I have a slightly different question -- can anyone name a race where a
Tea Party candidate won and in which, arguably, a regular Republican
would have lost? That is, did any Tea Party candidates win because of,
rather than in spite of, their affiliation?
I know this rests on counterfactuals, so it will be impossible to
prove one way or another, but standard political models predict that,
all else being equal, extremist candidates will underperform relative
to more centrist candidates in general elections. And we have at least
a few examples of Senate races (Nevada, Delaware) where a regular
Republican probably would have won but the Tea Party candidate lost.
So are there examples from any level of races where things went the
other way? If so, then it's a good example of the enthusiasm vs.
left/right positioning tradeoff. If not, it helps put the Tea Party
phenomenon in perspective.
David Epstein
On Wednesday, November 3, 2010, Lloyd Mayer <lmayer@nd.edu> wrote:
One congressional race where the presence of a third party candidate
may have been decisive is in my home district of Indiana-2. The incumbent
Democrat, Joe Donnelly, won by about two thousand, five hundred votes out of approximately
190,000 cast, narrowly edging out the Republican candidate. A Libertarian
candidate received almost 9,445 votes, or almost four times the margin of
victory. For exact figures, see http://64.255.123.76/indiana.htm.
Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer
Associate Professor
Notre Dame Law School
P.O. Box 780
Notre Dame, IN 46556-0780
Phone: (574) 631-8057
Fax: (574) 631-4197
Web Bio <http://law.nd.edu/faculty/lloyd-hitoshi-mayer>:
http://law.nd.edu/faculty/lloyd-hitoshi-mayer
SSRN Author
Page <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=504775>: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=504775
Questions for Tomorrow
How did Independents and third party candidates do, did their presence
affect any D-R races, and what of "none of the above" in Nevada? What
we know now is that independent Chafee won the R.I. gubernatorial race,
Tancredo lost in Colorado, None of the above is polling under two percent in
the Reid-Angle race, but it is doing much better than the "Tea Party"
candidate in that race (who some allege was put there by Democrats to take
votes away from Angle.)
Posted by Rick Hasen at 09:07 PM <http://electionlawblog.org/archives/017793.html>