Safe Seats and Carolina Blues
By C. Edmund Wright
American Thinker
The voting shift in this nation is largely about two dynamics: safe seats and the Carolina blues. To get a really good close-up glimpse of what demographic problems the Republican Party is facing in the national electorate, one has to look no further than the North Carolina Senate race lost by Elizabeth Dole.
The loss by Dole was not simply a result of the headwinds (self-inflicted as they were) that all GOP candidates faced in 2008, though that was a factor. The Dole loss was more than that. Dole lost a senate seat held by Republicans since 1972. Dole lost the "Jesse Helms" seat. Truth be told, she never filled it adequately, but at least she did win it in 2002 against Clintonite Erskine Bowles.
Consider: Counting the 30 plus 6 years that Helms and then Dole occupied that seat, and the multiple terms served by conservative Democrat B. Everett Jordan before that, this is a seat soon to be occupied by a liberal for the first time in modern American political history. The other N.C. seat has gone back and forth between the parties for the past four decades, but this is a loss of the Helms seat. This is seismic.
American Thinker
The voting shift in this nation is largely about two dynamics: safe seats and the Carolina blues. To get a really good close-up glimpse of what demographic problems the Republican Party is facing in the national electorate, one has to look no further than the North Carolina Senate race lost by Elizabeth Dole.
The loss by Dole was not simply a result of the headwinds (self-inflicted as they were) that all GOP candidates faced in 2008, though that was a factor. The Dole loss was more than that. Dole lost a senate seat held by Republicans since 1972. Dole lost the "Jesse Helms" seat. Truth be told, she never filled it adequately, but at least she did win it in 2002 against Clintonite Erskine Bowles.
Consider: Counting the 30 plus 6 years that Helms and then Dole occupied that seat, and the multiple terms served by conservative Democrat B. Everett Jordan before that, this is a seat soon to be occupied by a liberal for the first time in modern American political history. The other N.C. seat has gone back and forth between the parties for the past four decades, but this is a loss of the Helms seat. This is seismic.
posted by Andy W. Rogers | 7:45 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home