No, really:
The race has now been called for Democrat Bill Owens.
This is a huge win for conservatives.
“Whaaaa. . . ?” you say.
There are two big victories at work in New York’s 23rd Congressional District.
First, the GOP now must recognize it will either lose without conservatives or will win with conservatives. In 2008, many conservatives sat home instead of voting for John McCain. Now, in NY-23, conservatives rallied and destroyed the Republican candidate the establishment chose.
I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman winning would just be gravy. A Hoffman win is not in the cards, but we did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed GOP candidate.
(…)
[W]e have demonstrated to the GOP that it must not take conservatives for granted. The GOP spent $900,000.00 on a Republican who dropped out and endorsed the Democrat. Were we to combine Scozzafava and Hoffman’s votes, Hoffman would have won.
Well, we don’t really know that last part for sure do we ?
For some reason that only they know, more than 6,000 people — not counting whatever absentee ballots may come in before the results are certified — decided that they’d rather vote for Dede Scozzafava (who, it should be noted, has had a successful career as a local politician and state legislator in this district) than for the supposed conservative “Republican.” That seems to say more about Hoffman, and about how good a fit he really was for the district, than it does about Owens.
Moreover, this idea that you have somehow achieved victory by bringing about a defeat is exactly the kind of insanity that I and Rick Moran talked about in essays earlier this week. Scozzafava may not have been perfect and I probably wouldn’t have voted for her, but until outsiders decided to make this race a focus of national attention, she looked to be winning the race. And, quite honesty, Republicans can use all the seats in Congress they can get right now.
Republicans should run small-government conservatives wherever possible, that’s what the party claims it believes in after all, but they also need to recognize that there have always been, and will always be, regional differences in the United States when it comes to ideology or views on certain issues. Creating the kind of litmus tests that conservatives are asking for now would be to consign the party to minority status at the national level for a generation or more.
