Election News

Several recent politcal races are in the news this week. First, in Ohio, the race for the Congressional seat formerly held for 12 years by Bob Portman (now U.S. trade rep) was won by former state Congresswoman Jean Schmidt. This was a nationally-followed race because Schmidt's opponent was an Iraq veteran, the first to seek national office after service in the war there. He was basically a one-issue candidate - look at me, I'm a veteran - but he put up an honorable fight and has given the GOP some food for thought based on his performance and the overall voter turnout.

However, as Michael Barone points out in his blog at US News.com:

But the Democrats' shrewdest political strategists know that partisan
swings in special elections are not usually replicated in the next general
election. Special elections usually run against the party that holds the
presidential office, for structural reasons. Voters in special elections know
that their vote will not change party control of the House. Republican-leaning
voters who are discontented with their party's leadership for any reason can
vote for a Democratic candidate serene in the knowledge that Republicans will
still have a majority in the House. Shrewd opposition party candidates will try
to aggregate discontented voters and will sometimes win. That seems to be what
Paul Hackett did in the 2nd District.

Consider another special election in a similar district, the 4th
District of Ohio, in 1981, Ronald Reagan's first year in the presidency. The
Republican incumbent died, and Democrat Dale Locker won 49.8 percent of the vote
to Republican Mike Oxley's 50.2 percent in a district in which Reagan had won 64
percent of the vote. But this was not a harbinger of the 1982 results. In that
year Republicans did lose 26 seats, but most of those losses, by my
calculations, were the result of redistricting, and Republicans lost no
districts as heavily Republican as the Ohio 4th. Oxley has been re-elected by
wide margins and is currently serving his third and, because of Republican term
limits, probably his final term as chairman of the Financial Services Committee.
So the Ohio 2nd result probably is not a harbinger of a Republican bloodbath in
2006.

In other news, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has finished SECOND in a 12-person runoff for the top job in the Motor City. This is the same guy that racks up hundreds of thousands of dollars in suspicious charges on his city-issued credit card and gave his wife a city-owned luxury SUV. Does anyone really wonder why people have moved out of Detroit in droves?

There's only one possible solution to Detroit's problems:

ROBOCOP.