Primary Elections Yesterday

For conservatives, there was a lot to celebrate in the primary election results yesterday:

In Indiana, 36-year GOP incumbent Senator Richard Lugar lost by a massive 61-39 margin to State Treasurer Richard Mourdock.  Lugar was so out of touch with Indiana he sold his home in the state years ago.  For most of his tenure in the Senate, Lugar was a conservative, but over the past 5-10 years he had been drifting steadily to the left, even going so far as to agree to be featured in an Obama campaign ad in 2008 (viewed by some as a quasi-endorsement of Obama).  Lugar will certainly not be missed by me, and Mourdock should have no problems winning the general election in a conservative state like Indiana.

In North Carolina, voters passed a state constitutional amendment to reiterate the traditional definition of marriage as the union between a man and a woman by an overwhelming 61-39 margin.  I expected the measure to pass but not by such a wide margin in this supposed swing state that Obama apparently entertains hopes of carrying in November.  I also found it interesting that 21% of Democrats (200,000 voters) voted for "No Preference" rather than for the unopposed Obama.  Hmmm.

In West Virginia, Obama did have an opponent.  A convicted felon who has been incarcerated in a Texas prison since 1999.  This guy got 41% of the Democratic vote statewide!  Obama got only 59%.  I think it's safe to say this is one state Romney has locked up.

In Wisconsin, Democrats nominated former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to run against Scott Walker in a gubernatorial recall election in June.  The interesting thing here is that Barrett comfortably defeated Kathleen Falk, who was Big Labor's nominee of choice.  After all, this recall election was engineered by Big Labor in the first place, and they spent big money on Falk's behalf.  Barrett is downplaying the union issue, to the point that he backed out of a unity rally with Falk and union leaders the final weekend of the campaign in an apparent attempt to avoid being associated with them.  It seems pretty obvious that the non-stop union protests and recall shenanigans over the past year plus have turned off voters and provoked a backlash.  Walker was practically unopposed in his primary and there were no other GOP primaries occurring, while the Democrats had a competitive gubernatorial primary as well as a number of competitive primaries for state legislature recall races.  Therefore, Democrats should have had far more motivation to turn out than Republicans.  Yet, the total votes cast by Democrats and Republicans was virtually equal, and Walker got more votes than Barrett and Falk put together!  I'm feeling good about Walker's chances in the recall election next month.  He is one of the most courageous and principled politicians out there, in my opinion.