Tobiasly’s Blog

Apparently it is possible for a party to win an election without having a plan. What yet remains to be seen is whether Nancy Pelosi is actually Speaker material… her first bungled attempt to instill her pal John Murtha as Majority Leader certainly doesn’t look good for her. Not only does it display a surprising amount of political naiveté (why on earth would she make such a high-profile gambit without first ensuring that her pick was at least within striking distance? Really… 149-86?) but, regardless of what she and Hoyer say, this will damage her ability to effectively rally her troops for quite a while.

What was surprising to me was how much the national anti-Republican mood hurt us locally at the county level. I know I’m biased, but for the first time in the history of Clark County, the Republican party had a slate full of good, quality, experienced candidates, and every one of us were way better than what the Democrats offered. And we did everything right, from door-to-door events all year long to phone calls to holding the local Democrats’ flagrant disregard of election law to the minimum amount possible.

By any measure, we should have won some county-wide seats this year. Every Republican and Democrat I spoke with leading up to the election talked about how this was the beginning of the end of Democrat control on this county. Looking at the numbers, if this were a usual non-presidential election year, we would have indeed had a great showing. But, this was no normal election year.

I can’t say that the punishment of the national Republican party was undeserved. We certainly got away from our core values of fiscal conservatism and small government. And it looks like the Democrats have picked it up and are running with it for all it’s worth. Hopefully Republicans across the country take this as a much needed wake-up call to get back to what brought us to power in the first place.