President

Mia Love wins GOP Primary. Becomes official nominee

Parker V 1 Comment

Via the Republican Security Council:

A STAR IS BORN: Mia Love won the Utah GOP state convention vote tonight with 70%. That means there will be no primary and she is now the official nominee to oppose Rep. Jim Matheson (D).

Because of redistricting, Matheson only represents 30% of the new 4th district. She is already defeating the incumbent in the polls, and this race is one of the top five national pickup opportunities for the GOP.

Love is the Mayor of Saratoga Springs and she soundly defeated former State Rep. Carl Wimmer who had an impressive campaign.

Wimmer had considerable support from libertarians, Sen. Mike Lee, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and numerous legislators. He was campaigning on a states’ rights theme.
Love has already won support from national GOP leaders. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the leading budget hawk all gave money to Love early in her campaign.

She is the daughter of Haitian immigrants and would be the only black Republican woman in Congress.

On her Facebook, Love posted:

I am so honored to be the Republican nominee for Utah’s 4th Congressional District. There are too many people to thank, but I will first mention my husband and kids. They’ve sacrificed a lot these recent weeks, and I could not do this without them. And much thanks to my team who’ve been prepping for this day for a long time. This is the beginning, and we are ready! Please, everyone, jump on board!

The impending Conservative Landslide?

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The math for this election appears to favor the GOP…

Obama can count on winning only the 10 states he won with more than 60% in 2008 — California, Hawaii, New York, Maryland, Delaware, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Illinois. Add the three Electoral College votes from the District of Columbia, and President Obama has only 146 Electoral College votes to Romney’s 392.

To these 10 “certain” Obama states, add four “blue” states that Obama won in 2008 with 56% to 57% of the vote — Washington, Maine, Oregon and New Jersey — and Obama’s electoral count edges up to only 186, barely half of the 352 Electoral College votes Romney will receive from the other 36 states where Obama received 57% or less of the vote in 2008. But even these four states aren’t guaranteed. All four of them have active and engaged local tea parties, and New Jersey has Chris Christie, the popular governor and big Romney backer.

The only hope Democrats have of narrowing the gap is to win the ground battle. In that effort they have several advantages over the tea party movement. Unions and left-wing organizations will spend millions of dollars to pay people to get out the vote this fall. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s get-out-the vote efforts will be laughably anemic.

Only the tea party has the enthusiasm and manpower to get out the vote for Mitt Romney, but it’s financed by the spare change found in the couches of local leaders. Nonetheless, as the critical role it played in the 2011 Republican takeover of the Virginia State Senate proved, the tea party is very effective.

The big question is whether wealthy conservative donors will wake up to face the political realities and help local and regional tea party groups finance get-out-the-vote efforts. To date, they have ignored the tea party, giving their donations instead to Washington-based organizations that are more interested in building their own brands than in building effective local get-out-the-vote capabilities.

If local grassroots activists are forced to finance their get-out-the-vote efforts from the spare change in their couches, Obama could pick up six additional states where he won between 54% and 57% of the vote in 2008 — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico. This would give Romney a solid, but not spectacular, 296-242 Electoral College victory.

But conservatives around the country should take heart because that’s an unlikely scenario. As we’re beginning to see, conservative donors are finally realizing that the scope of the conservative victory in November will be determined by the level of financial support they provide to local grassroots conservatives. They understand that when it comes to political return on investment, local tea party groups provide the biggest bang for the buck.

 

Romney/Huckabee 2012?

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Doug Wead boldly predicts in his Op-Ed for Conservative Actions Alerts, that Mitt Romney will choose Mike Huckabee for his Vice President:

Romney, if he has any chance of winning at all, will pick former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, as his running mate. Because Huckabee is a born again Christian who is vetted. Two very big factors. Now if Huckabee were only a woman and an African American there wouldn’t be any doubt about it. But the Romney campaign has been pretty stunning in its missteps. So there is no guarantee that it will pick Huckabee. People do stupid things. Especially Romney. And then, gas prices may climb to $8 a gallon and then he can pick whomever he wants.

Consider, 48% of the nation claims to be born again Christians. If even a fraction of them sit at home, the South, bulging with African American voters for Obama, will tilt to the Democrats. Huckabee can help Romney carry the South. And all of the other VP candidates will have surprises in the closet that will come out. Huckabee too had some of those surprises but they are old news. And they are manageable.

The first rule of choosing a VP is do yourself no harm.

Newt changes his mind on voting for any of his GOP rivals

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Newt Gingrich is taking an opportunity:

Newt Gingrich spoke up in defense of Mitt Romney Thursday night, insisting any Republican presidential candidate would be a better president than Barack Obama.

“I want to start with something Rick said tonight that I frankly was very surprised that he said and that I hope he’s taking back,” Gingrich told the Baton Rouge Tea Party event crowd referring to Rick Santorum’s comments earlier today.

But unlike this report claims, the new position is a flip flop:

“I may have some very substantial disagreements with Gov. Romney. There is no doubt in my mind that if the choice was Gov. Romney or Barack Obama, we would have no choice,” Gingrich said. “The danger of Obama is so great that I would hope that every candidate running – Ron Paul, Gov. Romney and Sen. Santorum – that we would all agree that whoever becomes the Republican nominee, we have one common goal and that is to defeat Barack Obama.”

While Gingrich finds faults with his GOP rivals, he has told crowds throughout his campaign that any of the other candidates are superior to the current president.

Not true. Previously Gingrich said he would nto vote for Ron Paul over Obama.

Santorum flip flops on whether Romney is a conservative

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In 2008, Rick Santorum said that if you wanted a conservative as the nominee of the Republican Party, “you must vote for Mitt Romney.” Now that Santorum is a competitor of Romneys for the 2012 nomination, he has flip flopped on Romney’s conservatism despite Romney being only more conservative than in 08.

Previously, Buzzfeed released 7 minutes of Santorum talking to Laura Ingraham about how conservative Mitt Romney is.

UPDATE: 2 days after this post, the Drudge report headlines with the link to the video above!

UPDATE: Rick Santorum not only supported liberal Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector (who later left the Republican party to become a Democrat and cast the deciding vote for Obamacare) for reelection to the United States senate when he faced a primary challenge from the conservative republican who currently holds Spectors former senate seat – but he also supported Arlen Spector for President in 1996.

“I was his colleague in the United States Senate. He asked me to stand with him. That certainly wasn’t one of my prouder moments I look back on. But look, you know, you work together as a team for the state of Pennsylvania,” said Santorum. “I certainly knew that Arlen Specter was going nowhere. I certainly disagreed with a lot of things that he said.”
Santorum, who is fiercely against abortion, appeared on stage with Specter in 1995, who was vocally pro-choice at the time.

“I want to take abortion out of politics … and leave moral issues such as abortion to the conscience of the individual. That is a matter to be decided by women, not by big government,” Specter said in 1995.

Santorum said his support for Specter hinged partially on Specter’s support for him when he was running for office in 1994.

Supporting Specter “was something I look back on and wish I hadn’t done,” Santorum said.

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With only 2 wins, calls intensify for Gingrich to drop out

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Jamie Weinstein says Gingrich is burning down the house:

Some have suggested that deep in his heart Gingrich fashions himself a modern Winston Churchill, called to lead his country at a critical moment in its history. But history — using Alabama and Mississippi as its surrogates — has spoken and it has declared that Newt is decidedly not Churchill and that he won’t be president. At least not President of the United States.

“As The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis pointed out while calling for Gingrich to drop out, ‘if [Gingrich] truly believes Mitt Romney is a ‘Massachusetts moderate’ masquerading as a conservative, then he owes it to Republican voters to give former Sen. Rick Santorum a clean shot at wresting the nomination from him.’

“Tuesday night, Gingrich took the burn down the house strategy in refusing to get out. If he can’t win, he’ll torpedo Santorum’s chance of winning and intentionally or unintentionally give the nomination to his nemesis, Mitt Romney. Perhaps upon further reflection, he will put his ego aside and do the right thing by allowing the final two serious candidates standing to battle it out for the GOP nomination.

Politico spins GOP primary attack fails on Romney as Romney “gotcha”s

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Politico claims the 2012 GOP Primary race to be a “gotcha”  campaign and Mitt Romney to be the “gotcha candidate”. Why? Because attacks levied against him in the debates have notably failed and backfired. Instead of noting these failures, however, Politico oddly blames/credits Romney for…knowing the substance behind the attacks against him as well as the weaknesses in the background of his opponents on the very issues they’re attacking him on.

Throughout the 20 GOP debates, Romney has been the candidate most prepared to take down his rivals’ records. When Rick Perry threatened, Romney delivered fatal blows to the governor’s immigration record.

In October, when Gingrich whacked Romney for the individual mandate at the core of his Massachusetts health-care law, Romney replied with a tart, “Actually, Newt, we got the idea of an individual mandate from you.”

And in Wednesday night’s CNN debate in Arizona, the Santorum offensive was thorough and concise. When Santorum mounted his most extensive health care attack of the night, a lengthy treatise of how the Massachusetts plan wouldn’t have been possible without federal funds, Romney cut him off at the knees with two words: “Arlen Specter.”

It was gotcha Romney at his best — using two words to force Santorum into a 262-word explanation that was, in the end, not helpful to his cause.

Santorum’s stumbling defense of his record in Thursday’s debate left Romney another opening he exploited at a tea party town hall here Thursday — he argued that Santorum is unprincipled, the very charge GOP opponents have now been throwing at Romney through two presidential cycles.

Traditionally the term “gotcha” is used to describe an unfair trap or meaningless distinction. Politico may be showing a little bias by applying a term that implies unfair tricks attempting to paint a person poorly in situations where all that is demonstrated is the failure of such unfair tricks to paint a person poorly.