Live results tonight on Kentucky Governor’s race at @AOSHQDD.

Found here. Fair warning: I dunno if Matt Bevin’s gonna pull this one out. Kentucky is one of the few places left in the South where the Democratic party still survives and the polling has been ever-so-slightly favoring Jack Conway. Guess we’ll see…

Who *will* we get as a nominee for 2016?

I understand Allahpundit’s concern, here:

Nominate a guy like [Ted] Cruz and he can spend the entire campaign pandering to the middle since conservatives feel 100 percent sure he’ll govern as a conservative in office. Obama benefited from the same logic on the left six years ago: He could reassure Rick Warren and evangelicals that he believed in traditional marriage with nary a peep from his progressive base because none of them thought he was serious. He was a loud and proud liberal, no matter he said in his attempt to get elected. He’d support gay marriage later even if he couldn’t support it sooner. Cruz will have that same advantage from the right. Will anyone else have it, though? Even conservative candidates like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, I think, might feel pressure to out-Cruz Cruz in the primaries by tacking further right than they’d prefer. I’m not sure anyone except him is above suspicion by grassroots righties.

…but he’s forgetting one important mitigating factor.  There are, in fact, two ways to reassure the conservative base that Candidate X is reliable: Continue reading Who *will* we get as a nominee for 2016?

This is actually a pretty good look at next year’s most vulnerable governors.

NPR didn’t do anything too sneaky-like, here. The list is balanced: Malloy in CT & Quinn in IL for the Democrats; Corbett in PA, LePage in ME, and Scott in FL for the Republicans.  It’s also pretty realistic; once you get past these guys the probabilities start going way down… with one caveat.  That would be Lincoln Chafee, in RI.  The guy may not even make it out of the Democratic primary alive (yup, he switched parties); and if he does Chafee’s numbers in a three-way race are awful.  They’re so bad, in fact, that this might be why NPR left him off of the list: this was a list of vulnerable Governors, not dead men walking.

Or maybe it’s just that NPR has its little ways, after all.  Or must have its private victories…

Moe Lane

PS: For some reason, I was under the impression that Charlie Crist had actually declared that he was running for Governor of FL on the Democratic ticket.  This has not actually happened yet, though; and I wonder why that is. And whether he’s getting a certain amount of resistance to the notion, behind the scenes.

#rsrh Democratic party shocked to discover actions have consequences.

That’s the only explanation that I can come up for this HuffPo article complaining that the Democrats are going to have between zero and one female governors in their ranks starting next January – with zero being the somewhat more likely number. Bless their hearts, but what did they expect? While Republicans will – admittedly, somewhat reluctantlly – grit their teeth and ignore a pro-choice candidate in states where the party has to take what it can get, the Democrats are getting pretty adamant that their statewide candidates not be pro-life. Particularly the female ones. Couple that with a general tendency for the Democratic party to want to reserve the good political jobs for white males and you can easily get this general result.

Personally, I think that it’s a pity that the Activist Left largely cannot conceive of a feminist also being pro-life, but it’s a sort of detached pity; after all, the end result skews in my side’s favor.