I don't know... maybe if the challenger had taken more popular positions on important issues he might have attracted more voters. Instead, he chose to take more extreme positions that didn't attract enough voters... instead, he frightened many voters.
His positions scared the other party. Apparently his own party favored him. If he was really extreme enough to scare voters away, then he should have been able to lose his general election on his own.
They scare people... those who would have been hurt most from his positions. But he did not attract enough of his own party's votes. If he had, he wouldn't have lost...
That's not true though. If 10,000 people vote and 8,000 are my own party with 2,000 being other party flooding to change the outcome... I could win 60% of the vote of my party (4800 votes) with my opponent getting only 40% 3200 but the 2000 people who are voting here that are NOT members of my party would put him over the top and he would win. I don't know that something like that happened because I haven't seen the full turnout numbers, but the general consensus on the story seems to be that Cochran won because democrats came out to vote against the tea partier.
Except this strategy was from Cochran and not because Democrats are "scared" of McDaniel http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politic...an-beats-tea-party-challenger-chris-mcdaniel/
Our voting rules are what have institutionalized the two party system. First past the post voting rules tend to result in fewer parties being represented in the legislature, there is a large body of literature in comparative politics on this topic. I am personally in favor of adding a variant of proportional representation like they have in Germany. There, you vote for your representative in a single member district, but in addition, you vote for a party. When the legislature is formed, seats are added on top of the single member districts to make the representation in the legislature roughly proportional to the party vote. We could easily do this by simply adding seats to Congress (most countries have representatives in the amount of around the cube root of the population, which would make ours in the 660-670 range, for an addition of about 230 seats, which I would add to the House). Doing this would result in the TEA Party having actual representatives in Congress, same with Libertarian, likely Green and other parties as well. Of course, the Democrats and Republicans won't ever pass this as it would help We, the People to wrest control from the parties, an outcome they aren't interested in seeing happen.
If I am a democrat in Texas don't I have a right to vote on which republican I would rather have representing me? hedging your bet seems like the smart thing to do if the odds of getting true representation are so small.
No one knows how many (if any) Democrats crossed over to vote in this runoff. It doesn't seem likely that number was very large, noting how many more republicans reside in Mississippi. In the absence of any real evidence that a substantial number of Democrats did vote I think it is just as easy to view this as sour grapes on the challenger's part. I do believe there is evidence that people voted against the challenger due to concerns about cuts we might make. But in any event, if he had attracted more voters to vote for him (including republicans) he would have won. But he didn't.
It is almost humorous to see poor Commodore's confusion. He's a "libertarian" who is against the one percent and the Chamber of Commerce. He is a fan of the Kochs and still hasn't figured out why the Kochs invested heavily in the founding of the Tea Party as well as their allies ,the Chamber of Commerce.
Term limits would solve this problem. The tea party would have to run against new blood that could also be moderate.
Keep in mind that it's a low-turnout primary election. So really, a small rabid portion of his own party favored him. As far as Dems turning out, it's an open primary in a state with no voter registration (and in a state controlled by the party involved here - they could have rewritten the rules they are playing by if they didn't like them). Cochran is the one that sought out liberal and minority votes because it was a legitimate route to victory. There's nothing that says a GOP candidate can only appeal to conservatives in his state.
Also, McDaniel shot himself in the foot a few times in the interim between the primary and the runoff, and it also may have awakened more moderate GOPers to go out and vote. Apparently, the Cochran campaign went nuts in the last few weeks and made a ton of calls to voters, had more creative advertising, etc.
I find it a little hard to believe that enough Democrats voted in the Republican primary to make a difference. But, if they did, whatever. McDaniel knew the rules going into the contest. If he couldn't navigate them properly to get the win, that's on him. This is like blaming a team's fans for not cheering hard enough to get the win.
Unfortunately, that photograph cuts off the Cochran Official Campaign letterhead, otherwise we would have thought that was simply a piece of paper that anyone could have thrown together... oh, wait...
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>Cochran's race-baiting tactics are appropriate for MSNBC, not the GOP, which is why he needed Dem votes to win <a href="http://t.co/I9hiBSJXGY" title="http://ow.ly/yshGQ">ow.ly/yshGQ</a></p>— IBDeditorials (@IBDeditorials) <a href="https://twitter.com/IBDeditorials/status/481926529354850304" data-datetime="2014-06-25T22:26:53+00:00">June 25, 2014</a></blockquote> <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
this just in: Broader political bases win elections over ideologues! Paint a guy as too liberal, then cry when liberals vote for him.
Bingo. McDaniel ran a "liberals are evil" campaign for a hard-right primary - but it backfired when he didn't account for the fact that there are strategies to outmaneuver the crazies.
Out of curiosity, is there anything inaccurate in there (outside of maybe the generalization about Democrats and African Americans)? Or do you just not like the fact that Cochran out-uglied McDaniel?
