If you live in Nebraska, Florida, Virginia, or anywhere else in the country, you might see some headlines today about a special election in New York, to fill a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
We can understand that you might not think this race has much to do with you - and we don't entirely disagree. A simple mid-cycle replacement race for a single seat in the House shouldn't mean all that much. It shouldn't - but it does.
To start with, the 26th Congressional District of New York was vacated in February of this year when the married, conservative, Republican congressman was discovered to have e-mailed shirtless pictures of himself to a woman he met online. By itself, that incident would be just another unfortunate black mark on the reputation of a political party that continues to claim - laughably, at this point - that its members are more ethical or moral than members of any other political party.
That was only the beginning of this story, though.
Three candidates entered the race for this now-open House seat; a Democratic candidate, a Republican candidate, and a Tea Party candidate (who had, at different times in his life, been both a Republican and a Democrat). Even with three candidates, the political makeup of the district is so heavily Republican, it should have been a cake walk for nearly any solidly Republican candidate to pick up the open seat.
"Should have been" is the key. The other big key to this race may yet prove to be what the Republican candidate said that she would do to Medicare, if she were elected.
In short, she made it clear she would enact the plan put forward initially by Michigan GOP Representative Paul Ryan - a plan that would get rid of Medicare as it exists now, and replace it with a voucher program. That voucher program would force the elderly to try to get private insurance when they're over the age of 65 - but they'd get a voucher, which isn't worth the paper its printed on when no insurance company worth it's stock will take a 65-year-old with pre-existing conditions.
As Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com noted on Monday, it's easy to draw some early conclusions from this contest - and many pundits have. However, the unique characteristics make it unusually difficult to forecast with any certainty who will pick up the most votes when the polls close later today.
Unlike Nate, we're willing to go out on a limb and declare who will likely be the biggest losers in this special election, no matter what the vote tallies are: the Republican Party.
The Tea Party candidate has virtually no chance of winning. He began the race with about 25% of the potential vote in early polls. He's now down to 12% in polling and is continuing a downward trend. Unless the election is somehow a massive landslide for the Republican candidate - which, based on polling, is a highly unlikely outcome - this special election will have been fought over a topic that forms the basis of the GOP's 2012 campaign strategy.
Even if the Republican candidate wins by a slim margin, this issue will have proven exactly where the GOP's political weak points are - with more than a few months for Democratic strategists to refine their attacks before the 2012 campaign season really heats up. If the Democratic candidate wins, the Democrats will win a long-time Republican seat and weaken the GOP hold over the House by one more vote. If the Democratic candidate wins big, it will show just how dangerous and divisive the Tea Party truly could be in 2012.
No matter what the vote count is, the Republican Party won't come out of this special election unscathed - an outcome we warned was likely to happen one day, if the old-fashioned Republican moderates didn't stand up to the fanatical members of the Republican Party.
Just winning isn't enough. HOW one wins is as important as winning. Sometimes, maybe more important.
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