“Blogmeister, what went wrong yesterday?”
I think the answers are simple. I don’t think Hayworth’s past career as a free government money-getter hurt him, because his campaign found similar services on McCain’s own official Senate website before he had them scrubbed. I think the mendacity issue overall was a wash. So I think it boils down to these simple reasons:
1. M-O-N-E-Y. $20 million vs $3 million. Need I say more? If you drank a Bud Light in Phoenix any time recently, you funded the McCain campaign. (“John, this Bud’s for you!”) That and the cheap labor lobby really opened the coffers.
2. The power of incumbency. It is virtually impossible for a U.S. Senator who has been elected to multiple Senate terms to be toppled in his or her own party’s primary. So rare that I have not heard of an instance. Don’t tell me Lisa Murkowski in AK yesterday, because she only won one term in her own right, and that was by a thin margin in 2004, just two years after her father, after having made the lateral move from Senate to Governor, appointed his daughter to take his place in the Senate. Some incumbent Governors have been toppled in their own party’s primary, including at least two within the last decade (Holden, MO, 2004, and Gibbons, NV, 2010). But those Governors were just finishing up their first term.
3. AZ, like MO, has an open primary with no party registration. Since there was virtually nothing going on the Democrat side, everything there being a foregone conclusion, I bet a lot of Hispanics took an R ballot to vote McCain. (UPDATE: Scratch that. You have to register with a party or as an independent. Registered Indies can take either a Republican, Democrat or Green Party ballot, but can’t choose a Libertarian Party ballot, for primary elections. The person who e-mailed me describes AZ as a “semi-open primary” state. So this part is a bonk.)
Still, even counting all this, McCain only got 56% of the vote, with Hayworth and some other guy I’ve never heard of taking the rest. It is pretty pitiful that a four-term incumbent Senator who was the party nominee for President just two short years ago can’t even get four-sevenths of his own party’s votes in his own state for another Senate term.
One object lesson I took from yesterday is that James Edwards’s theory is ultimately right about McCain and his Presidential campaign — These last few months clearly shows that he has fight left in him, even if he has to fake it and be deceitful and mendacious. So the reason he didn’t do the same versus Barack Obama two years ago is purely because of fear of the R-word.
I looked over the county data (didn’t take too long, AZ only has 18 counties), and McCain won all of them, with Hayworth coming the closest (3% margin) in Apache County, in the northeast/north central part of the state, the county which had Bill Cooper’s old stomping grounds. The rest of the counties were almost consistent in their big McCain margins, though in Arizona politics, it’s almost entirely a matter of Maricopa, Pinal and Pima equaling the state. I was expecting Hayworth to do better the closer you got to the border, but that wasn’t so — I thought at first that this was almost proof of Hispanic meddling in this vote.
Also in AZ, John Shadegg is retiring from AZ-3, and Dan Quayle’s son won the primary to replace, and probably ergo the general election. I don’t know enough about Ben Quayle, even though I wasn’t too fond of Dan Quayle. I saw right through that faux-aw shucks I supposedly can’t spell potato shtick of his from the jump — Quayle was a Bildeberger, not so much because he was a blue-blooded elitist, but because he was an insipid suck-ass for said blue-blooded elitists. Here’s hoping that the apple does fall far from the tree. As it turns out, Dan Quayle actually spent much of his life in Arizona, in spite of his electoral fortunes being associated with Indiana. DQ’s mother’s father once owned the Arizona Republic newspaper.
UPDATE 8/28: Here’s another simple theory about why McCain was able to hold on: People still feel sorry for him because he was a POW.
As for my theory that no person who has ever been elected to multiple terms as a U.S. Senator has ever been defeated in his or her own party’s primary, a few people have e-mailed in the names Arlen Specter and Bob Bennett. They’re special cases which don’t disprove my theory, because Specter won all five of his elected Senate terms as a Republican, then switched parties last year, and failed in his first attempt to win election to the Senate as a Democrat this year in the primaries. As far as Bennett, Utah doesn’t use plebiscites for primaries, they use state party conventions to nominate candidates that are on the November ballot.
UPDATE 9/21: Joe Lieberman. Multi-term (three) elected U.S. Senator, defeated in his own party’s primary (Ned Lamont) in 2006. However, CT is permissive about primary losers running as independents, so that’s why Lieberman is still in the Senate today. While Lieberman is technically an answer to my original question, I get the feeling he would have won that primary if it wasn’t widely known that he would be able to, and be likely to, run as an Indy.
