The Lesson of Busby

I've read the congratulatory reviews on some of the blogs concerning Busby's 45% in CA-50 yesterday, but I have problems with them. The low turnout, the 10-pt. loss under optimum circumstances, so on, so on, that others have noted. But my major concern is this: the loss gives Repubs a model for overcoming the likely dissatisfaction of their normal voters. Just get a conservative to run as a third party.

A few years ago, I was living in MD and checking the results of some primaries. I was surprised to find a friend of mine not only had run but had gotten single-digit percentage of the vote. So, the next time I talked to him, I asked him why he hadn't said anything about running. He just grinned and said he'd done it as a favor to the incumbent, who had won the primary. Huh? He just kept grinning, but it was obvious that he had earned a future chip with the legislator by pulling votes from dissatisfied constituents away from his challenger. My friend had given the alienated an alternate channel to voice their disapproval.

It seems to me that that's what happened with Busby. If I'm Karl Rove (I'm not--I have a soul), for those districts and states with questionable incumbents, such as Ney or Burns, I start finding conservatives to run as independents, the Ross Perot effect (aka why the DLC types have never understood why they really won in 1992). It's counterintuitive and could, I realize, backfire, but why take the chance that your now-pissed-off former voters will actually cast the vote for the Dem? You couldn't be too obvious with it or overuse it, but 4-5 House seats, a Senate race or two (PA anyone?), any key state where you don't control the Secretary of State and the voting machines, may make all the difference in the final control of Congress. Given the polls in some of those states, there really wouldn't be that much to lose. So I'm not getting excited about yet another "near miss" in a conservative district. The model is now set.

And I can already picture Rove grinning.