Political spin after an election is as normal (and expected) as the dawn after the darkness. As such, it is hardly surprising that many who were boosting the candidacy of Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman are now asserting how they didn’t lose (even though, objectively, they did).1
They are two fundamental lessons from this contest, and both are institutional in nature, not ideological.
1. If a Voting Bloc is Split in a SMD, Plurality Election, the Opposing Party Tends to Benefit. The bottom line of all of this is that since US Congressional elections take place in the context of single member districts (i.e., we elect one member per district) with plurality winners (i.e., the candidate with the most votes wins).
From the moment that the Conservative Party of New York decided to run a candidate in the district the possibility existed that the right would split its vote and give the seat to the Democrats for the first time in ten decades.
If movement conservatives wish to have a truly conservative party in the United States, they need to start pushing for electoral reform that would move the US to a proportional system. That is the route that will allow for an ideologically pure (or purer) party than they currently have. Otherwise they will have to live with a moderate wing of the Republican Party that acknowledges the big tent and stops calling people RINOs because they deviate from some ideal type.
(Or, they could start a regional party, I suppose, with the only hope of controlling Congress being a coalition with the Republicans).
2. Candidate Selection Processes Matter As I noted the other day, one of the main issues of relevance here was the candidate selection process employed: elite selection2 of Scozzafava (and, for that matter, Hoffman) in lieu of a primary. In this context it is especially important to point to the fact that neither Scozzafava nor Hoffman had primary competition to determine the GOP nominee, leading to neither having a clear electoral base from which to build their campaigns (which is the norm in the US context). Further, Hoffman defected from the GOP and took the Conservative Party route after he was initially denied the GOP nomination. As such, it is also noteworthy that this was less a case of a pure third party challenge as much as it was a case where the structure of the New York party system allowed for an easy route for what was initially an intra-party conflict over a nomination to manifest as an inter-party challenge.
Now, the specifics of a given candidate selection process do not necessarily equal a particular kind of candidate, either in terms of ideology or competitiveness. However, in this particular case, one cannot fully understand the outcome without understanding the process by which the candidates were selected.
A contested primary between Scozzafava and Hoffman (and the other candidates) would have more likely produced a winning candidate for the GOP. Further, it would have likely been more difficult for Hoffman to take the sore loser route and run as a third party candidate with the same kind of success. At a minimum the overall narrative/atmospherics of the contest would have been different.
The importance of this latter point is less about whatever counterfactuals that we can generate regarding NY-23, but is more about the exportability of the model to other districts (as some movement conservatives would like to see). The bottom line is that during the regular contests in 2024, that the candidates will be chosen by the voters and will have a basis from which to build their general election campaigns.
Further, most states do not have the party system that NY has.
Some other lessons/observations:
a. Patterns cannot, by definition, be ascertained when N=1. There is really very little that can be gleaned from this race save for the points above. This is one isolated event and one cannot extrapolate a pattern from one event. It should be noted that the observations above are based on broader patterns that have been reinforced over and over again from multiple events.
I would expand the basic point to note that any small N situation makes patterns all but impossible to ascertain. As such, a handful of elections this week really do not not tell us all that much about the national political scene, regardless of what politicians and pundits will try to argue.
b. Special elections are odd creatures. The combination of no other races to provide interest and the fact that voters know that the term in office is limited (amongst other things) lead to atypical turnout. As such, not only do we have a small N here, but we also have a case that is likely an outlier by definition.
c. It is more difficult for national politicians to swoop into a local race and manipulate it than they often think. One guesses the various politicos who tried to make political hay out of this event will simply pretend like the whole thing never happened (although they will, no doubt, score some political points with true believers). Regardless, the odds are that none of them really had much of clue about the nature of the district’s politics when they decided that they could use it to their own political ends.
- e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and Erick Erickson-amongst others. [↩]
- And I am not using this term in a derogatory fashion, as is in vogue these days. Rather, I am using the term quite precisely: when the leaders of a party select a candidate, it is (by definition) “elite selection.” [↩]
