Posts Tagged ‘Elizabeth Colbert-Busch’

South Carolina CD1 Election Fallout

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

A roundup of interesting commentary on Mark Sanford’s defeat of Elizabeth Colbert-Busch in the SC1 special election:

  • Erick Erickson on Mark Sanford’s victory: “[Colbert-Busch] opted out of most debate opportunities. Instead of debating her, Mark Sanford toured the district with a life-sized cutout of Nancy Pelosi. It worked.” More: “Between Bill Clinton and Kermit Gosnell, no one would ever accuse the Democrats of being for family values.”
  • Human Events joins the smackdown parade:

    “We gave it a heck of a fight,” Colbert Busch said in her concession speech. No, you didn’t. You were obliterated by the most beatable Republican in the House. Between campaign and independent spending, you blew upwards of $2 million, and got trounced by a candidate the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to support. You ran a weak, lazy campaign that never had much to say beyond harping on Sanford’s extramarital affair, and reminding voters that your brother is a TV star, while he threw himself furiously into shoe-leather retail politics. Sanford was still holding public events on Election Day, while you were nowhere to be found. You backed away from a crucial debate opportunity, leaving Sanford to own the stage by debating a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard to imagine how you could have fought less for the seat, short of holding all your campaign events by closed-circuit TV from your brother’s house.

    More:

    The mythical backlash against opponents of gun control didn’t materialize to help Colbert Busch, which should only come as a surprise to those who take liberal media manipulation seriously. She took labor union money, which wasn’t going to endear her to voters in the state where unions tried to kill a Boeing plant. Between the ObamaCare disaster, the failure of their Sequester Terror efforts to cudgel more taxes out of the American people, and the gathering Benghazi storm, the Democrat Party isn’t looking its best at the moment…I would imagine we’ll be hearing a lot about Nancy Pelosi in tight 2014 races.

  • How the MSM carried Colbert-Busch’s water:

    What we see here is another refutation of what I’ve called a “beautiful little fairy tale that liberals tell themselves,” that the American public is broadly supportive of their worldview, and they only lose because Republicans manage to Jedi-Mind-Trick the electorate into caring about distractions, silliness, and those irrelevant ‘wedge issues.’…The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way. But the electorate doesn’t always think liberal ideas are better, and we may argue that they rarely do.

    More: “Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘Oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.’ Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win.”

  • PPP’s polls were not exactly oracular: “At one point, PPP had Colbert Busch ahead by nine points…The fact that Sanford, a deeply flawed candidate, substantially outperformed the polls is just one data point. But it suggests that the Obama phenomenon may not be easily replicable. If that is the case, 2014 could look a lot like 2010.”
  • Colbert-Busch sucked as a campaigner. “At a Chamber of Commerce forum last week, the Democrat delivered four minutes of remarks and was then hustled out of the room by a team of handlers.”
  • MSM reports of Mark Sanford’s political demise were notably premature.
  • Heh. “Any time a Democrat white woman related to a famous man as the source of her fame fails to excite Democrat turnout, I chalk up a double victory for the GOP.”
  • Sandford Beats Colbert-Busch

    Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

    In the South Carolina First Congressional District race. In fact, it wasn’t even particularly close.

    Stephen Colbert may be America, but his sister can’t be a U.S. Representative on his coattails.