Very "Special" Election

Well the votes are in and Democrat Kathy Hochul was the winner in the special election to replace "Shirtless" Chris Lee in NY's 26th Congressional District. Hochul defeated Jane Corwin and Jack Davis for the seat.

I'm sure that by now, most of you have heard that (according to Democrats) Hochul's win was a referendum on the GOP's medicare plan or (according to Republicans) that the result was simply a matter of Corwin and Davis splitting the majority conservative electorate allowing Hochul to slip in.

There may be some truth to both sets of "talking points" but my main impressions of the election were somewhat different. First, Corwin really ran a crummy campaign. She had a significant GOP enrollment advantage, so she may have figured she didn't need much of an effort to win. Further, her campaign worker's "ambush" of Jack Davis backfired incredibly. The video of the encounter was a massive embarrassment to the Corwin campaign.

Most of all, however, I was astounded by the nature of the campaign ads. I'm not a "negative ad" naysayer. Some "negative" ads are appropriate for exposing particular flaws or positions of an opponent. In this race, however, I rarely saw a positive ad. There were three candidates and yet there were few ads giving voters affirmative reasons why they should vote for any one of them. The three candidates mainly went on a round robin of attacks against each other. If I had been in that district, I might have considered not voting at all.

A final word on the medicare "debate". I do not think that this election was a referendum on medicare although it was an important factor in the race. The reason I do not think it was a referendum was because Jane Corwin never defended or promoted the Ryan/GOP medicare plan after she fell under attack for saying she would have voted for it. The lesson the GOP ought to take from this election is that they need to have clear and direct defenses for their plans or the Democrat demagoguery machine will grind them up.