Our best hope is a badly divided rat field that allows the exactly 2 Republicans who run to place first and second.
either that or get one conservative “democrat” and get him into 2nd place behind the liberal. if the first strategy becomes an impossibility.
The problem is that it is a chess game where each piece decides how to move itself. There are no sacrifices in such a game. Sacrifice a pawn to win a rook? No, says the pawn.
“Our best hope is a badly divided rat field that allows the exactly 2 Republicans who run to place first and second.”
________________
That’s exactly right. We need two—not less and not more—Republicans to riun in the jungle primary; the RATs won’t be able to keep four or five liberals from running, and if they’re all reasonably well known they should get around 15% each (give or take a couple of points) and permit two Republicans to finish 1-2 with 18%-20% each. That’s how the GOP won the CA-31 in 2012, in a district not that much less Democrat than the state as a whole. And had a third Republican not run in 2014 in CA-31 the GOP would have placed both candidates in the general election once again: the Republican spoiler got 3.4%, and had his votes been split among theother two Republican candidate in the same proportion as such candidates got overall, the Republican who finished third with 16.5% (Gooch)!would have gotten 17.8% and beaten out Democrat Aguilar (who got 17.4%) for second place (Republican Paul Chabot finished first with 26.8%, and would have gotten around 28.9% had the third Republican not run).
The hard part is convincing two decent candidates to run for the Senate and not campaign against each other in the primary, and to discourage additional Republicans from running.