p.s. to clarify my prior post, they have 28 days from the election to certify the vote--not 28 more days.
Posted on 02/16/2008 2:59:44 PM PST by mdittmar
Moderate GOP wing flexes its voting muscle
SACRAMENTO - By now, anyone who cares knows that Arizona Sen. John McCain smashed his rivals in California's presidential primary Feb. 5. But almost no one foresaw the scope of McCain's win, which was nearly total.
The Golden State primary was open only to registered Republicans and as such was expected to skew to the right of the political spectrum. Yet the more moderate McCain, who is loathed by large sections of the GOP, swept the field in all but three counties: Fresno, Shasta and Sierra.
McCain easily carried San Joaquin, Calaveras, Stanislaus and Amador counties.
One big takeaway from the race is that the self-identified moderate wing of the party showed its strength. So what happened to the conservatives? Voters, experts and party activists point to a host of reasons.
Some point to the fact that 53.2 percent of the GOP vote went to a candidate who was neither McCain nor fellow GOP moderate Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has since endorsed McCain, captured 34 percent of the vote alone.
California's absentee voting system was another reason: Thousands of voters cast ballots for conservatives like Southern California Rep. Duncan Hunter or former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson before they dropped out of the contest.
Manteca Republican activist Frank Aquila said many of his fellow conservatives weren't overly thrilled with any of their choices, so they wandered from candidate to candidate searching for the right person to support.
"Right from the beginning, I liked Duncan Hunter," Aquila said. "But Duncan Hunter never got any traction." Aquila then went over to Thompson, then Giuliani before voting for Romney. "I was all over the place."
Valley Springs voter Barbara Niemann also voted for Romney because she viewed him as far more of a genuine Republican than McCain, whose views on immigration and President Bush's tax cuts - McCain does not want to make them permanent - make him hard to swallow.
"I'm having a real difficult time with that right now," Niemann said, adding that she's unsure whether she can vote for McCain in the fall. For his part, Aquila says he will get behind McCain.
Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, said many self-identified conservatives were like Aquila, wandering from candidate to candidate, while self-identified moderates were solidly behind McCain all the way.
"His big lead among these voters was more than enough to offset the deficits he had among the strong conservatives," DiCamillo said.
Another factor entered the equation as well: McCain's resounding victory in the GOP-only Florida primary just days before Super Tuesday. That win received a great deal of media attention and catapulted McCain into front-runner status.
"McCain had a tremendous amount of momentum coming out of Florida," said California Republican Party chief Ron Nehring. "It made a big difference."
Nehring said with so many states in play on Super Tuesday, media exposure played an unusually large role in making up voters' minds. When McCain became the "most electable" candidate in news accounts, an unsure GOP electorate backed him.
That damaged Romney's effort everywhere, including the San Joaquin Valley, where he had been expected to fare well.
Carl Fogliani, a Stockton Republican who works for Assemblyman Greg Aghazarian, R-Stockton, moonlighted as Romney's lead organizer in the Valley. He said the effect Nehring described was significant.
"We had to compete with that, and I know we lost some votes because of it," Fogliani said.
Jon Fleischman, an officer in the state GOP who runs the conservative Web site the Flash Report, suspected that the strategic voting Fogliani described was widespread. "Everyone is freaked out at the possibility of Hillary (Clinton) becoming president.
"People ended up voting for McCain because, for whatever reason, they thought he'd be the best person to beat her."
WAY too rigged to be an honest vote.
Oh, they started early, first Rick Santorum, then George Allen, taking out to excellent players very quickly in the game. One by storming against the potential upset of a long-standing RINO (Arlen Specter should have been retired LONG ago), and the other by making a huge to-do about a slur that was not even an identifiable slur, until it was built into one. What is “macaca”, anyway?
News from the state that elected a Dimocrat masquerading as a Republican as Governator...
It is called incompetent. Whoever ran Myth’s campaign in CA should be brutalized. All that money and winning only 3 CDS. Myth was setup.
Unfortunately, bad as McCain is, the alternatives were not great either. Huckabee is a snakeoil salesman. Ron Paul diluted the vote. Many absentee ballots, as the article notes, were wasted on conservatives who had dropped out.
And people voted for the other still-standing candidate, Mitt Romney, because he was “Not McCain.” Understandably, that wasn’t enough to put him over the top. Who could get enthusiastic about Not-quite-as-bad-as-McCain?
If God had intended me to vote, he would have given me a candidate.
Republicans in California, like in Washington state, tend to be more liberal. Being from Wyoming, a Democrat in Wyoming is usually more conservative than a Republican from Washington. That is why when Wyoming has a Democratic governor it is no big deal, they are actually pretty conservative, comparatively.
Republicans in Washington State don’t tend to be more liberal,we tend to be out numbered.
{It is called incompetent. Whoever ran Myth’s campaign in CA should be brutalized. All that money and winning only 3 CDS. Myth was setup.}
In Florida, I thought the same thing, and so I investigated who was producing all those mediocre TV spots for Mitt and I found: Wikipedia Alex Castellanos - Alex Castellanos is a U.S. Republican Party political media consultant currently advising Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign,[1][2] although Castellanos allegedly has also met with potential Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson.[3][4][5]
Romney work
In late February 2007, the Boston Globe obtained a leaked copy of an internal Romney campaign document describing the campaign’s plan to achieve the Republican nomination.[1] That document, produced by Castellanos, drew attention by implying the campaign’s poor view of the sitting president.[2] Specifically, the document advised that that Romney should create distance between himself and President George W. Bush by focusing on the separating factor of “intelligence.”
This guy is a first class a**clown. I told the campaign as much and begged them to boot him off the payroll.
The attack line on Romney that killed him was: Mitt is a millionaire phony who is just trying to buy the election...”
So how did his campaign geniuses try to counter that? By buying more media spots. The number an mediocrity of same just re-inforced to the public that Mitt is trying to buy the election.
Factoids (as of data published last night):
• There are 53 Congressional Districts, with 3 delegates assigned to each.
• There are approximately 800,000 ballots still not counted in California.
• McCain leads in 49 CDs; Romney in 4.
• Less than 4,000 votes separate McCain from Romney in 31 of the 53 districts.
• McCain won handily in the liberal bastions like San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, etc.
• There were 5,229,425 registered Republicans eligible to vote on Feb 5th. As of last count, 2,660,949 Republicans voted on Feb 5th. In other words, 51% of Republicans did not vote.
• As of last count, 1,120,470 Republicans voted for John McCain. In other words, 79% of Republicans did NOT vote for John McCain.
• There were 15,712,753 Californians eligible to vote on Feb 5th. 7.1% of those voted for John McCain. 92.9% of Californians did NOT vote for John McCain.
We agree,come on over;)
Here is how the Republican primary vote went on a Statewide basis:
President Republican 100.% ( 23109 of 23109 ) precincts
reporting as of Feb 16, 2008, at 3:46 p.m.
County Returns Other Contests
Statewide Results
View Map
Candidate Votes Percent
Mike Huckabee (Rep) 305,440 11.5 %
Duncan Hunter (Rep) 13,261 0.5 %
Alan Keyes (Rep) 10,594 0.3 %
Sam Brownback (Rep) 2,253 0.0 %
John H. Cox (Rep) 2,902 0.1 %
Rudy Giuliani (Rep) 121,773 4.6 %
John McCain (Rep) 1,120,470 42.2 %
Ron Paul (Rep) 112,552 4.3 %
Mitt Romney (Rep) 920,498 34.6 %
Tom Tancredo (Rep) 3,593 0.1 %
Fred Thompson (Rep) 47,613 1.8 %
http://vote.ss.ca.gov/Returns/pres/rep/59.htm
I went to high school with macaca!
Yea it was a stupid thing but he should have known that macaca would cost him northern va.
With 800,000 votes still not counted, you would think that the vote split between McCain and Romney or 42% vs 34% would still hold up...Still if only 4000 votes separate the two in 31 counties those votes should still be counted..Have the vote totals been Certified by the State yet ?
They’re still counting.
They have 28 days to finish counting and to certify.
p.s. to clarify my prior post, they have 28 days from the election to certify the vote--not 28 more days.
Shaw, and some Republicans on this thread, attribute the low margin to absentee ballots cast for drop outs. My Guess is that these voters, given the facts, would have shifted to another not-McCain candidate.
For some reason, I just can't remember this CONgressional District "winner take all" in the Presidential Primaries in CA ever before. I musta been totally asleep!!! (I guess I shouldn't exhibit my ignorance like this!)
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