That NY 26 Election Wasn't About Medicare At All

If I was the Democrats I wouldn't be doing a victory dance today over the results of the special election in the New York 26th congressional district. After looking at the results of the election one fact was abundantly clear. Republicans stayed home.

At the very beginning of this campaign there was a lot of disgust expressed by the rank and file Republican voter over the choice made by the New York political establishment of the Republicans choice to carry the banner.

Let's look at the numbers. In 2010, in the election won by the Republican Lee he received 151,449 votes. In this special election the Republican establishment candidate received only 43,836.

On the Democrat side of the ledger in 2010 their candidate got 54,307 and in the special election won by Hochul she received 48,530.

The Democrat totals were very close in both elections while the Republican turnout was only a third of that cast in 2010. If I was a member of the powers that be in the New York Republican Party I might want to start listening to what the folks in the district are saying they want for a candidate. If the Republicans had voted in this special election in the same numbers they did in 2010, the few thousand votes siphoned off by the third party candidate wouldn't have mattered.

As far as all the pundits who have come out and proclaimed that this was a referendum of Medicare they are full of it. That is what the Democrats want to blame it on as they flounder around looking for an issue they can use as a rallying cry for the upcoming 2012 elections, since they need to get as far away from their record as possible and their culture of failure. The Republicans need to quit letting the Democrats and their myrmidons in the media continue to dictate what the terms of the issues will be and start staking out positions in line with their convictions. Already today I have heard Republicans playing into their hands and issuing comments on the role the Medicare debate played in the special election, which makes them less astute then the average American who realizes that the issues of today are jobs, economy, and energy.