For a Dead Party, They Sure Keep Winning a Bunch of Races

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

NRO's Fred Schwarz offers a sense of what some local races in New York might mean for the bigger races later this year:

It's very close (51-49 percent), but the Republicans appear to have won a special election in New York's 3rd assembly district, which lies within the 1st congressional district, currently represented by Rep. Tim Bishop.

He leads by 186 votes out of 8,000-plus cast, with 931 absentee ballots yet to be counted.

Since the 1970s, this assembly seat has been represented mostly by Democrats, though the most recent occupant, Patricia Eddington, was an enrolled member of the ACORN-affiliated Working Families Party (the only WFP member in the assembly). She resigned to take the job of Brookhaven Town Clerk... which will give you an idea of what a crummy job being a member of the New York assembly is.

I was in the district over the weekend, and both sides were going all out — lawn signs everywhere you looked, stacks of ad-hoc anti-Thoden newspapers from Dean Murray's camp (he is in the free-newspaper business), letters and ads in the local weeklies, foot soldiers handing out flyers. The seemingly successful Republican candidate, Murray, is the usual prosperous GOP small businessman; he has run for a couple other offices in previous elections and lost. The apparently losing Democrat, Lauren Thoden, is a former Eddington staffer who is 27 years old but looks about 16... I suspect her name will appear on more ballots in the future.

The practical significance of the election is small, as the Democrats still control well over two-thirds of the 150-member assembly, so the GOP cannot even sustain a veto. But both sides clearly saw the election as a test of strength in this mostly Democratic but voluble corner of a region that is fairly evenly divided between the parties. So overall it's a good sign for Long Island Republicans and a worrisome one for Rep. Bishop.

This wasn't an isolated electoral incident: "In Tuesday's 4 special elections to fill vacant NYS Assembly seats, Republicans won 3 of the 4 races - and garnered a net gain of 2 seats."

But the GOP is dead in the northeast. Everyone says so.

02/10 09:42 AM Share