for a good laugh, I set myself up on the Club for Growth e-mail list. I love to see what Democrats they target and I especially love to see them promote primary challenges to Republicans….especially when they are Republicans that we are targetting…like Mark Kirk.
Recently, the CfG sent out an e-mail complaining about 8 RINO’s who voted in favor the “dangerous cap and trade bill” last Friday. They are looking for viable candidates to run primary challenges against these 7 (McHugh is the 8th vote but he’s retiring)
Bono Mack, Mary (CA-45)
Castle, Mike (DE-AL)
Kirk, Mark (IL-10)
Lance, Leonard (NJ-07)
LoBiondo, Frank (NJ-02)
Reichert, Dave (WA-08)
Smith, Chris (NJ-04)
I can’t help but notice that Democrats ran strong challenges in several of these districts and are primed to do so again. It would certaintly work to our benefit if we gave the CfG a little boost in helping to find some viable primary challengers to these Republican candidates.
Does anybody have any knowledge of potential Republican candidates in these races that we could give some encouragement to get into these races or give the CfG some encouragement to try and get them in themselves??
Christine O’Donnell should be sufficiently nutty for CfG support.
For example, MD-01, where voters think the district is safely Republican enough to vote for the conservative challenger. There are areas in New Jersey that are analogous to the conservative Baltimore County suburbs that supported Harris, mostly in NJ-05 and NJ-11, but some in the Ocean County part of NJ-04. I could see a CfG challenger from Ocean County run against Chris Smith because he’s too moderate. Chris Smith is a legend to NJ Republicans, but he hasn’t had a challenger from the right before, so you never know.
The Club for Growth and the nature of New Mexico’s closed primaries are pretty much what gave Steve Pearce the nomination (and pretty much guaranteed Tom Udall’s victory in the fall).
I don’t really expect the CfG to really be able defeat any of these guys in a primary….but they can cost them money and support from the right…people on that side who don’t go vote is one less vote we need to win.
The CfG can provide us with that
I thought the CfG was suppose to be a purely economic conservative group. Not some all-around right wing group. Sure this bill has some ‘economic factors’ in it but even staunch economic conservatives support this because they are also very pro-environment. IMO…if a bill, such as this one, is not purely about economics then the CfG should form no opinion on it. Just because you are for this bill it does not mean you are anti-fiscal conservative. As there is such a thing called the ‘greater good’. And the CfG is showing themselves to be hypocritical. They were not against all that funding for the Iraq War, even though it was taxpayers’ dollars. Nor are they against alot of funding for homeland security (and rightly, they should not have been). This just shows that the people in charge of the CfG have more than just an economic agenda. They are diehard all-around conservatives. Hence why you almost never, ever see them endorse a socially moderate Republican. And why almost all their venom is toward socially moderate Republican incumbents.