Charles Babington for the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON — Whether they are sore losers or never-say-die patriots, third-party candidates threaten to tip a handful of congressional and gubernatorial races to contenders who otherwise might have lost this fall.
Nine-term Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware is the third prominent Republican to consider a third-party bid this year after a suffering a stinging setback at the hands of tea-party-backed conservatives.
If Castle decides to make an independent run for Senate, he will join Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in refusing to let GOP primary voters force them into retirement.
While Crist, Murkowski and Castle are well-known politicians, many third-party campaigns are lonely, low-budget affairs with little hope of winning more than 2 or 3 percent of the vote. But in extremely tight races, that could be enough to swing the outcome between the Democratic and Republican nominees.
AND IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION
thanks to http://www.news.yahoo
This one act has moved [President] Medvedev out of the shadow of his patron, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and cast him as a political fighter as he looks ahead to a second term.
Medvedev’s personal victory didn’t come easy – only after the kind of power struggle Russia hasn’t seen since the cage-match politics of the ’90s.
That began in August, when Luzhkov suffered his latest embarrassment. Compared to some of his previous misadventures – crushing peaceful protests with riot police, banning gay pride marches as “satanic,” allegedly giving his wife’s real-estate firm the best property in town, promising (and failing) to stop the city’s heavy snowfall last winter – this one was fairly mild:
refusing to come home from holiday while Moscow was surrounded by wildfires, the heat and smoke doubling the city’s death rate to 700 a day. (See pictures of Medvedev and Putin on vacation.)
But the Kremlin saw it as a chance to get rid of another one of Russia’s political dinosaurs, the regional leaders who dug in after the fall of the Soviet Union and have ruled their regions like fiefdoms ever since.
Upon consideration, the only true path to political power would come from a Progressive-Libertarian-Moderate-Synthesis. We vote we all win. I have one dollar I will gladly contribute and in return ask nothing for myself, though I would no doubt recoup that dollar a hundredfold in the dawning era of peace and political prosperity sure to unfurl immediately afterward.
Vanke has a point.
The polling of Independents recently in IPR shows that a plurality are moderates/centrists.
This holds out the possibility of a viable centrist party-the New Whigs?
If so, they would take votes from the dems & reps -not from a PLAS candidate.
So I wish him well.
We did a push-poll / survey that demonstrated my campaign can beat Goodlatte’s, if we can just get enough money (or media coverage) to get out my core message.
Results: Vanke 42%, Goodlatte 46%, Bain 4%, no response 8%.
Poll text linked below. (Yes, I know, I deliberately minimized Libertarian Stuart Bain. This was a survey to measure my campaign message’s effectiveness against the incumbent.)
http://jeffvanke.com/2010/09/informational-poll-results-vanke-42-goodlatte-46-bain-4/
Someone like Richard Winger might know how to research this, but this article does catalog what appears to be a trend:
– Incumbents losing in the primaries +
– Incumbents going independent
This would seem to indicate a falling apart of major party discipline. That, from a challenging third party perspective, seems positive.
I wonder if 2010 has had more of these primary losses and independent bids than anytime in the past, or at least in modern history.
I continue to wonder whether a crackup of the GOP is possible, and whether it’s the Tea Partiers or the RINOs who’d be more inclined toward a “more liberty across the board” approach.
Come on, this is not news. It is always the case that an Independent or third party candidate might make the difference.
Who cares which reactionary wins?
And not a word on the California Governor’s race with the dead heat between Brown and Whitman and the great deal of leverage any alternative candidate could have.
Then there is the imploding national Constitution Party.
Then there is the imploding personal life of Chelene Ward Nightingale / Nightmare Nightingale ………