Not With a Bag

Bagger candidate Chris McDaniel is refusing to concede to incumbent Thad Cochran, who narrowly won the Senate primary in Mississippi yesterday. McDaniel supporters are considering legal challenges to the election as well as a write-in campaign.

I don’t think we know for certain that Democrats voting in the Republican primary (which is legal in Mississippi, as long as they hadn’t voted in the Dem primary) gave Cochran the victory, although many appear to assume it did. If it did, we may learn that African Americans were incentivized to vote more by news of teabagger poll watchers than any love for Cochran. One suspects such voters will abandon Cochran in November.

Conservative public intellectuals such as Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson have sads. Palin asks why there is a Republican Party at all, if Cochran could win an election by acting “like a Democrat.” Studmuffin Erickson writes,

… this becomes a longer term problem for the Republican Party. Its core activists hate its leadership more and more. But its leadership are dependent more and more on large check writers to keep their power. Those large check writers are further and further removed from the interests of both the base of the party and Main Street. So to keep power, the GOP focuses more and more on a smaller and smaller band of puppeteers to keep their marionettes upright. At some point there will be more people with knives out to cut the strings than there will be puppeteers with checkbooks. And at some point those people with knives become more intent on cutting the strings than taking the place of the marionettes.

Wow, you might assume Erick Son of Erick was a big supporter of campaign finance reform. I suspect you’d be wrong, though. He continues,

Unfortunately for the Republican Party the fight continues. And as grassroots activists feel further and further removed and alienated from the party, it will become harder and harder to win. The slaughter the GOP will inflict on the Democrats in November will be a bandaid of built in momentum. When the GOP inevitably caves on repealing Obamacare, opting instead to reform it in favor of their donors’ interests, we may just see an irreparable split. Then, and even worse, if party leaders and party base voters cannot reconcile themselves to a common candidate in 2016, God help us.

I continue to oppose a third party. I’m just not sure what the Republican Party really stands for any more other than telling Obama no and telling our own corporate interests yes. That’s not much of a platform.

That last paragraph is likely to earn Erickson a visit from Men in Black to persuade him that what he really saw was the planet Venus.

See also an explanation of what the hell is the difference between the baggers and the GOP, considering their stated positions line up pretty neatly. Also, too, Dave Weigel.