Word: republican
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...conservatives leading the Republican Party off a cliff? That's what a lot of people concluded after conservatives forced the official Republican candidate out of a congressional race in upstate New York for being too liberal. That candidate, Dede Scozzafava, promptly endorsed the Democrat running for the seat - who then won an area that had been sending Republicans to Congress since 1872. Even some Republicans are complaining that a party purged of moderates would be unable to win elections outside the South. The party would be left with a hard-core conservative base, and nothing else...
...this narrative doesn't hold up even in that New York congressional district, let alone in the rest of the country. Scozzafava was not a moderate Republican. Her support for same-sex marriage and her stance on unions put her to the left of many Democrats in Congress. Several moderate Republicans, such as former governor George Pataki, endorsed the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman. Anyway, Hoffman lost so narrowly as to suggest that a conservative could have won under slightly different circumstances. (See pictures of Republican memorabilia...
More important, a few Republican candidates have demonstrated that it is possible to transcend the party's conservative-moderate divide. In Virginia, Robert McDonnell won a landslide - the first Republican win in a governor's race there in 12 years - by running as a problem solver. Social conservatives know he is one of them. But independent voters strongly backed him too. Voters as a whole trusted him more than his Democratic opponent on everything from fixing the roads to strengthening the economy. Once he had that trust, Democrats were unable to get voters to see him as frighteningly conservative, although...
...Jersey, Republican Chris Christie - who beat a primary candidate running to his right - also won independent voters by big margins. The state has not given a majority of its votes to a Republican candidate for governor in 24 years. Christie didn't break 50% either, in part because of a third-party candidate but also because he ran a vague campaign that left voters unconvinced that he offered real solutions to the state's serious economic and budgetary woes. He won anyway because voters thought the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine, had already failed to deal with those problems...
...politically potent Cuban-American voters. But the newest bill, the freedom to travel to Cuba act, introduced this year in both the House and Senate, suddenly has Cuban-American backing - and as a result a decidedly better chance of passing. In a recent statement, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican and co-sponsor, called this "a very good time for public diplomacy with Cuba."(See a photoessay about the fading sound of Salsa in Cuba...