Posted on 10/16/2007 6:42:21 PM PDT by Fargo Rock
LOWELL, Mass. --The widow of 1992 presidential candidate Paul Tsongas defeated the brother of an American Airlines pilot slain in the Sept. 11 terror attacks Tuesday in the special election to replace Democrat Martin Meehan in the U.S. House.
Democrat Niki Tsongas of Lowell edged Republican Jim Ogonowski of Dracut, whose brother John died when his plane was hijacked and flown in the World Trade Center. With 170 of 195 precincts reporting, she had 51 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Ogonowski.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Really, an embarrassing victory for Tsongas. Massachusetts is so overwhelmingly democrat. Excellent showing by our side.
Second place is still first loser.
What happened to Marty Meehan?
Good showing in a DemocRat state. She was so far ahead in the primary showing that he really did well.
Let MA have another liberal who will only do them more harm.
Way to look on the bright side there, Hoss. BTW, he was exactly your kind of RINO, and still came up short. Never, never works.
Damn. Well, it wasn’t a loss of a district. God bless the man who ran in a deep blue state against the socialist Democrat party apparatchiks.
But he tried which may not get points from you but it does from me.
Good on ya Jim.
UMASS for a few years and then the golden handshake, Marty is an expert at milking the trough.
Thanks. I should have known a liberal big government slime would end sucking off another big institutional teat.
Yes, overwhelmingly so, however, out of the big cities and their immediate burbs, in the the smaller cities and towns, Republicans often have a better showing.
She had all the big guns come out for her - Teddy Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, even Bill Clinton - and still just squeaked by.
It’s the Merrimack Valley, whada ya expect?
Now he's been stashed at UMass? Just a couple of more years before he wheels off to Boca Rotten, eh?
And this is news that Mass votes in a Democrat...?
The place is a hopeless toilet.
This is why Mitt’s candidacy is a lost cause. Any Republican who could be elected by that toilet stands zero chance nationally.
I think the news is that it was so close.
Personally, I detest this POS Tsongas. Liberal Marxist in the Hillary Clinton mode. I was really hoping Ogonowski was going to pull it off...
All I can say is woof.
Google image search ‘Niki Tsongas’
I hate to be doom and gloom, but what happened in Mass is going to be played out nation wide in 2008. Republicans are going to get the mother of all a$$ whippings.
However, it’s not going to stop me from voting a straight ticket.
She makes her Daddy look good.
But I’m afraid I expected nothing else. People who would re-elect Teddy Kennedy or Barney Frank are capable of electing just about anything to public office if it has a (D) after its name.
I feel for them like all captive Republicans in socialist states. Mitt is an anomaly, an error in the Massachusetts
DNA...
That was an outstanding effort for Ogonowski! I only wish I lived in his district so I could have voted for him.
Don't confuse MA with the rest of the country. It's been years since there was a Republican in the national delegation to Congress. The fact that Jim got at least 46% of the vote in a solid Democrat district is just amazing! Republican Presidential candidates only ever get about 37% of the vote here. We've only had Republican Governors because the liberals still want lower income taxes, unless of course if a black candidate is running, then they can assuage their white guilt, which they did when Deval Patrick was elected. They got just what they deserved, though, because he's a bungling fool.
The Republicans in the rest of the country can do very well, if they work hard at it.
“Don’t confuse MA with the rest of the country. It’s been years since there was a Republican in the national delegation to Congress. The fact that Jim got at least 46% of the vote in a solid Democrat district is just amazing! Republican Presidential candidates only ever get about 37% of the vote here. We’ve only had Republican Governors because the liberals still want lower income taxes, unless of course if a black candidate is running, then they can assuage their white guilt, which they did when Deval Patrick was elected. They got just what they deserved, though, because he’s a bungling fool.
The Republicans in the rest of the country can do very well, if they work hard at it.”
Republicans are cowards, they don't have the guts to get down and dirty like the Dims do.
I don't remember Ronald Reagan getting 'down and dirty', and they shoveled tons of carp about him for years. He was optimistic and upbeat, and had a vision for the type of government that wouldn't slow down the economy, and would let people run their own lives. That resonated well with the American people. Unfortunately, the Republicans haven't fielded someone with national stature like him since, but I'm thinking Fred can do it!
And the bright side is what? Tsongas won by 5 precentage points in a special election with a small turnout. On Democrat leaves, another enters. Life goes on.
BTW, he was exactly your kind of RINO, and still came up short. Never, never works.
Squishy on abortion, huh?
“But Tsongas’ support in Lowell and Lawrence was enough to earn her the seat.”
Hmmm, could promising freebies have anything to do with it?
I love how the Globe omits any mention of Jim’s 28-year service to the Air Force.
I was not surprised to hear that Tsongas won, but the surprise was that it was close. Real close. Kerry, Kennedy and Big Bill himself came to shill for her. She won because of Lowell, Lawerence, and the liberal enclave of Concord. All the towns in her district went strongly for Kerry in 04 - to have to rely on the 3 strongest and the big guns on a national level in order to pull this out shows that the Dems are vunerable. This should have been a safe seat and a walk in the park for them.
“This should have been a safe seat and a walk in the park for them.”
Maybe I should have said the glass is half full instead of half empty. Perhaps folks are waking up and taking notice and will do something in 08.
You forgot John (I served in VietNam) Kerry.
46 percent in MA? Not too shabby.
OK the dust is settled, the votes are counted, the turnout was less than half of what it was in 2006, and Tsongas still won by 5 points. When the rest of the Dems turn out a year from now watch for her vote totals to be in the 60 percent plus range, same has they've been for every Dem for the last few decades. Now, what is the bright side of all this?
Otherwise known as John F’n Kerry.
Immigration was a major issue, even in the People’s Republic of MA. The Reps should pay attention to this result and make illegal immigration the defining issue of the 2008 campaign. It cuts across partisan lines.
It hasn't gotten much attention outside of the Boston suburbs and truly hardcore political junkies. But there was a congressional election today. The topline is that the Democrat, Nikki Tsongas, wife of the late Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate Paul Tsongas, won. But the details are much more interesting. As of 10:23 PM, with 88% of precincts reporting, Tsongas has only 51% vs 45% for the Republican Jim Ogonowski.
That is weird. This is Massachusetts, after all, specifically the rim of suburbs to the northwest of Boston, Marty Meehan's (D) old seat, the 5th district. This is strong Democratic territory. At Openleft.com, Chris Bowers says it's a +10 Dem district. (By the way, among many other things, this is one of the best sites to get smart and candid analyses and number-crunches of stuff like this.) One of many eye-popping numbers about this race was that the Republican, Ogonowski, was crushing Tsongas among voters under 35.
So what happened? Bowers had an interesting post yesterday evening analyzing Tsongas' expected narrow victory. His basic verdict is that Tsongas was a lousy candidate, nominated largely on the basis of her husband's reputation, and picked by an "ossifying" local political machine that hadn't faced a real race in decades. But Chris isn't putting that forward just as an excuse; he notes that the same probably applies to the machines that run numerous solidly Dem districts around the country.
There's so much bad data out there for the Republicans today that I'm inclined to think that this is the issue -- a really good Republican candidate, a really bad Democratic candidate. But only fools spin excuses and rationales for data that doesn't square with their assumptions. So I'm not sure I'm ready to let go of this one yet.
And Iraq. I wonder what a strong Conservative's performance in such a district would've yielded. A liberal RINO vs. a raving moonbat with a chronic case of BDS ain't exactly much of a choice.
So Ogonowski was another Romney?
Well, you could congratulate me on my prediction that he would get about 45% of the vote. I know that bugs you my being right. ;-)
In Massachusetts? Probably a Tsongas win in the double digits. Conservatives and New England don't go well together.
Your prediction on his vote was offset by your prediction on her's. You get half a congratulations.
Seriously, regardless of how you want to define conservatism Massachusetts isn't ready for it and probably won't be in our lifetime. And we both know it. Just have to keep our hopes up in other areas.
Hmm, not exactly. I don’t think Og misrepresented himself, as Romney has consistently done, but we invested a bit heavily in a man that probably would’ve voted more like the Maine Twins or Chris Shays. It would’ve been a nice psychological boost, but not much more. As I posited to Non-Seq, I wonder if Og had run a go-for-the-jugular, no-holds-barred unapologetic Conservative (which, mind you, doesn’t mean pro-Bush, as we well know) candidacy, how would it have turned out ? I think there is a substantial number of voters in MA that don’t bother to participate in voting because between the far-left kooks and the squishy go-along to get-alongs, there is nothing that is worth turning out for. It’s not even a matter of getting everybody to agree with your positions, but making enough of an appeal to people disenchanted with politics in stating there NEEDS to be a change in Washington. Niki Ticks-on-ass is just another Pelosibot footsoldier, no change, just the same old crap.
I wrote more in #46. There’s really no harm in trying to get an idea. At this point, with an all-rodent delegation, there is literally nothing to lose.
Shays is such an awful RINO, almost anyone would be better. Romney could get nothing done in MA with the way the statehouse is(85% D) but that’s the only thing he gets a pass on.
I was not taking into account the other candidates. With the Constitution party candidate, that pushed the “right coalition” up to 47 or 48%. I don’t know enough about the other independents to see where they leaned. Her percentage I wasn’t particularly trying to guess, it was his I was trying to.
As with my arguments with respect to how damaging the RINO Govs of MA have been, it’s not a matter of somehow turning the state wholescale into a Reagan Republican one, but building up enough of a minority bloc/base of footsoldiers at the legislative level that can start to effect change for the better for the long run. After all, if the state could essentially move from being heavily GOP to fairly heavily Dem in a generation (from the ‘50s to the ‘70s), with hard work, we could surely start to chip away at a clearly overrepresented hyper-Dem majority. Of course, if we don’t bother to try, it’ll never happen. Right now, the change needs to happen from the grassroots up. We’re not ready to get, nor should we get, the Governorship until we’ve done something about the grassroots and ludicrously low number of members in lesser offices around the state.
Incredible to realize that Shays remains the last elected House Republican in the entire New England area. Of course, we still have 4 Republican Senators + Lieberman (whom was elected with GOP help). I think we’ll get a few seats back next year, although likely just in NH (possibly 1 in CT, the Nancy Johnson seat).
I checked to see when was the last time we held a majority of New England House seats, and it was 1956, you can see the decline since that period from 1953-on (and the overall number of seats have declined from 28 to 22):
2007- (1R/21D)
2003-2007 (5R/16D/1Prog) (22, 2003-
2001-2003 (5R/17D/1Prog)
1997-2001 (4R/18D/1Prog)
1993-1997 (8R/14D/1Prog) (23, 1993-2003)
1991-1993 (7R/16D/1Prog)
1989-1991 (10R/14D)
1987-1989 (9R/15D)
1985-1987 (10R/14D)
1983-1985 (8R/16D) (24, 1983-1993)
1981-1983 (9R/16D)
1979-1981 (7R/18D)
1975-1979 (8R/17D)
1973-1975 (10R/15D)
1971-1973 (9R/16D)
1969-1971 (10R/15D)
1967-1969 (9R/16D)
1965-1967 (8R/17D)
1963-1965 (11R/14D) (25, 1963-1983)
1961-1963 (14R/14D) *tied
1959-1961 (9R/19D)
1955-1959 (18R/10D) *last GOP majority in New England elected in 1956
1953-1955 (19R/9D) (28, 1953-1963)
By state: (*denotes a GOP majority delegation)
Connecticut
2007- (1R/4D)
2003-07 (*3R/2D)
2001-03 (3R/3D)
1997-2001 (2R/4D)
1985-97 (3R/3D)
1981-85 (2R/4D)
1979-81 (1R/5D)
1975-79 (2R/4D)
1973-75 (3R/3D)
1971-73 (2R/4D)
1970-71 (3R/3D)
1969-70 (2R/4D)
1967-69 (1R/5D)
1965-67 (0R/6D)
1963-65 (1R/5D)
1961-63 (2R/4D)
1959-61 (0R/6D)
1957-59 (*6R/0D)
1953-57 (*5R/1D)
Maine
1997-on (0R/2D)
1987-97 (1R/1D)
1975-87 (*2R/0D)
1973-75 (1R/1D)
1967-73 (0R/2D)
1965-67 (1R/1D)
1963-65 (*2R/0D)
1961-63 (*3R/0D)
1959-61 (1R/2D)
1957-59 (*2R/1D)
1937-57 (*3R/0D)
Massachusetts
1997-on (0R/10D)
1993-97 (2R/8D)
Spring 1991-93 (0R/11D)
1983-Spring 91 (1R/10D)
1975-83 (2R/10D)
1973-75 (3R/9D)
early 1969-73 (4R/8D)
1963-early 69 (5R/7D)
1959-63 (6R/8D)
1955-59 (7R/7D)
1953-55 (*8R/6D)
New Hampshire
2007- (0R/2D)
1995-2007 (*2R/0D)
1991-95 (1R/1D)
1985-91 (*2R/0D)
1975-85 (1R/1D)
1967-75 (*2R/0D)
1965-67 (1R/1D)
1939-65 (*2R/0D)
Rhode Island
1995-on (0R/2D)
1991-95 (1R/1D)
1989-91 (*2R/0D)
1981-89 (1R/1D)
1941-81 (0R/2D)
Vermont
2007- (1D)
1991-2007 (1 Prog)
1961-91 (*1R)
1959-61 (1D)
1933-59 (*1R)
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