The NY-26 Election. Have fun but keep your shirt on.

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Maybe, maybe not. Lee's seat is pretty much impossible to eliminate by redistricting, unique among the NY GOP seats.

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Maybe, maybe not. Lee's seat is pretty much impossible to eliminate by redistricting, unique among the NY GOP seats.

I don't think it'd be an issue of elimination, but rather protection.

A GOP seat upstate has to go away anyway. Logic dictates that they'd rather the scandalous incumbent go than someone more valuable (like Buerkle and someone else, who are the likely losers at the moment).

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If the Green party endorsed the Democrat, that would certainly be news, since they tend to either run their own candidate, or no one.

Well, they have to petition to get on the ballot in most other states.  There's no sense petitioning to get on the ballot to cross-endorse someone.  Also, most states don't have fusion voting, like New York.  Minor parties can and do cross-endorse in New York - often.   The Independence Party is often up for grabs.

I guess looking back to what the NY Greens did in 1998-2002 might be informative - but I'm drawing a total blank about whether they cross-endorsed back then.  I do recall them holding a primary at least once.

While the other minor parties with ballot status in New York quite often endorse the Democrat or the Republican, the Green party does not have a history of doing this.

The Green Party has never had automatic ballot access before, so they always had to nominate their own candidate.

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The Green Party has never had automatic ballot access before, so they always had to nominate their own candidate.

The New York Green Party had automatic ballot access from 1999-2002, after "Grandpa Munster" Al Lewis received enough votes in the 1998 gubernatorial race to put them on the ballot.

Oh, right. Okay, there is precedent. Not that I would expect the Greens to play ball for Fusion, anyway (and the Democrats probably wouldn't want them--"Working Families" sounds nice, but "Green" has strong connotations).

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I'm pretty sure he said he'd caucus with the Republicans.

Jack Davis is on his own specially-made "Tea Party" ticket.

It was a stupid question.  Sorry.

Edit:  Though it does make this an odd statement:

That comparison really can't be applied to NY-26 because Davis takes away votes nearly equally from Corwin and Hochul. There was a clear split field between Case and Hanabusa where both candidates split the Democratic vote nearly equally. Notice that Hochul has better favorable ratings than Corwin and that voters only barely prefer a Republican over a Democrat, I think Hochul would be leading Corwin even with Davis out of the trace.

If anything, if Davis voters were forced to pick between Corwin and Hochul, I'd expect them to chose Hochul by a decent margin.

Davis is a wacky former Democrat who has run campaigns in the area in the past on the Democratic ticket. His signature issue is opposition to immigration, which, in an area where the Democrats are all in unions while the Republicans are all wealthy or small farmers, probably appeals more to Democratic voters.

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If we win this, does it count as payback for Scott Brown?

No, that would require something far more drastic, like a Senator Matheson or Freudenthal.

Senator Matheson! Wouldn't that be something. That's even more extreme than Brown winning originally -- after all, MA has had Republican Governors in the last decades -- I don't think Utah's elected statewide Democrats.

Not recently, but the state was once a Democratic stronghold and was a swing state for a long time. (This was actually a political tactic by the Mormon church to gain influence--if they were perceived as a swing state, they would get more political attention, so they had religious leaders in different parts of the state endorse different parties. That practice ended when the Democrats backed civil rights, though, because back then the Mormons weren't sure if black people had souls yet.) Matheson's father was a Democratic Governor of Utah in the 70s and 80s.

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There's no way you could/would stretch a district from Rochester to Syracuse or Ithaca. Buffalo only works because you're going along a coastline. The most erose a Rochester district is likely to get, if it pulls out of Buffalo, is an extension down to take in the small and very Democratic college town of Geneseo in Livingston County. Slaughter would be absolutely, 100% safe in the 59-60% Obama seat that would result from carving out a few ultra-GOP bits of western Monroe County.

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It can't be done, not because of political resistance (although there is that, too--the current map is strong inertia), but because there are too many people living between the areas. You literally can't draw a map that takes in both Rochester and Syracuse in their entireties, at least not without saddling the surrounding districts with a lot of strongly Democratic inner-ring suburbs (and maybe not at all).

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Presumably no one advertised in the Rochester media market because the vast majority of the district is in the Buffalo media market, thus dampening Rochester-market turnout.