
The first time I started seeing signs out there I was quite shocked at the number of Keyes signs I saw. I really couldn’t understand it. Then I started seeing Keyes people at train stations handing out literature. I say this is something to watch, because while I heartily believe that Christine Ceglelis can pull of a win in 2006, it will likely be by only a percentage point or two, a lead that could be destroyed by continued Keyes activism.
Someday I should post the text of some of the Keyes literature that I found on people’s doorsteps. People who would read that and then vote for him are a frightening group indeed. But they are a group that could become very motivated to get out to the polls.
“The district runs deep into northern illinois with a ton of rural turf where no dem would do better than 25%”
Well, that’s funny but I think there is nothing wrong with having a representative that actual represent the majority of people in his district as opposed to few “highly sophisticated” political junkies.
We are not shooting here for a single party system , are we ?
Why ’06 doesn’t look to be a fun time to be a Dem (at downstate for sure and potentially in the burbs):
His name is Blagojevich.
I’m worried he may be like a lead weight around the ankles of Dems in these areas, especially as criticism of him ramps up in the next 2 years. The R’s are going to have the words “Chicago Democrats” seered into our heads.
Even an R who’s kind of nutty (O’Malley) or who’s slathered in Keyes-stink (Rauschy) will do very well downstate against the man who barely seems to leave Chicago. The situation in the burbs seems more complicated- but Blago hasn’t exactly been effective and a sharp Repub criticism coupled with his willingness to go on an all out attack, I think, could hurt him (tamp down Dem turnout, edge up R turnout, lose persuadables).
Its not so much even that I think Rod will lose (he’ll prove an oddity, both reasonably unpopular and re-elected I suspect) or that there will be big Dem loses- its that I suspect Dem progress will be hindered overall for at least that election.
Crosscheck: Who Are Tom’s Picks For New IL GOP Chair?
I’ve said a lot of good things about Tom Cross’s political touch – so one of the things I’d love to hear on his blog is who his favorites are for the new IL GOP Chair that will replace Judy…