Now that the election is over, the fingerpointing is beginning. People like Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint have gotten quite a bit of criticism for most likely costing Republicans control of the U.S. Senate. Now the pundits are getting into the game, talking about Christine O’Donnell and how she could have won in Delaware.
Chris Cillizza at The Fix does the math and finds that O’Donnell had a tough road in Delaware no matter what she did.
Raw numbers alone suggest that the math rarely — if ever — adds up for a Republican statewide win because of the Democratic dominance in New Castle. O’Donnell spent heavily on television — somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million — to try to break through in New Castle, which is covered by the Philadelphia media market, but failed.
The last Republican to carry Delaware at the presidential level wasGeorge H.W. Bush in 1988; Roth was the last GOPer to win a Senate race in 1994 — a pretty good year to be a Republican almost anywhere. (In a painful fact for Republicans, Castle won 57 percent of the vote in New Castle in 2008 in his admittedly non-competitive reelection race.)
And, that’s before you consider that O’Donnell was a poor ideological fit for the state — a social conservative in a state where even most of the Republicans outside of Sussex County are socially moderate — who ran a odd and unpredictable campaign. (Who could forget her “I am not a witch” ad?”
Combine the New Castle hurdle with the fact that O’Donnell was simply the wrong type of candidate for Republicans in a state as friendly to Democrats as Delaware and it becomes apparent that barring some sort of historical anomaly, she was not going to be elected to the Senate no matter what the establishment did or did not do for her.
According to Cillizza’s math O’Donnell out-performed McCain’s 2008 showing but did worse than George W. Bush, and, of course, Mike Castle. Harry Themal at the News Journal isn’t so sure though. He wonders if the GOP infighting hurt Urquhart’s and O’Donnell’s chances at the polls.
What justifiably galled the party brass was that these “outsiders” upset the candidates they supported and who they thought would have won.
After all, longtime congressman and former governor Mike Castle would probably have easily beaten any Democrat for Joe Biden’s old seat. Party officials realized early that the seeds of losing had been sown by O’Donnell and Urquhart. Castle, to his credit, said he would support the party but failed to endorse O’Donnell.
In a network interview, O’Donnell pointed to a parallel situation in Kentucky, where Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s preferred candidate lost in a primary to maverick Rand Paul but the GOP then united to assure Paul’s easy election.
There is no guarantee, of course, that even united Delaware Republicans could have overcome the 50,000-vote margins by which Chris Coons and John Carney won. Chances are that those who opposed O’Donnell felt so strongly about her that nothing might have changed their votes.
Of course we’ll never know what would have happened if things had been different but I don’t see how you avoid hard feelings and internal strife when the most prominent Republican in the state is defeated in a dishonorable, negative campaign. Also, the Paul/Grayson primary was much earlier in the year and Grayson was not particularly prominent in the state yet (he was an up-and-comer). I agree with Cillizza – I think O’Donnell never really had a shot to begin with. I look at it this way: in a Republican year with plenty of money (around $5M), O’Donnell was able to improve her vote % by 4%. That’s it.
Mike Castle (and Tom Wagner) proves that a Republican can win in Delaware. However, Wagner and Castle do not fit into the current hard right Republican party. Until that changes, I doubt we’ll see more statewide elected Republicans.