Plan B Forum

Some are trying to lead me into believing Virgil Goode will be the Republican spoiler.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Goode

Any thoughts from the local pundits?

I had never heard of him before, but he sounds like an idiot. In which case, he could definitely be a contender for a certain portion of the Republican vote.

To qualify the "Some" they all have been Tea Partiers so far...

Scooter wrote:I had never heard of him before, but he sounds like an idiot. In which case, he could definitely be a contender for a certain portion of the Republican vote.

Scooter wrote:I had never heard of him before, but he sounds like an idiot. In which case, he could definitely be a contender for a certain portion of the Republican vote.

1/3 of the country thought that Bush was doing a good job after 8 years of complete failure. 100% of them are either Republicans or phony 'independents'. Like this whack,

yrs,
rubato

Well, let's take a little look-see here at Mr. Goode's "spoiler potential"....

The "Constitution Party" (The successor to Howard Philips' "US Taxpayer Party") ain't exactly been settin' the world on fire....

In 2008, they garnered a whopping 180,000 votes nation-wide, out of 123 million cast; to put this in perspective:

In the midst of all the hoopla and jubilation surrounding the historic win for President-elect Barack Obama comes some sobering numbers for third party presidential candidates, who took on issues the two major parties wouldn’t touch.

None of the leading third party candidates received even one percent of the approximately 123 million votes that were cast on Tuesday.

The largest third party vote total went to Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. With 99 percent of precincts reporting, he has received 672,000 votes, according to CNN, or 0.55 percent of the national vote.

Nader, whose aides told the Washington Post “he would not be surprised if he garnered 2 million,” exceeded his 2004 vote total of just below 500,000. But his 2008 vote total paled in comparison to the 2.7 million votes he received in his 2000 run, when he was widely derided as a “spoiler” for the Democrats.

In a statement on the Nader campaign’s website, the campaign wrote, “our hands are clean…we made the moral choice,” in reference to the hundreds of thousands of votes they received.

Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, received almost 500,000 votes in his first presidential run.

Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party candidate, won almost 180,000 votes, while the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney (http://votetruth08.com) garnered 145,000.

http://www.indypendent.org/2008/11/07/t ... y-results/

But Mr. Goode will have no where near as impressive a performance as that; in 2008, the Constitution Party was on 36 ballots:

2000 & 2004
The party achieved ballot access in 41 and 36 states respectively.

http://www.constitutionparty.com/press_kit.php

But as of June 5th of this year, they had only qualified for 17 ballots:

As of this newsletter, the Constitution Party is ballot qualified in the following 17 states: Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Efforts to get ballot qualification are going on in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Virginia.

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.c ... s-efforts/

If they only qualified on 17 ballots by June, because of deadlines, the odds are they're only going to qualify on 21 or 22 total at best.

So if there are folks in the Tea Party who think this Goode character is going to be a "spoiler" in this election, then all I can say is that while the Tea Party may hold many conservative positions, a prohibition against smoking crack must not be one of them....

This is a classic example of what happens when people who all think alike only allow themselves to be exposed to other people and "information" sources that reflect their insular views. They begin to believe that more people think the way they do than is actually the case because afterall, everybody they know thinks that way....*








*Keld, please feel free to share this post with your Tea Party friends. I'm always happy to help re-introduce folks back to the world of reality....

I think, though, that there a a few things in play that make that analysis a bit simplistic. I don't think the number of states a third party candidate runs in is as important as how many swing states he/she runs in, and in this case there are up to 10 in that combined list. Goode is polling 9% in Virginia, which if it holds (if he can get on the ballot there) will almost certainly be enough to keep that state in Obama's camp.

I don't know if Goode's campaign is going anywhere, but in this election more than any other there is a hardcore group of conservatives for whom Romney is not conservative enough, and who would think nothing of voting for a hard core conservative candidate out of what they consider principle, even if it meant throwing the election to Obama. The same people that nominated folks like Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell in races that were the GOP's for the taking should be clue enough that these people are just doctrinaire enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.

Thanks to all for the input...

Goode is polling 9% in Virginia,

Wow Scooter, that is shocking to me....

Okay, I finally found the poll...

I suppose it's an anomaly because the guy represented a district in Virgina, but it still seems high to me; however if by election day he were still able to pull say 2%, even that could be decisive...he won't be a factor anywhere else...

It's also not a done deal that he will be on the ballot in Virginia:

Va elections board seeks probe of ballot signatures for Constitution Party’s Virgil Goode

By Associated Press, Published: August 6

RICHMOND, Va. — The Virginia Board of Elections says it is seeking an investigation into ballot signatures involving the campaign of Constitution Party presidential candidate Virgil Goode.

The former six-term congressman from Rocky Mount is gathering signatures to appear on the ballot in his home state. He’s already on the ballot in more than a dozen other states.

The Board on Monday voted unanimously to ask Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to investigate “suspected petition fraud” on forms submitted by the Constitution Party in its efforts to gain ballot access for Goode.

A call to Goode’s campaign headquarters wasn’t immediately returned Monday night.

Goode was elected to Congress as a Democrat before becoming an independent and later a Republican. In 2007, he lost his seat to former Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va- ... story.html

The fact that the vote was unanimous means that the Democrats on the board had to vote for it too, which indicates to me that there could be something really blatant and serious here.