Word: gop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most important, the campaign must be keyed to Specter's unexpected defection from the Republican Party last spring. On April 28, he announced he was switching parties after admitting he would lose the GOP primary to conservative challenger Pat Toomey. Specter's blunt and clinical explanation for why he switched did little to endear him to many of the Democratic partisans who will vote in the May 18 primary election. "He lost his first and best opportunity to really make people believe that it was a fundamental shift in his ideology," Nevins says. "Instead he made it sound opportunistic...
...Republican National Committee, insists he's quitting the Senate to spend more time with his family. But the Senate's first Cuban-American member is also leaving under a cloud of frustration with his party's vitriol against immigration reform and the Sotomayor appointment. In 2008 the GOP's anti-immigration stance helped drop John McCain's share of the Latino vote to 31% - a 13-point plunge from the 44% George W. Bush won in 2004. Barack Obama not only won 67% of the total Hispanic vote last year, but he got a stunning 57% of that bloc...
...GOP also has a female problem. Obama won 56% of women voters in 2008, a 5-point increase over John Kerry's tally in 2004. And while about half of female Floridians voted for Bush in 2004, 52% went for Obama last year. As a result, says MacManus, a political-science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, "Crist could end up making a bold appointment when you consider how helpful a little diversity would be to the Republican image at this point...
...bold choice being floated is state representative Jennifer Carroll of Jacksonville, a Trinidad-born, African-American Republican who has been the state house's majority whip and deputy majority leader. A rising star in the Florida GOP, Carroll, 49, served 20 years in the U.S. Navy and retired as a lieutenant commander. Another is GOP state representative Anitere Flores of Miami. Flores, the current deputy majority leader, is only 32, and she's the legislature's only Hispanic female - which itself is a comment on both the Democratic and the Republican parties in Florida. Flores, who has also been mentioned...
...former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Martinez was ushered into the Senate in 2004 by the conservative Republican machine of George W. Bush's political guru, Karl Rove. (His primary campaign smeared his opponent as pro-gay just because he supported hate-crimes legislation.) But that GOP faction eventually exasperated Martinez. It's something Crist needs to think about as he mulls the best way to win the Senate's seat next year - and the best choice to fill it next month...