What Ramesh Ponnuru has written about Tuesday's wins is right in so many ways:

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 they tried to make hay out of a hard-right master's thesis McDonnell wrote in 1989.

[Disclosure: I consulted for the McDonnell campaign, and these are my personal views on why he won.]

In the wake of McDonnell's landslide, many observers have pointed to his brand of "pragmatism" to make the case that McDonnell -- and not Hoffman in NY-23 -- is the way forward for conservatives in 2010.

But to point to McDonnell as a subrosa moderate profoundly misses the point. McDonnell is a strong conservative who early in the campaign put Deeds on the defensive by running against Obama and Pelosi's policies, most notably card check and cap-and-trade. There was never any doubt as to McDonnell's conservative bona fides.

But even though McDonnell was in fact a true conservative, there was no need to make the election about those credentials. McDonnell's conservatism spoke for itself.

What the campaign keyed in on very early is that most voters aren't ideological. In a time of crisis, they first and foremost want problems solved -- and specifically, the problems created by too much government meddling and taxes to go away.

Wait, not ideological? So Ruffini's saying we need to run moderates? No. That is precisely the opposite of what I am saying.

Because very few independents care about ideological name-checks, they won't be swayed by scare tactics trying to persuade them that Candidate X is the ideological second-coming of Attila the Hun. We saw this with the thesis attacks. Candidates have wide latitude to run as who they actually are, so long as they can persuade voters they'll deal with the bread and butter issues (which was McDonnell's calling card).

In a purple state like Virginia, you can win by running as a liberal and a problem-solver (Kaine), as a moderate and a problem-solver (Warner), and as a strong conservative and a problem-solver (McDonnell).

Faced with that choice, why wouldn't we choose to run the conservative every time? A non-ideological electorate gives us more leeway to run conservatives in blueish/purple states, not less. To get a flavor of this in action, just look at the closing slide of McDonnell's ads:

The ubiquitous "Jobs Governor" branding and the spinning icons highlighting different issues is evocative of the desire for practical, clickable solutions to everyday problems shown in another recent marketing campaign.

Fixing Northern Virginia traffic? There's an app for that.

Jobs? There's an app for that.

Education? There's an app for that.

Essentially, whatever the issue was, Bob McDonnell wanted you he had the proverbial "app for that" -- a set of practical solutions not overtly branded as left, center, or right.

Considering the issue void that was the Creigh Deeds campaign, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Republicans in Virginia have struggled to make their prescriptions relevant to swing voters. Our issues in local elections have traditionally been issues like taxes and immigration that don't always lend themselves to policy heft. And a lack of policy heft has translated into an intangible sense that there's not enough "there there."

This was the central challenge facing the McDonnell campaign at its outset, and so it systematically sought to dismantle this critique by branding McDonnell as a practical problem solver without compromising his conservative principles.

Republicans can be specific, detailed, and confident in putting forward solutions relevant to the middle class, while also being more conservative than we have been in recent years (especially with the Bush era spending binge). There's not an either/or tradeoff between conservatism and a policy focus, something the McDonnell campaign proved in Virginia this year.

The lesson of the McDonnell campaign: Maintain your conservative principles, but make the election about policy. And whatever the issue, make sure you've got an app for that.

Sarah Burris of Future Majority beats me to the punch in rebutting a blog post about a “Rising Tide of the GOP Youth,” as described by The Weekly Standard’s Rachel Hoff. Burris writes:

First, while Rachel is right to congratulate McDonnell for his campaign’s youth outreach, I hardly think it has anything to do with young voters having gone to the GOP…

This doesn’t mean young voters have gone GOP, it means that when you put forth the effort to get young voters, you speak to their issues, and you get out the vote you get a good result.

I wish I felt comfortable celebrating the fact that the 2009 elections meant young voters were turning toward the GOP, but unfortunately I just don’t buy it. Hoff suggests that “18-29 year olds in Virginia voted for Bob McDonnell over the Democrat 54% to 44%” could indicate a new trend, but as Burris notes, in Virginia there was not a “strong Democrat at the top of the ticket but…[there was] a strong Republican.” The unfortunate fact is that one Republican candidate’s successful effort in winning the youth vote does not indicate any sort of trend for future elections (for a counterargument, just look to New Jersey, where 57% of young voters voted for Corzine).

And while Hoff notes that “turnout among 18-29 year olds was 19% in New Jersey and only 17% in Virginia,” an “alarmingly low” turnout, it would be a huge mistake for the GOP to write off the youth vote based upon these numbers. As I have written previously, what’s at stake here is that the Republican Party stands to lose a generation of voters to the Democratic Party, potentially for life. Although Chairman Steele has taken some major efforts to reform the Republican National Committee, such as a huge push to modernize the RNC’s new media efforts, there still has not been a substantial push by Steele’s RNC to win over young voters.

In the end, both Burris and Hoff agree that making a real, authentic effort to earn the votes of young voters will result in young voter turnout. The Republican Party still has time left to turn the tide and prevent many of today’s young voters from becoming lifelong Democrats; however, the clock is ticking and time is running out. Major congratulations are due to the McDonnell campaign and their young voter outreach, but there is no time to pat ourselves on the back. Both the RNC and Republican candidates must follow Bob McDonnell’s lead and find unique new ways to reach out to and ultimately win over young voters.

Did conservatives or progressives win on Tuesday? Don't listen to what they say, pay attention to what they do.

Politico reports "Climate change on the back burner?"

Climate change has slipped so far down on the agenda that at least one key committee chairman has suggested it might have to wait until after the 2010 elections.

A number of factors are conspiring against the Senate version of the bill: a Republican boycott on the Environment and Public Works Committee, a new EPA analysis that could take at least five weeks and wide-ranging disagreements among six competing Senate committee leaders who have jurisdiction.

“Some people are talking about not doing it until after the 2010 election,” Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said Tuesday.

 ABC News reports Top Dems: Obama Won't Get Health Care Bill in 2009

Senior Congressional Democrats told ABC News today it is highly unlikely that a health care reform bill will be completed this year, just a week after President Barack Obama declared he was "absolutely confident" he'll be able to sign one by then.

"Getting this done by the by the end of the year is a no-go," a senior Democratic leadership aide told ABC News. Two other key Congressional Democrats also told ABC News the same thing.

 The Senate is not going to vote on health care till January 2010. The Senate is not going to vote on cap and trade till after November 2010. The left is scared and on the run. We have the initiative. We need to press them on jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

[Disclosure: I worked with the Doug Hoffman campaign. However, the views here are my own. I have not discussed this at all with the Hoffman campaign.]

The bottom line on NY-23:

• Doug Hoffman just won the Republican Primary. The general election is next year.

• There are two broken, corrupt, arrogant political parties we need to defeat.  We beat the Republican establishment in 2009.  We'll beat the Democratic Party in 2010.

• NY-23 is not really about Conservatives VS Moderates.  It is about the Establishment VS the Movement.

What happened in NY-23:

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that blue state Republicans had to nominate a "not too hot, not too cold" candidate - what my friend Max Borders called a Keynesian political strategy of tweaking the policy variables until you get a candidate whose positions seem most appealing to the most people.  Like Keynesian economic tinkering, it all works very well....until some fundamental shift reveals the underlying artificiality, and it all falls apart.

Political parties gain power by standing for something appealing.  But when a party gains power, it loses definition.  Rather than standing for something appealing and well-defined, they try to stand for anything appealing enough to win.  But you can only tinker so much before you destroy the brand that people had elected, and then you become the minority again.

The minority is where Parties and movements go to be reborn.  There, they have to figure out who they are, and what their mission is.  You can't storm the castle until you're all facing the same direction and focused on the same goals.  Sometimes - as in NY-23 - that involves telling the establishment "Thank you, but our mission is in another castle" (If I might borrow political wisdom from Super Mario Bros).

The establishment GOP - the NY GOP, the NRCC, the RNC and a few prominent Republicans - got behind another establishment GOP type in Dede Scozzafava. In any other recent year, she would have sailed through.  Not in 2009.

The public - including moderates, libertarians and alienated Republicans - has grown much more nervous about Democratic governance.  The Tea Party movement is just one manifestation of the sparks that are flying, but it goes far deeper than that, and the establishment GOP has been oblivious to, or dismissive of, these sparks. With Dede Scozzafava, the establishment Republican Party threw gasoline on top of the sparks and a brushfire erupted.  The result was the quintessential "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" campaign of Doug Hoffman.

What NY-23 Is About

The story of NY-23 is not "conservatives beat moderates" or "conservative loses to Democrat".

The story of NY-23 is "the Right starts dismantling the Republican establishment."  This is about how the Republican Party is defined and who defines it.

Right now, the movement wants the Republican Party to be defined by opposition to big government. Gradually, as new leaders arise, we will demand that the Republican Party be defined by its own solutions, as well, but rebuilding is an incremental process. We can hammer out the policy agenda and the boundaries of the coalition later.

For now, our job is to disrupt the establishment GOP.  If we beat Democrats while we're at it, great. But the first priority is to fix the Drunk Party - the Living Dead establishment Republicans. They're history. They just don't know it yet.

NY-23 was the first shot in that war.  It was a direct hit.  Next year, we start storming the castle.

Its been said that Democrats have two growing electoral bases: trial lawyers and voter fraud.

Republican candidates who get screwed in elections by Democrat / Leftist / ACORN voter fraud is so common that its deserving of its own Wylie Coyote routine.

This year, its time we stand up and fight.

We can send Jon Corzine packing this year if we prevent him & the New Jersey political machine from stealing yet another election.

The same goes for a myriad of other races today.

So, today we fight back.

And we fight back with Web 2.0.

Here are four simple ways to report voter fraud:

Twitter | use #votefraud hashtag

YouTube | visit http://www.youtube.com/group/votefraud09

Flickr | visit: http://www.flickr.com/groups/votefraud

Facebook | visit: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=214486540096

 [UPDATE: 3:23 PST 11/3/09]:  John Henke requested that we add links to "prove" that vote fraud was occurring.  Or had occurred. 

I can't speak for this year's election (yet).  Hopefully as a result of Web 2.0, we won't have to.

But as for past instances of vote fraud, my definition of vote fraud INCLUDES vote registration fraud (some people differ).  Check these links out.  Also, John Fund has an excellent book that i highly recommend reading.

Most folks on this site today, tomorrow, and the rest of this week will come here to slice and dice the election results in NY-23, NJ, and VA.  As Patrick's earlier column noted, the NY-23 situation (paired with the endorsement of Crist by the NRSC, etc.) has rankled many conservatives and has broken faith between the conservative faithful and the national party organizations.

There's no doubt that national party organizations have a great amount of resources and knowhow that can be of great use to a local campaign that is just getting its bearings.  Whether or not you agree with their recent play-calling, simply the financial resources and infrastructure alone do give national parties value in elections.  Yet a lot of what we've seen as big campaign successes these last few cycles haven't been born here in DC but rather came out of clever ideas and innovations by campaigns outside the Beltway. (On the other side of the aisle, look at the early Obama campaign as a great example.)

Which begs the question - how can the resources of the national parties be brought to bear in elections without eclipsing or smothering local efforts?  

Another hot topic here at The Next Right is on the topic of innovating in campaigns, at coming up with the Next Big Thing to help usher our candidates to victory.  What if the national party (RNC or either of the campaign committees) set aside some funds specifically to invest in innovations being tested at the local or state level?  Think of it like a national party version of venture capital funding - looking for potential Next Big Ideas or candidates with real promise who are underfunded and under the radar, giving them the seed money, and letting them implement fresh campaign thinking?  

This will probably get blowback from entrenched consultant types who make a killing each year running "tried-and-true" (and tired) campaign tactics.  I imagine that makes this idea even more appealing to many up-and-comers.  If, say, the NRCC were to offer to max out contributions to 15 candidates whose campaigns submit a proposal for something truly unique they want to do with their campaign, I can't help but wonder how much brainstorming that might inspire.  This wouldn't have to be terribly expensive in the end, and out of 15 ideas, maybe only one or two really uncover a great new method of voter contact or targeting.  But that's one or two ideas we didn't have before.

Right now, the national parties in many ways are like private equity firms, sweeping in to races that need "national help", investing money, hoping for a return on that investment.  That can work too and in some cases, when a local campaign is falling apart at the seams, there needs to be a national organization to pick up the slack.  But I think if our national parties started acting a bit more like venture capital firms - investing in good ideas, letting them flourish or fail, reaping huge payoffs when one succeeds - we might have a shot at spurring some innovation as well as finding a role for national parties that respects local control.

This is just a passing thought, and idea I haven't firmed up quite enough, but I wanted to throw it out there to The Next Right commenting corps to see if the idea resonates at all.

As a Vice Chairman of the New York State Conservative Party, I have been involved in the Special Election to replace Congressman McHugh from the beginning.

Personally, I opposed Dede because she is radically pro-abortion, a rare Republican who voted twice to legalize gay marriage, in favor of card check, refused to rule out the public option, and supported Obama's stimulus. When I warned friends in the national Republican Party that she is way to the Left of the voters in this district they refused to listen and dumped a million dollars into her race. I also speculated that if she won she would likely switch parties.

Today's, news that she endorsed the Democrat did not come as a surprise to me. Throughout this race I have been disappointed about how tone deaf most national Republicans have been to the millions of Americans who see candidates like Dede as the problem and not the solution.

Local Republicans (outside of New York where moderate Republicans have virtually destroyed their party) in Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere took it upon themselves to endorse our candidate Doug Hoffman . They understood what Newt, the RNC, and NRCC failed to comprehend: Millions of Americans feel that their country is being subverted by big government liberals and they are not interested in winning elections with the wrong candidates.

The national Republicans are so clueless that they praised Dede for suspending her campaign. Until the end they did not know that she is a Left wing opportunist not a loyal Republican.

On Friday, a leading Republican in the House asked me what the Republican Party should do to win back the trust of conservatives. I said run conservative candidates and continue to build a record of opposing Left wing policies. This Republican expressed a fear that third parties will emerge across the country. I told him a third party movement will materialize if the Republican Party does not embrace the majority of Americans who consider themselves conservatives.

 Today's Washington Times has a story by Ralph Hallow about NY-23. One of the things Ralph discussed was Newt Gingrich's struggles with the race. He quotes Newt:

He said Mr. Hoffman's "rise is a result of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, the Club for Growth, Gov. [Sarah] Palin and [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Pawlenty and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and virtually the entire national conservative movement joining with Mike Long, whose Conservative Party, a very established organization, which won its first big race 39 years ago."

It is striking to me that Tim Pawlenty is the only presumptive 2012 candidate in that list, unless Sarah Palin really gets in, but there are no indications that she is. After a Presidential primary in which Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee fought out for the conservative mantle (to a stalemate, I might add), they both were absent from this battle.

You see, NY-23 is the first big fight of the 21st century for the conservative movement. It is important to remember that this movement is about moving the to the right by moving its governing coalition to the right. That means, by definition, the Republican Party because it is the vehicle of the center-right coalition in American politics. There can be no doubt that, whatever the result on Tuesday or afterwards, that the leadership of the GOP has been chastened. Marc Ambinder's analyzes the race and concludes that Scozzafava's social liberalism was necessary to create the conditions on the ground for the Conservative Party to reach out to national groups. However, ultimately, the Club for Growth, responding to her positions on card-check, the stimulus, etc., funded Hoffman and really made this happen. In other words, the two key components of the conservative movement came together in perfect complimentarity.

So we have the definitional fight for the conservative movement, post-Bush. And only Pawlenty shows up at the fight? But for the movement, the question is as much "are you with us on the fight" as it is "are you with us on issues". Let's consider how this impacts Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, both of whom declined being in the fight over the last several weeks.

Let's take Huckabee first. Mike Huckabee not only didn't endorse Doug Hoffman, Huckabee took $20,000 away from Hoffman's GOTV effort (which tells me that he isn't running, but ...):

Huckabee, who according to Upstate Committee sources is receiving a five-figure fee in excess of $20,000 for his appearance, has refused to personally endorse Hoffman, who is pro-life and signed the "no-tax" pledge in August before his announced candidacy, and has informed Hoffman that HuckPAC will not support him either. Some Conservative Party officials believe Huckabee's fee is intended for his PAC. Ironically, the dinner is held to honor conservatives who exemplify conservative principles.

This offers a(nother) critique of Huckabee from the movement perspective. Huckabee is particularly vulnerable here. In 2008, no electorally significant critique damaged Huckabee within his base of evangelical voters. Why? I think that Ramesh Ponnuru nailed it in a discussion of Romney's campaign:

Romney’s problem was not that he is a Mormon. It was that he is not an evangelical. A strong plurality of evangelicals “would have backed Huckabee against anybody — Mormon, Buddhist, or Catholic,” says another former Romney adviser. “They were voting for one of their own.” To attribute Romney’s loss in Iowa to anti-Mormon prejudice from evangelicals, he says, is like attributing Romney’s victories in Utah and Nevada to Mormons’ hostility to people from all other faiths. But this adviser reaches the same conclusion as his colleagues who blamed anti-Mormonism: Romney should not spend as much time and resources on Iowa next time. 

In other words, the options for Huckabee voters were to go to Romney. Not going to happen. But guess what? Tim Pawlenty is an evangelical. Indeed, during the VP speculation in 2008, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody argued, "Pawlenty may be the one guy to help McCain with working class moderates AND socially conservative Evangelicals." So he can genuinely compete with Huckabee or someone similar to his right.

Ramesh notes that Romney ran as the candidate of the conservative movement (and I would point out that Fred Thompson's candidacy was about the fundamental mismatch of Romney the man and Romney the candidate of the movement):

All these advisers may, however, be looking at Romney’s options too narrowly. Romney’s strategy in the last campaign was not to run as the social conservatives’ candidate. It was to run as the movement-conservative candidate. Throughout the primary he claimed that he best represented what he called “the three legs of the stool” holding up conservatism, with the legs representing conservative positions on social issues, economics, and foreign policy. The attempt to rally his party’s right made a certain strategic sense. Giuliani and John McCain started the primary season with higher profiles than Romney and, in different ways, represented the party’s left wing. Running to the right thus presented Romney with an opportunity.

Romney, in not playing in NY-23 has, in some important sense, laid the groundwork for a(nother) criticism of him as the candidate of the conservative movement. How can he be the candidate of the movement but duck out on the first major fight of the movement. (2nd, if you count healthcare, which doesn't cut nicely for Mitt...) Can he really run from the same location that he had earlier? No. This suggests that he is taking the route that Ramesh almost recommends by moving to the left end of the party and/or the establishment. (I distinguish between these)

This time Romney could follow a different path. There are no prospective McCains or Giulianis, no heavyweights from the left or even the center of the party. Instead of running as the movement conservative in the race, Romney could run as a party-establishment candidate who is acceptable to the Right. That strategy wouldn’t require him to move left on the issues. But it would entail, among other things, taking fewer jabs at the other candidates for not being conservative enough (jabbing them for having bad ideas would still be in season). It would entail advertising Romney’s conservatism less. The policies could still be conservative — but he would promote them as good ideas more than as conservative ones. 

 I don't know how this plays out. Romney running from establishment/left of the party, and Pawlenty running to the right? Perhaps. There's another angle that Ramesh notes:

To be a strong candidate, finally, Romney has to address one weakness that has not gotten much attention: his lack of appeal to middle-income and low-income voters. The exit polls from the primaries tell a consistent story. In Iowa and Florida, he won pluralities only among those voters who made more than $100,000 a year. In New Hampshire, voters had to make more than $150,000 before they started favoring him. Michigan, where Romney’s father was governor, was the great exception: Romney won among every income group above $30,000 a year. If Romney can’t find an economic message and a way of making it that appeals to middle-class voters, he may as well save his money and not bother running.

Again, we have Pawlenty's strong suit: reaching out to the middle class and working class.

The field is set. A working-to-middle class Midwestern candidate with strong evangelical roots running against a white-shoe Northeast wealthy candidate with strong western roots. This will be an interesting battle.

For the better part of today, I have been reading reactions among the right to the news of Dede Scozzafava's withdrawl from the NY-23 race.  Probably the most oft repeated commentary I have seen is that the developments of this race once again prove that, "moderate Republicans rarely succeed, and true conservatism wins every time". 

Scozzafava dropping out is indeed a great thing for the conservative movement.  It represents a victory for the grassroots activists on the ground over a disconnected and out of touch Republican establishment.  But the analysis that says this proves "conservatism wins every time" is woefully misplaced, extremely lazy, and not at all grounded in reality.

This notion is an extension of rhetoric that has been used by Rush Limbaugh for years.  It has gained popularity as the "true conservative" (whatever that means) base has grown frustrated with what it sees as "squishy moderates" losing in national elections.  We heard it endlessly following John McCain's defeat in 2008, and had heard it previously when Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996.

But the reality is very different.  This increasingly popular notion is simply false, and lets take a look at why.

Since World War II, the Republican Party has run sixteen presidential campaigns.  It has won nine of those campaigns and lost seven:

• 1948 - Moderate Thomas Dewey (Loss)
• 1952 - Moderate Dwight Eisenhower (Win)
• 1956 - Moderate Dwight Eisenhower (Win)
• 1960 - Moderate Richard Nixon (Loss)
• 1964 -True Conservative Barry Goldwater (Loss)
• 1968 - Moderate Richard Nixon (Win)
• 1972 - Moderate Richard Nixon (Win)
• 1976 - Moderate Gerald Ford (Loss)
• 1980 - True Conservative Ronald Reagan (Win)
• 1984 - True Conservative Ronald Reagan (Win)
• 1988 - Moderate George HW Bush (Win)
• 1992 - Moderate George HW Bush (Loss)
• 1996 - Moderate Bob Dole (Loss)
• 2000 - Moderate George W. Bush (Win)
• 2004 - Moderate George W. Bush (Win)
• 2008 - Moderate John McCain (Loss)

Haggle about my definitions if you wish - but lets just say I am pretty comfortable labeling each of these men as I have put forth above.  The only one I even find debatable is George W. Bush - but that is mostly because he talked like a "true conservative" in 2000, but acted completely differently once in office, and the only bit of "true conservatism" in his administration was a large tax cut, and high defense spending.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand.  Republican moderates have a remarkable habit of winning nationally.  The only times they lost, they tended to have non-ideological reasons for losing. 

In 1948 Truman outlfanked Dewey with his whistlestop tour of America, connecting with the average American.  In 1960, Nixon went up against the transcendent John Kennedy, blew the campaign big time in the televised debate, and still probably won that election, were it not stolen by Kennedy's electoral shennanigans.  In 1976, Ford angered the country by pardoning Nixon.  In 2008, the entire country hated the Republican party, and Abraham Lincoln probably would have lost.

Every single one of those moderate losses - with the exception of McCain, and to some degree Dewey - were in extremely narrow elections that were decided by essentially one state.

Transversely, the only "true conservative" elected to the White House since World War II was Ronald Reagan.  Barry Goldwater got slaughtered, and every other "true conservative" couldn't even make it out of the primary.  Reagan's election is often pointed to as proof of concept on this theory, but was it about ideology?  No - in 1980 it was about economic malaise and American hostages, and in 1984 it was about an economic resurgence under Reagan's leadership.

Could "true" conservative candidates have won in '48, '52, '56, '60, '68, '72, '76, '88, '92, '96, '00, '04 or 08?  It is certainly possible, but if they did, it wouldn't have been because of their ideology.

This same analysis applies to more than just national elections.  Moderate Republicans often win crushing victories, and "true conservative" candidates often go down in flames.  But the opposite is also true - often moderates get absolutely spanked, while conservatives dominate.  Far too often we think elections are about ideology simply because we believe deeply in something, when they very rarely are.

But even if they are, the evidence in the last sixty years shows us that being a moderate does not even come close to dooming one's candidacy, and being a conservative hardly means you "win every time".

The victory of the conservative grassroots in rejecting Scozzafava in favor of Hoffman is a great thing.  I applaud it.  I happen to belong to a wing of the party that is fiscally to the right of Reagan, so I am hardly arguing for us to turn to moderates to solve our electoral problems here.

My problem is cheap, dime store analysis that is devoid of logic or rationality.  We should argue for more conservative candidates where more conservative candidates can win - but going with the superficial and inaccurate echo chamber soundbites like "conservatism wins every time it is tried" as the accepted explanation for an eventual Hoffman victory simply cheapens the conversation.

If we want to win, we need to understand why we win, and why we lose.  Such nonsensical rhetoric does not help us in that regard, so I suggest we stop saying it.  Real political analysis deserves better.

What follows may be akin to one of those crazy ideas Dick Morris used to come up with in the Clinton White House, only one in ten of which turned out to be workable -- but when they worked, oh man, did they work.

The key fact that sticks out in my mind about Doug Hoffman's incredible momentum in NY-23 is that his election would not have been possible had he been the Republican nominee. The fact that we may be about to elect a non-squish from New York has everything to do with the fact that he is running as a third-party independent, and not a Republican (even if the Conservative Party is an auxiliary of the Republicans in most elections).

Hoffman as a Republican would have been too obvious a target and the subject of a relentless barrage of negative TV, websites, mail, and phones branding him as outside the mainstream, anti-choice, anti-worker, etc. But politically, Hoffman has managed to avoid all that until five days out, when it's now clear he's the frontrunner. And as Chris Cillizza points out this morning, Hoffman's success in the polls is built on the back among strong support among independents and (primarily) not Republican regulars disgusted at Scozzafava.

This got me thinking: How many points is an Independent party label worth, assuming you're able to vie for Republican votes in a general election? 5? 10? We know that in races with a plausible third party, that candidate automatically tends to earn more independent and moderate support even if they are ideologically indistinguishable from a Republican (Hoffman) or a Democrat (Chris Daggett in New Jersey).

We also know from Daggett's run in a strong-party, machine state that American politics is entering a phase of third party strength which we last saw in the early '90s with Ross Perot and culminating in the Republican Revolution of '94.

This led me to tweet the following this morning:

Brainstorm: what if Republicans were to withdraw from a series of hot Congressional races and run as conservative independents a la #ny23?

I am not one to believe that a situation exactly like Hoffman's is recreatable across the spectrum. Certainly, we would not want to have to take out every slightly wobbly Republican nominee (Scozzafava's problem was that she was very wobbly) with a third party conservative. With 435 House races on the ballot in 2010, the conservative movement won't have the energy to concentrate its Death Star gamma ray on hapless local establishments in every district.

But what if it were to happen peacefully? Or as a concerted strategy to gain votes?

What if you were to have promising Republican candidates running in Democratic-lean seats say, a few months out from the election, "Let me tell you something. I'm just as sick and tired of the Republicans as I am of the Democrats. So, from this moment forward, I'm running as a common-sense, Independent conservative for Congress."

From one perspective, this would not be helpful to efforts to tie the Republican brand to a broader sense of popular disgust at the Obama/Pelosi overreach. On the other hand, it might be a way for conservatives to invade the center, and thus control the high ground politically.

If you're a party person, don't dismiss this just yet. Say you're the NRCC and you haven't found a good recruit against a vulnerable House Democrat. Say the Republican nominee is a joke, or the incumbent is unopposed. Three months out, you go to your star recruit who turned you down a year ago and ask him to run as an independent. It's a three month campaign as opposed to an 18-month campaign. They don't have to quit their law practice or small business. They enter in the last few miles of the race, and you put serious pressure on the joke nominee to step aside, or put out word through local media and talk radio that this is the guy.

Now, I know one could raise myriad issues here. Ballot access for one. The reflexive aversion to third parties. The relative infrequency of unchallenged vulnerable Democrats, especially because 2010 won't be 2008 or 2006. And the prospect of bloody intra-party battles after the nomination has been settled.

All of these risks are arrayed against a few salient facts. First, the rising disgust at incumbent politicians that will play out over the next couple of years, accompanied by a "pox on both your houses" sentiment. Second, a proven history of entire party blocs picking up and moving to third parties when they need to (NY-23, or Joe Lieberman's 2006 re-election). There are two possibilities for an ideological third party candidate -- they can either flop and pose no serious threat (which happens the vast majority of the time because the candidates are nobodies) or dominate (if they are credible).

In a handful of races, perhaps in places where we can't win with the Republican label alone, it might be more useful for the general election to be a strong Independent versus a Democrat rather than a Republican versus a Democrat. At one extreme of the Cook PVI, let's stipulate that the general election against Charlie Rangel was waged with a Puerto Rican small business owner running on the No More Corrupt Politicians Party line with behind the scenes, logistical support from the GOP. At a minimum, that person would stand a better chance than a Republican in that district.

I'm a strong party guy, but I also believe in Sun Tzu's maxim that you do the unexpected to throw your opponent off balance. Strategically unleashing a swarm of conservative independents may be one such strategy for 2010.