The race to defeat frosh Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly is finally starting to heat up:
Barely a week earlier, an estimated 4,000 people packed Mishawaka High School’s east gymnasium to witness democracy in action when Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton visited.
On Saturday night a grand total of six people showed up to the school’s auditorium to see democracy in action as two 2nd District Republican candidates for U.S. Congress debated each other.
Even with the low turnout candidates Tony Zirkle and Joe Roush took the night seriously and easily chewed up the 90 minutes allotted for the debate. (Emphasis added)
Watch your back, Donnelly!
Watch the Repubs “cut and run” — it’s fun, fun, fun — and this ain’t gonna be the last time in 2008!
The NRCC has to try to hold back a few bucks to defend their threatened incumbents. It seems there’s more of them every week or so, and not that much money left in the bank! Challengers to Dem incumbents and even in open seats like LA-06 and LA-04 will be on their own to sink or swim. I’m betting on sink.
I’m reluctant to worry about our freshman incumbent because he seems to fit the district pretty well.
The item you excerpt is amusing but I wouldn’t rely on it as a measure of his safety, though. The third Republican, who seems more like a mainstream GOP candidate, wasn’t there, and the comments to the paper complain that there was little publicity before the event. That I can’t assess.
Zirkle is evidently a frequent candidate tarred even in a conservative district by concern about his racist views. The other speaker, Roush, is an isolationist whose website is more candidly anti-George Bush than most websites of Democrats running for Congress. The GOP candidate who didn’t attend the debate (whose name is Puckett- he looks like Captain Picard in the picture on his website) seems to be emphasizing anti-immigrant rhetoric, which will have some appeal to rank and file Republicans in a suffering rust belt district, but hopefully, not enough.
OpenSecrets hasn’t yet posted 1st Quarter fund-raising totals for this district. As of last December Donnelly had raised a million dollars and had 3/4 of it left as cash on hand. Puckett was on their radar already but had not yet raised enough $ to have to file. They show a small amouint of fund-raising, this cycle, for a Republican candidate called David Minor, who’s not mentioned in the article from the Tribune. Perhaps he’s withdrawn? Ron at Politics1 doesn’t list him, either.
Okay, this just seems cruel. Funny, but cruel.
I applaud you for both.
“They show a small amouint of fund-raising, this cycle, for a Republican candidate called David Minor, who’s not mentioned in the article from the Tribune. Perhaps he’s withdrawn?”
Minor came and went within 3 weeks, he works for Blackwater, resigned from the Kokomo PD after getting in a fight at a party and had a DUI. All this was disclosed by him to “circumvent” his opponent using it against him. All before anybody actually knew who he was.
Puckett was in the race for a couple of weeks early last year before dropping out to spend more time with his family. Apparently he decided he’d spent enough and got back in when nobody else wouldn’t run.
Tony Zirkle is easily the most insane political candidate in America. In no particular order he believes in: restoring the guillotine as a form of capital punishment, we should guard the border with deadbeat dads (cause it’s not like they wouldn’t be looking for quick cash and easily bribed)he spent $5000 on the first issue of Playboy to run it through a paper shredder for a publicity stunt, and has demanded that Donnelly debate him- in the primary. Oh, did I forget the part where he wants to re-establish segregation? He thinks we should set aside the southeast for the African American community and have whites run the rest of the country.
everyone says the IN is such a DEEP RED STATE, so GOP candidates don’t need money to win 🙂 🙂
And the tsunami continues to grow.
If only we could fix the upticket problem. And soon.