In an ordinary election cycle, a Senate seat in Delaware would be well out of the Republican Party’s reach. In this extraordinary one, it seemed close to a sure thing. Last night, the party’s rank-and-file decided that they weren’t really interested.
It’s too late to argue about whether Mike Castle is “really a RINO”. A more interesting question is why so many Delaware Republicans turned against him, despite the sure knowledge that the most likely alternative was a Democratic victory. Christine O’Donnell isn’t an especially compelling candidate and didn’t run a brilliant campaign, nor did Rep. Castle suffer from Lisa Murkowski’s fatal overconfidence. The vote was, it appears, anti-Castle more than it was pro-O’Donnell. Not being a close observer of the First State’s politics, I don’t know what the long-serving Congressman did to alienate his party. It must have been a doozy. One can’t help wondering, too, whether he would have been the unbeatable general election candidate that everyone assumed.
Perhaps someone like Senator DeMint did perceive in advance that the Castle walls were made of paper. If so, his push for O’Donnell, which came rather late, may have been slick political calculation, not ideological extremism. He (and Sarah Palin, too) get the credit for an outcome for which they were only marginally responsible.
The conventional wisdom, backed by direly unpromising polls, is that the O’Donnell candidacy is doomed. That’s probably right. The small consolation is that the candidate’s weakness is her dodgy résumé. She doesn’t advocate crackpot positions – if she did, we’d have heard all about them by now – so she won’t do much harm. And, who knows? Just as the horse might learn to sing, so might Delaware voters come to prefer a semi-employable conservative over an ex-bearded Marxist.
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