Centerfield

Winning seats for either party looks to depend on resisting the inclination to give victory in the primary to less moderate candidates. (Certainly that's how Republicans here in California have contrived to avoid winning state-wide elections for the past couple of decades.)

Even granted a lot of gerrymandered "safe" seats, if you get candidates far enough from the center you can lose to a moderate from the other party. As this election in Illinois showed. My own Congressional district, is supposed to be a safe Republican seat. But last time, a moderate Democrat beat out a more extreme (not to mention corrupt) Republican. Can he hold it? Well, the Republicans appear to be putting a lot of money into attack ads already -- and the primary isn't until June. Which I take to mean that they are hopeful, but certainly not confident, about taking it back.

The question for those who want their party to win is: How do we convince the true believers that if they go for extreme conservatives (or extreme liberals), they are libiable to get someone who is further from their beliefs than if they nominated a moderate? For that matter, how to bring them to see that their personal beliefs, no matter how staunchly held, are not moderate? Certainly denouncing RINOs and DINOs isn't the path to victory.

Works the same way here in Kansas. Why an apparently solid "red" state keeps electing Dems to state wide offices. The far right pushes through a fire-breathing "social conservative" in the primaries, who loses 2-1 against a Dem moderate in the general. When a GOP moderate gets through the primary, they win hands-down.

What is fascinating to me is that it keeps happening, but the far right somehow manages to convince themselves that the population actually agrees with them. And that if the party would just nominate a someone who was more conservative, they would win. Even though experience demonstrates that it never works that way.

I suspect that it would work the same way for Democrats here. Except that when their far left candidates come up against farther right Republicans candidates, they manage to get elected anyway. The only way that we got a RepUblican Governor is that we had a free-for-all election to replace a recalled (Democratic) governor -- so Arnold didn't have to get thru a Republican primary first. And when he's come up against a (liberal) Democrat for re-election, he won relatively easy.

It does work the same way for Dems they're just mostly on the winning side of the pendulum at the moment. Let the MoveOn wing gain control and you'll see the House majority dwindle as the Blue Dog types get massacred by their own party. Reference Joe Leiberman....

I've written quite a bit about this effect, and it's at the core of the Dem's internal cannibalistic tendencies, not just the GOP's.

...yeah, it was our turn in '02, IMHO. And thus we left a President unchecked who could've used a little congressional checking, as I see it.