Apparently NH was a waste of time for conservatives. It’s gone socialist like the rest of yankeeland. Sad for resident conservatives who have deal with this daily.
“Apparently NH was a waste of time for conservatives. It’s gone socialist like the rest of yankeeland. Sad for resident conservatives who have deal with this daily.”
NH is still far more conservative than the rest of New England, and moved sharply back toward the right in 2010.
The biggest problem is the open-in-all-but-name primary. Liberals vote in the Republican primary in droves, particularly in a year like this one when the Democratic primary is a rubber stamp for a single candidate.
In NH, you can register as an “unaffiliated” voter. When you arrive to vote, they ask if you want a Republican or Democratic ballot. You’re automatically registered in whichever party you choose, and you cast your ballot. There’s a table by the exit where you can fill out the form to DROP the party affiliation you gained 3 minutes before, so you’ll be able to repeat the trick in the next primary.
Unaffiliated voters are VERY common in here in NH. I would guess that about 1/3 of Romney’s votes yesterday were unaffiliated liberals and Rats. They won’t be voting for him in November.
These rules are controlled by state law, not by the state parties. The Republicans have big majorities in the legislature, so they COULD fix the law if they managed to override the Rat governor’s veto. But this problem doesn’t seem to be high on their list.
We have a lot of work to do at the local level in NH Republican politics. It’s dominated by mushy RINOs who fell in line behind Mittens this year.
The right thing for the national Republican party to do is reduce the delegate count for NH to something even smaller and less significant than it is now. It wouldn’t solve the problem of the media over-hyping NH elections, but it would make the skewed election results matter less.