Posted on 04/24/2012 7:42:19 PM PDT by P.O.E.
President of the United States
Republican Primary
Candidate Votes Percent
GINGRICH, NEWT (REP) 62,556 10.6%
ROMNEY, MITT (REP) 339,097 57.3%
PAUL, RON (REP) 77,897 13.2%
SANTORUM, RICK (REP) 112,061 18.9%
Democratic Primary
Candidate Votes Percent OBAMA, BARACK (DEM) 484,958 100.0%
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
United States Senator
Republican Primary
Candidate Votes Percent
CHRISTIAN, DAVID ALAN (REP) 54,691 9.8%
SCARINGI, MARC A. (REP) 40,834 7.4%
WELCH, STEVEN D. (REP) 114,296 20.6%
SMITH, TOM (REP) 231,013 41.6%
ROHRER, SAM (REP) 115,072 20.7%
Democratic Primary
Candidate Votes Percent
VODVARKA, JOSEPH JOHN (DEM) 108,888 20.2%
CASEY, JR, BOB (DEM) 429,419 79.8%
(Excerpt) Read more at electionreturns.state.pa.us ...
Santorum came in second, followed by Ron then Newt. Total votes for non-Romney close to for-Romney
Hope Romney's paying attention.
I went in about 7:30, I was the only one there. Can’t believe Romney got that much. Too many people just giving up.
No, not particularly. 57% for Willard, 43% for someone else. That really isn't particularly close.
True, but voters in PA still sent him a significantly-sized message.
Newt losing nearly 2-1 to a candidate not even in the race anymore.
Unfortunately I have to agree. That said however, when you combine the Obama voters, Romney has the ‘approval’ of barely 1/4 of the country.
That bodes well for no one.
Well, when your choice is Newt or Romney, there’s not much point in going to the polls.
Pity. This could have been an interesting night tonight. Congratulations to Santorum for picking up second place.
Combine that with a low turnout (apochryphal at this point - I haven’t seen hard data yet), and the electorate is exhibiting troubling symptoms.
Here’s the Pennsylvania breakdown:
Coal mine owner Tom Smith is the GOP nominee. I don’t know what he stands for, but he has a huge campaign treasury.
District 4: state Rep. Scott Perry won easily. Many conservative rooted for York Cnty. Commissioner Chris Reilly, who finished second place. Perry seems OK, though.
District 12: In an incumbent-vs.-incumbent race between Dems, Mark Critz narrowly defeated Jason Altmire with the help of Big Labor, who disliked Altmire’s opposition to ObamaCare and other Obama priorities. The general election could go either way.
District 17: Blue Dog incumbent Tim Holden was defeated by liberal Matt Cartwright, a high-ranking member of the Trial Lawyers Association who attacked Holden’s occasional dissent from his party’s progressive agenda. This is a safely ‘Rat district.
If people ever make the connection that this is the direct result of the GOP’s manipulation of the base, IE “the light goes on”, we could really see change we can believe in. The problem is that it’s more likely this was the last chance and most people have just decided to give up.
In a way I do not blame them. When your own turn on you, there’s no one but yourself left to believe in. When the history books are written in a couple hundred years (assuming humanity survives to write them) I am convinced that they will have a chapter on the merger between the Dems/GOP starting back in the 80s.
Reagan had plenty in his own party out to get him.
Congrats to Rick Santorum. Oh, to have you back....
I hate to say it, but Newt just can’t seem to cut the mustard. Even after pulling out of active campaigning, Rick Santorum got almost twice as many votes as Newt.
I’d be happy to see Newt pull ahead, but he just doesn’t seem to be doing it. And I will not vote for that scum Romney, under any circumstances. He is not quite as bad as Obama, but he comes too close for comfort.
True, but in the current situation VS Obama, he does have 25% favorables. At least that’s what the Penn numbers seem to indicate.
“Coal mine owner Tom Smith is the GOP nominee. I don’t know what he stands for, but he has a huge campaign treasury.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
Smith self-financed a barrage of TV ads and was on track to spend more than three times as much as his four rivals combined.
[Steven] Welch had been endorsed by Gov. Tom Corbett and the state GOP.
http://www.yorkdispatch.com/ci_20472559
At this point, the primaries should be considered a wash, and conservatives should seriously consider presidential politics outside of the GOP.
I’m worried that with this level of apathy, Obama’s minions will gin up his base (I’m thinking the Trayvon travesty is just a trial run) and win (thug tactics and voter fraud are their specialty).
I feel we need to keep conservative-leaning pressure up, and gin up the Silent Majority to step up to the plate and save us from certain fiscal, if not historical, collapse.
The most recent poll has Romney with 48% ‘approval’ nationally, Obama with 44%. Mixing percentages of totals from primaries is meaningless in the general election.
Eff'n lemmings doing what the MSM tells them.
Even in my red flyover county Mittens got 48%.....not from me.
Fun to see Welch lose and making Corbett look incompetent and weak for backing the worst GOP Senate candidate anywhere. This weird decision by Tom will cost him his reelection.
Fun to see that bald headed loser Tim Holden get thrown out.
Fun to see that lying, cheating POS Patrick Murphy get his @$$ handed to him. He was trying to rehabilitate his career. Luckily, it failed.
I can’t believe Rick came in second and he wasn’t even in it. I really thought Paul was going to be second. There are some die hard Paul people in PA.
Commissioner Chris Reilly had his hindmost parts handed to him for the second time in a congressional race (first time was in 2000 when he came in dead last).
He is a self described "conservative" but was part of a county government cabal that balanced the county general fund budget through overcharging the INS about 3:1 for housing immigration detainees at the county do-right.
He and his colleagues bragged so much about their little graft at Uncle Sam's expense that the federal auditors did what they were supposed to do and demanded repayment of much of the overcharges. Result: A substantial property tax increase.
CINO!
Glad to see him given the smackdown again.
Right now, Romney has about half the traditional Repub voters behind him. Thats what all the primaries show. Those are hard numbers, not polls.
That equates to 1/4 of the electorate when you consider Obama has half in a 50/50 Dem/GOP split. Even if Romney does get a hard 48% of the vote (unlikely but possible) half of those people simply voted to get rid of Obama, not that they truly want or like Romney/his ideas.
Ultimately, if he wins, he will have no dem support and half of his own voters only did so out of fear/disgust.
That is not a great platform on which to build anything but a disaster.
What we need is for conservatives - of all parties and none at all - to finally start figuring out that while we do have a two-party system, nothing says that it has to be the present two parties.
Once conservatives can start wrapping their heads around that truth, rather than just resigning themselves to the GOP-E candidate who is being scammed into the GOP nomination, we might actually see things happen.
I voted tonight about 5 pm. I was number 46 for the day. No one is enthusiastic.
Yup. that’s what I’m getting at. Even if he wins, he has no ‘real’ support. Dems don’t want him and half his own (supposedly) camp doesn’t want him.
The GOP hurt themselves beyond repair this time. When all the fear/drama passes, they will find themselves marooned on the bare desert island. The rest of us are clearcutting the place, building boats and sailing off into their sunset.
Manned a poll for my assemblyman for a couple hours in early afternoon....15 voters during the whole windy two hours. Barely a hundred all day for that district.
True. The biggest lie is that the GOP is eternal. Nor are the Dems. When you consider a 1950s dem is today’s rabid right wing Repub, and that 1 1950s Communist is the modern Democrat, it seems self evident.
I talked with the poll workers for awhile and they said that the primary was not well advertised and those that did vote were unenthusiastic. Even fatalistic. If Romney is the nominee America will die.
I would say that America HAS died already and as a result, Romney will be the nominee.
I won’t give up until Romney has 1144.
Øbama vs. Øbama-lite
Why choose the phony when you can have the raw deal?
I'm writing in Santorum, come what may.
He woulda won Pa. if he stayed in. The media/Romney team’s prediction of a loss for Rick was all hype.
Exactly. I don’t know if my state allows write-ins. We have new electronic machines and everyone hates them. We were told that “supplementary” ballots are seldom counted.
Every ballot category has a "write in" button on the touch screen. If you touch that a Q-W-E-R-T-Y keyboard apppears and you type the name. Voila!
I've used that feature in almost every election since we got them--I'm one of those mavericks, you know.
In all honesty DJ, I want to think that a miracle will happen and he will explode before the election. That the MSM will unload on him and drive him out, then someone will stand up and pull this off. I really hope that happens.
But I also think about that article that said Obama isn’t America’s problem, the problem is people would elect him. Same logic for Romney. When half of the traditional votership of the GOP is willing to elect a Romney, then the country I grew up in is no more.
I don’t like thinking that, but I logically do not see how that is not the case. There are so few of us left willing to stand on principle, that barring divine intervention, we are the last of a species. And the ideas that ‘were’ America will go down with us. I feel sorry for the ‘winners’.
Tom Smith has the money to run campaign ads statewide and potentially be competitive against Bob Casey, Jr., which is more than you can say about the others. He was probably our best bet in a weak field.
I don’t have much of an opinion on the redrawn PA-04; maybe Reilly was more conservative than Perry, but from what I’ve read about Perry he seems solid enough, and will definitely be a more consistently conservative vote than Todd Platts.
As for the Altmire-Critz showdown in the redrawn PA-12—wow! I didn’t think Critz would stand a chance; this primary seemed to me like the Buyer-Kern primary in IN in 2002, in which the freshman Kern got trounced by Buyer, but I guess that Altmire was too “moderate” for Big Labor. Critz’s victory gives the GOP nominee, Keith Rothfus (who came very close to beating Altmire in 2010), an excellent chance of winning the general in this GOP leaning CD, since Critz is unknown in the more populous Allegheny and Lawrence areas and what sells in Johnstown won’t work in the central and western parts of the district.
In the PA-17, I would not have believed the result had I not read a column this morning predicting Holden’s defeat. Serves Holden right for staying a Democrat as the party kept going further left; had he switched to the GOP back in 2004 or so, he would still be in Congress (and Republicans could have packed even more Democrats into the PA-17 by taking out Schuylkill County and putting in Dem parts of Allentown and Bethlehem).
I take it that Tim Murphy won handily over his young conservative challenger (Feinberg?) in PA-18. I don’t think that Murphy is that bad, but that wasn’t exactly a victory for conservatism.
In summary, the GOP now has a good chance of ending up with a 13-5 GOP House delegation (two years ago, the Dems held a 12-7 edge, meaning we would have gained 6 seats and the Dems would have lost 7). And the Senate race is an uphill, but not impossible, battle for Tom” mSmith.
Glad to hear that Patrick Murphy lost; betcha he wishes he had run against Fitzpatrick in PA-08 instead.
There’s been articles recently that Obama won through fraud and deceit. And a lot of Russian money. I honestly don’t think Obama won. That said, he has powerful backers. I don’t think they are going to give up power.
The good news we got a decent candidate in the Senate race.
We have paper ballots. You fill in the circle and then feed them into a machine that reads them.
Tim Holden is my congressman and Schuylkill County is my home area. The district was a Republican district that Holden kept winning (he’s popular in my county). Matt Cartwright is much more liberal. I can see him losing Schuylkill but it’s an uphill battle though since it has been redistricted into a Democratic district.
I hear you. PA is an expensive state to run in. Rick ran out of money and there is nothing you can do about that. Many a good campaign ends because the cash runs out. The 800 lb gorilla Milt was tough to go against on a shoestring budget this cycle. He has a very fat wallet.
Personally I’m a believer in Ulsterman’s Insider. Whether he’s a real person or a collaboration I don’t know. But he has been VERY accurate. And he says that we are going to get a race war from the Obama camp to keep that power. He said so long before Martin/Zimmermann.
No, I don’t think he will go willingly...or more aptly, the people pulling his strings will not go willingly. But since Soros says there is no difference between O and R, they keep their power either way anyway.
Corbett really embarrassed himself.
It's time for bed my friend. See you around. :-)
I disagree, no one will care about this Senate primary in 2014. That certainly won't be the thing that breaks the long streak of PA Governors winning reelection.
Welch of course is the idiot who voted for Obama (only in the primary he says) it's beyond me why anyone thought he was a good coice. The winner, Smith, himself was a rat until 2011 (yes just a year ago he was still voting in the rat primary), allegedly a conservative rat. Now he's "tea party", if he spends enough of his own money he may have a chance at an upset in November. Dick Morris loves him.
The moonbat Critz beating Altmire is good news, he'll be easier to beat in this new GOP-leaning district, most of which is new to him. The Republican is Keith Rothfus who narrowly lost to Altmire in 2010.
Holden losing to a moonbat is bad news but oh well, it's a new safe rat seat that was mostly new to him, he was clobbered outside his home base.
Given what PA freepers said about Scott Perry I'm surprised he won so easily. I haven't heard anything bad just "meh".
This is funny, former rat Congressman Patrick Murphy lost the rat primary for Attorney General to a self-funding former prosecutor. Unlike most states AG spots which lean rat, Republicans have won the office every time since it's been an elected position (1980). Hopefully that continues.
And in the POTUS primary, Santorum still came in second even after quiting and Paul came in third. So much for Gingrich "making noise". He also placed behind Paul in NY, CT and RI. He did come in an extremely distant second in his "targeted" state of a Delaware, this brings his number of second place finishes to a hearty 5 to go along with 2 wins. Maybe you should protest vote for Paul in Indiana, Clintonfatigued. Who did you vote for CampaignPete?
I too will probably vote Romney in the (desperate) hope he’s been playing rope-a-dope this whole time.
If I’m lucky enough to be right, he’ll be to the right of Reagan.
If (as is almost certain) I’m wrong, we’re done as a nation regardless who wins. And then I’ll move to the Free States of Texas et al.
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