Indiana Senator Election

[GodFearinGunTotin]

FWIW
https://www.mikebraunforindiana.com/2018-gravis-indiana-polling-results/

 

[jamil]

FWIW
https://www.mikebraunforindiana.com/2018-gravis-indiana-polling-results/

Here’s something that’s really stupid about political pundits. They speak of the electorate as a hive mind, and try to ascribe a unified collective voting strategy. No, the voters did not collude with one another and decide to collectively support republicans for the house, but send Joe Donnelly as acheck on the Donald’s power.

Individuals make individual choices. It’s not a hive mind. The aggregation of all the individual reasoning, considering all the dynamics, their own individual goals, results in one person winning. There’s no collective, monolithic, will. There are individuals voting. Period.

 

[historian]

FWIW
https://www.mikebraunforindiana.com/2018-gravis-indiana-polling-results/

47% undecided.

That means Undecided is going to face Joe!

 

[JettaKnight]

Negative ads are a paradox. Everyone says they hate them but the "experts" say they work.

The way these guys answer direct questions about their positions and philosophies, it's no wonder people have to rely on negative ads as a means to vet these people.

Why answer when you can dance around?

[video=youtube;Emc1M5F9I-E]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emc1M5F9I-E[/video]

 

[chipbennett]

You blame people who didn’t vote for Mourdock? So then, logically, you would vote for the squishiest liberal Repulican ever, or it’d be your fault the Republican didn’t beat the democrat.

“Republican” isn’t a synonym of conservative. No one betrayed the Republicah tribe. Primary voters picked a fringe candidate who did not have wide appeal. If you need to lay the blame at someone’s feet, it’ll be too diluted to really matter by the time it’s spread out everwhere it belongs. There was a lot more involved than just RINO.

Mourdock is not, and was not, "fringe." He was submarined by his own party, for having the audacity to defeat the Establishment candidate in the primary.

No more, no less.

 

[historian]

Mourdock is not, and was not, "fringe." He was submarined by his own party, for having the audacity to defeat the Establishment candidate in the primary.

No more, no less.

AHAHAAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAAAAAAAA

Oh...my sides...

 

[2A_Tom]

Braun, the second coming, runs his campaign like Satan.

 

[JettaKnight]

Braun, the second coming, runs his campaign like Satan.

He tells people that good works are what gets you into Heaven?

 

[jamil]

Mourdock is not, and was not, "fringe." He was submarined by his own party, for having the audacity to defeat the Establishment candidate in the primary.

No more, no less.

There's a lot more to it than just that. I imagine the establishment republicans were pissed about Lugar, for sure. That's not the whole story. Donnelly was pretty much unopposed in the primary. The statistics for that primary vote don't make a lot of sense. What's a bored democrat gonna do? It's an open primary. Do the math.

Yes. Mourdock was a fringe candidate.

 

[bwframe]

For whatever reason, we let those "too smart" to take yes for an answer drive us into losing our Senatorial representation in congress for the past six years. The real question is if we will choose to do it again?

 

[JettaKnight]

For whatever reason, we let those "too smart" to take yes for an answer drive us into losing our Senatorial representation in congress for the past six years. The real question is if we will choose to do it again?

I'm not tracking - what was the question?

 

[chipbennett]

There's a lot more to it than just that. I imagine the establishment republicans were pissed about Lugar, for sure. That's not the whole story. Donnelly was pretty much unopposed in the primary. The statistics for that primary vote don't make a lot of sense. What's a bored democrat gonna do? It's an open primary. Do the math.

Yes. Mourdock was a fringe candidate.

Okay, convince me: what made Mourdock a "fringe" candidate?

 

[LockStocksAndBarrel]

I thought Mourdock was Tea Party aligned. I believe he'd have won but he got torpedoed by a poor answer on an abortion question in a debate and to a lesser extent the establishment GOP. I was a supporter early and often.

 

[jamil]

Okay, convince me: what made Mourdock a "fringe" candidate?

Left|----------^--------M-|

M=Mourdock on just about all the issues. You probably can't get much further to the right on a given topic.

I'd say what defines "fringe" is where they are on the bell curve. I'd say Lugar was center/center-right. Mourdock was out on the fringes of the bell. I'd say not radically fringe, like, he wasn't Nazi fringe, or, hole up in a bunker in Montana fringe. But fringe.

Very, very few people in the world would have answered that gotcha question like he did. Granted, more people in Indiana would answer it that way. But still.

Yep. Fringe.

And I voted for that fringe guy. Even after he screwed the aborted pooch. Sometimes you have to make pragmatic choices and vote for the fringe, but harmless, choice.

 

[jamil]

I thought Mourdock was Tea Party aligned. I believe he'd have won but he got torpedoed by a poor answer on an abortion question in a debate and to a lesser extent the establishment GOP. I was a supporter early and often.

That poor answer revealed the genuine believe held by Mourdock. Of course, if he were a more seasoned politician, he could have properly dodged the question so that he wouldn't have fully revealed himself. But not many people, even in Indiana, believe what Mourdock believes about conception, and about abortion. I'm not going to go into details because I don't want to drag this into referendum on abortion. We're just talking about what people believe. And on that issue, you almost can't get further right than Mourdock's position. Calling him a fringe candidate is quite accurate.

And yes, he was aligned with the TEA Party. Unfortunately. I say unfortunately because the TEA Party's original message was about taxation. TEA = Taxed Enough Already. But after they started gaining some electoral success, EVERY right winger hitched his or her wagon, and all their ideological baggage to it. The TEA Party originally created under the idea of fiscal responsibility, morphed into what essentially became effectively the Fundamentalist Christian Party, and it eventually lost its original identity. It's a shame too. Fiscal responsibility was a strong message under a really wide tent. It was originally supposed to be non-partisan. And many democrats (at least at the time) could support fiscal responsibility. But then you throw in all the religiously based positions, like the hard line on abortion, and it just loses people's support.

 

[bwframe]

Abortion is like "racist," eventually we'll get a belly full of the left's BS. We'll look at what it really is and stop being scared less of being branded as such.

Woman's health, my ass...

 

[2A_Tom]

Well If Lugar was center right, then I am definitely fringe.

BTW When you mention a NAZI as being right that offends most on the right.

NAZI, KKK, Supremacists of any stripe is a blaring character flaw that is rooted in hatred not politics. They are heart conditions.

 

[jamil]

Abortion is like "racist," eventually we'll get a belly full of the left's BS. We'll look at what it really is and stop being scared less of being branded as such.

Woman's health, my ass...

No. You're right. It's not about women's health. There's another fringe on the other side of it. But you have to recognize that the Mourdock view of abortion is indeed a fringe position. Inside the bell curve, on the far left, is the idea that abortion is always okay during any part of pregnancy, up to birth. Definitely that's a fringe position. Then the curve gains space as you move towards the center, where the highest points of the curve you find the idea that abortion is kinda okay until after the first trimester. Then moving towards the right it goes towards kinda not okay, until you get to the fringes that say it's never okay anytime ever for any reason, period. That's fringe. That's pretty much Mourdock's view.

I'm not going to tell you that the fringe viewpoints are right or wrong. On controversial issues like this, there's obviously a grey area. Maybe it's not grey for you, but for most individuals, they decide it's okay-ness is elsewhere. It's really up to the individual to decide what is right for them, according to their own conscience. It's certainly not acceptable to the majority of people to accept either fringe. A large majority of people don't agree with always okay, and they don't agree with never okay.

 

[jamil]

Well If Lugar was center right, then I am definitely fringe.

BTW When you mention a NAZI as being right that offends most on the right.

NAZI, KKK, Supremacists of any stripe is a blaring character flaw that is rooted in hatred not politics. They are heart conditions.

One can be on the right, politically, and be heartless. One can be on the left, politically, and be heartless. If you're heartless on the right, it kinda looks like extreme nationalism/supremacy. If you're heartless on the left it looks like extreme egalitarian (communism). The political right isn't necessarily morally correct. It's what you do and how you treat others that makes you morally correct. A liberal and a conservative, in terms of, say, Christianity, can both be liberals and conservatives, AND Matthew 25 kinds of Christians.

Here's what I would say about the fringes. The people out on the fringes look to me like ideologues improperly endowed with sufficient pragmatism. It's fine, and even necessary to have principles. I certainly don't trust pragmatic people improperly endowed with ideology. You have to have something to ground you to principles which make living a moral life in the world likely. So ideology--and religion fulfills that purpose as well--serves as a foundation for life-guiding moral principles.

But the opposite is also true. Pure ideology untempered by pragmatism is impracticable. For example, I'm very libertarian minded, but I understand that it's not scalable, and therefore not practical to implement society-wide. There has never been a scaled libertarian society for a reason. It is incompatible with human nature. That doesn't mean that all libertarian principles are impractical. So, my ideological bent has to be mitigated by that reality, by at least some pragmatism.

I think the reason the fringe positions are fringe is that most people have a practical side. I hate to say, "common sense", because of they hijacking of the term by the left, but that's really what reasonable pragmatism looks like. And the people on the fringes don't have it, because they're all about the ideology, and very little about the practicalities. The always abortion fringe doesn't consider the practical morality/irresponsibility of their position. The never abortion fringe doesn't consider the practicalities either, since they apply only the fundamentals of their religious beliefs, and they expect to impose them on people who don't share those beliefs.

 

[chipbennett]

Left|----------^--------M-|

M=Mourdock on just about all the issues. You probably can't get much further to the right on a given topic.

I'd say what defines "fringe" is where they are on the bell curve. I'd say Lugar was center/center-right. Mourdock was out on the fringes of the bell. I'd say not radically fringe, like, he wasn't Nazi fringe, or, hole up in a bunker in Montana fringe. But fringe.

Very, very few people in the world would have answered that gotcha question like he did. Granted, more people in Indiana would answer it that way. But still.

Yep. Fringe.

And I voted for that fringe guy. Even after he screwed the aborted pooch. Sometimes you have to make pragmatic choices and vote for the fringe, but harmless, choice.

I don't see a single, specific issue mentioned. You have alluded to "that gotcha question" (an answer that was nothing more than Mourdock saying that any conception of human life resulting from sex is something that God intended - hardly a controversial statement or belief).

So, do you have anything else, or is your "fringe" label based solely on that answer to a debate question? If his positions are (by your description) so obviously fringe, it should be fairly easy to rattle off some of his "fringe" beliefs.