Tuesday made me believe November will be the last gasp for the teabag movement

Our primary was Tuesday. The teabaggers came out in force and stomped incumbents and non-teabag challengers to the ground. OMG! It's a tea party revolution! They'll be here forever!

Except that they won't. The TOTAL turnout in the Idaho primary was only 27 percent, and some of the teabaggers won by real thin--five or six percent--margins.

My thinking on this: The tea party people probably came out en masse. They claim to be real politically active, so you can bet a great majority of them showed up at the polls. I don't think they all came out, but it's probably close to 85 percent of the total teabag population. The people they put on the ballot are some real nutcases--one of them brags about authoring a bill that will cause the state to mint one-ounce silver medallions from Idaho-mined silver (which will make us a lot of money), and for those medallions to be valid for the payment of taxes. In the bill it cites the paragraph in the Constitution which prohibits states from accepting anything but gold or silver coinage as payment for debt but misses the part two commas ahead of it that prohibits states from coining their own money.

Truth be told, most people--not just in Idaho, but anywhere--are not that extreme. Right now, a political column in the Spokesman-Review (I don't remember it being in the Press, and I would have seen it) lists Idaho as "leans Democratic." If the Teabaggers drive Idaho leftward--say, putting a Democrat in the ID-2 seat--the national Republican Party will work overtime to kill the tea movement.

Right now? I think we'll lose no more than five seats in the House, lose maybe one in the Senate, and, depending on the viciousness of the teabaggers, may gain some.

Republican candidate - Simmons - not a right wing crank, bails on the race in favor of a self-financed bazillionaire who is the wife of the guy who brings the world professional wrestling.

Independents won't go for that At. All.

I was in polling for 10 years. That's just the way it feels on my skin.

I do not see the Democrats making any net gains.

The fact is they don't need to have anywhere near a majority to have an effect. In 1775 probably less than a quarter of the colonists were actively supporting the revolution but it won.

Right. That's a good analogy. :sarcasm:

When you put it that way I guess.

I am just trying to point out that you do not need a majority to have a big impact.

believe everything any politician tells them, so any lying Republican can and does get elected because no one will dig up the dirt on them and what they really stand for. They have told people that social programs are baaad and only bootstrap pulling is the honest way to survive and they do it while they are making sure corporate welfare is alive and well. Crapo was my Senator back then and that was more than ten years ago. Why is he still there? He's nothing more than a logging and mining shill. You'd think people would have figured him out by now.

Edited for error.

Mike Jorgenson is his name, and he's hideous. He is so bad the president of the state senate mailed a letter to every resident of his district, "please send someone else to the Senate next term, we can't work with this man." We did; he's going away. Yes, we're sending another Republican down there, but we're not going to send one who stands up and says "the federal government is always the last solution to any problem--but we've gotta run all the illegal immigrants off, and the solution to that problem is to force every Idaho employer to run new hires through e-verify." (Which is operated by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration--two offices of the last solution to every problem.)

Yeah, the only thing the man did the last two years was scream about illegal immigration. He didn't do a damn thing to help Kootenai County, which has no agriculture hence has no illegal immigrants.

I lived there for five years and I never asked him what his immigration status was. lol.

... and hilarious at the same time.

Good one SR.

I DO find it hard to believe that in 2010 even the VOTING public would be so stupid as to support turning our country back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But I've been wrong before.

Since it's a mid-term election it will STILL devolve to turnout. I'm voting, but then I vote most of the time in mid-terms. I sure hope a lot of those new Obama voters from 2008 decide to get out and do it again.

was a poll I saw the other day where Jim DeMint in SC was only like 7 points over a relatively unknown Dem in SC. The Dem had never ran a statewide election and he was STILL that close to Mr. Teabagger with 6 months to go. IN SOUTH CAROLINA, YET!

The loonier, the better. They'll turn sane voters away in droves.

on June 16th! They're a rising force, and there will be a RED tsunami in November!

:eyes:
rocktivity