The day is finally here! All over Florida, old people will be driving to vote, after hitting the early bird special at Country Kitchen Buffet. Will we hear again the dreaded phrase "Dimpled Chad"? Will the butterflies take over the state? Will my cousin in Tampa stop calling me to complain that the temperature is in the 40s? Dave Barry as usual says it best
Mitt Romney needs to overcome the redundant "Straight Talk Express" and he will do so by his clear and constant message of conservative values and common-sense solutions. Florida voters will realize that Washington is the real problem here and it will take an economic outsider to fix the ills from which Washington suffers. Prior conservative candidates Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson and their cadre of real conservative supporters will gravitate toward the Romney camp and caucus with Romney supporters and Romney's message of improvements to the economy and fiscal discipline. McCain's beltway-insider status and his sellout to the party in the areas of immigration and taxation were slaps to conservatives and Florida voters will not forget the insult... Romney will use his impressive Florida win today to go on to the GOP Convention as our conservative nominee for president and the likely win in November!
Rudy's dead, and Romney and McCain are polling statistically dead-even. I say we let them fight it out in the desert. Maybe McCain could fashion a rudimentary lathe....
The democrats and republicans can fight all they want, but I have a feeling that Florida is ready for a Grimes takeover. HAIL GRIMES!!!
The thing I didn't realize until I heard it this morning was that the race is winner-take-all on the Republican side. Someone is going to get 100% of the FL delegates with less than 40% of the vote. And you know, because of the silly Republican winner-take-all (WTA) system, now I finally get Rudy's strategy. NY, NJ, DE and CT are all WTA and on Feb 5th, and I'm sure he thought that as Northeast moderate states, those were locks for him. So if he campaigned hard among NYC transplants and added the FL delegates to his count, it's 114+101+52+30+18=315, or over 25% of the necessary total. Two other Rudy-friendly WTA states later are in the Northeast (VA and VT), so if those are wins it's an additional 80, getting him to 395 or 33% of the necessary total. And that's before he even gets to the West Coast, where I'm sure he thought he could win a majority of the delegates in CA + OR + WA (243 total). Everywhere else he just needs 25-35% of the vote to amass enough delegates to win since most every other state is not WTA, and with Romney vs. Huck vs. Thompson fighting over the social conservative vote, that would have been relatively easy for him. But of course, all of this required fellow war hawk / perceived moderate McCain imploding before today, which for months it looked like he would but he didn't. That's why Rudy is screwed today. It's not that bad a strategy, but when he failed to beat Ron Paul in Iowa or NH, people in FL stopped paying attention to him.
The NY, NJ and CT GOPs figured winner take all would help Giuliani. And the strategy was not that crazy. His idea was to lock up Florida early. It could have worked IF he then started focusing on one or two of the other early states. But he kept working on Florida, so as the race changed, people just forgot about him. Then when Giuliani and Romney pulled out a few wins, the focus of attention shifted to them. Last summer, when McCain was left for dead, Giuliani made a play for the McCain vote. As I told an old acquaintance of mine back in NY (who is the GOP District leader of a very Democratic district), once McCain dropped, I was going to support Giuliani. I felt honor bound to support McCain until the end though. Lucky for me, McCain came back strong. I have a feeling most of the Giuliani vote will move toward McCain now.
Wouldn't surprise me. NY has the most arcane election laws in the country. I remember at one time something like 50% of all election lawsuits were in New York State. The state mid level appeals courts are ususally closed for the summer, but have a special "election term" bench, requiring the justices to return for a week or two each summer to hear election law appeals. When I worked on campaigns in college, they actually had guys on the payroll whose sole job was to make sure the nominating petitions were properly filled out.
I am not sure when they went WTA Back when I was a GOP committeeman in college, the NY primary was not WTA. Rather, it was extremely confusing and based on district level votes with state wide extra delegates. Basically, in a county with a strong GOP organization (such as Nassau or Suffolk County back in the days), the establishment candidate had an easy time of it. In counties without strong organizations (such as the Bronx) it was a big mess. In 1988, there was no primary in Nassau county because none of the candidates except Bush was able to get on the ballot in any of the districts. On the other hand, in some heavily Democratic, heavily minority districts, Jack Kemp was able to get on the ballot because he had a following among a group of young, conservative/libertarian minorities. The rules have changed since then, I am not sure when though. I was still living in Virginia for the 2000 primary and was in Illinois for the 2004 primary.
Petitions cannot have red ink anywhere, I believe, and there's a whole load of other stupid rules like that. McCain had a really hard time just getting on the ballot 8 years ago and I believe there are Giuliani loyalists who are working very hard to that end this time out also.
To give you an idea, I was helping a friend in Queens get his cousin on the ballot in an Assembly race (he had no chance, just wanted to fly the GOP flag). One of the nominating papers was covered with tomato sauce - the guy who got the signatures was filling out his portion while eating pasta (OK -- insert Italian joke here). He had to convince an election judge that the red marks were sauce, not stray ink marks, and hence not in violation of the law.
NOT OFFICIAL NUMBERS JUST MY GUESS Republican Primary: McCain 35% Romney 35% Huckabee 13% Guiliani 12% Paul 4% People who still think Thompson is running 1% Democratic Straw Poll: Hillary 52% Obama 34% Edwards 13% Gravel/Uncommitted/Throwaways 1ish%
LOL! How can they be so short sighted? And these are the organizations that we trust for selecting the best candidates for president of the United States. How depressing. See above. People are fed up!
Well, I decided to rot my head today and put on Limbaugh. He's declaring voter shenanigans in Florida, claiming that there are two polling sites right now that are letting independents register on site, a practice that is not legal in Florida. And of course who are these enterprising independents gonna vote for? I feel good about today if this is the fear coming out of the machine.
Now Rush is accusing McCain of robocalling and spreading misinformation. This is a laugh riot. He is also praising the anti McCain piece by George Will while declaring David Brooks insignificant. Some balls. Go Mac!
McCain kinda reminds me of Yoda. He is soft spoken, he looks peaceful and clumsy, but I bet once the action starts he kicks ass.
You're assuming they can drive. My grandparents cannot...of course, they are probably too far gone understand the candidates.