Greene Wins SC Primary:
Alvin Greene is one audacious candidate, no matter how you slice it. Also, either South Carolina Democrats are really stupid or Vic Rawls is one hated politician/ asshole to lose to an unknown by 18%. I've written in Mickey Mouse or voted for a relative unknown when I didn't like any of the frontrunners, but I never thought any of my Hail Mary votes would actually win. Maybe Democrats in SC just don't like ugly, old white guys 1 year away from collecting SS checks representing them. Does anybody else have a better theory on why Greene won the SC primary? I find the whole situation incredibly amusing myself. That's partly because I can't imagine the GOP hijacking this election at the ballot box, so it strikes me that the dems shot themselves in their own foot. A coordinated get out the vote effort is too difficult to manage statewide without garnering tons of attention and negative publicity. Every party has plants in the other party and people on their opponents e-mail lists, plus plenty of people on their own side who despise dirty politics enough to blab to the press and buck a move toward sabotage. An 18% statewide differential translates into a massive get out the vote effort, if that was the driver in this election. At least, if some GOP operatives did engineer this, they will be easily found out and likely offered a job in Harry Reid's campaign. He could use that kind of miracle working.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_pl2544
Anyway, if reports like the below turn out to be true, it wouldn't be funny. I'm just skeptical people would be so stupid as to actually rig an election that would receive such scrutiny. It's practically a guaranteed jail term, as it should be.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38433.html
1 comment:
What a bizarre case.
One possibility is that neither Rawl nor Greene had positive name recognition and Greene won due to negative recognition and some psuedo-random selection by voters, like ballot order or alphabetic.
But there's some conflicting information even within that one article -- "the Rawl campaign had a poll conducted ten days before the primary looking ahead to the general election in November" which had Rawl "trailing Jim DeMint 50-43". Annoyingly, the article doesn't demonstrate any curiosity about the nature of the polls in order to reconcile them.
The other possibility is crappy e-voting machines. Maybe this will finally lead to open source machines.
But I still don't understand Greene's motivation to run and part with the $10k filing fee. There's no chance he could reasonably predict winning, so he's either just that far out there or, more likely, some Republican gave him the money to run.
There's also Greene's hidden advisor in the interviews, though I guess he could've shown up after the win.
I can understand journalists ignoring Greene at first. I'm more disappointed in those who have covered the story since then. No one pressed him on his advisor, funding, extracted even one place he stumped, or any falsifiable information really.
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