Readers have most likely seen the news headlines about the New York special election, for House district 26, being a referendum on Paul Ryan’s budget plan. The Left has been repeating the mantra that this election was about Medicare, but making the race in New York’s 26th district exclusively about Medicare, would be like saying that the 2008 Presidential Election was exclusively about Iraq.
Democrat Kathy Hochul won the Tuesday election with 47% of the vote, The Republican Jane Corwin received 42% of the vote while the TEA Party candidate (Davis) received 9% of the vote. If the narrative were actually as stated above then the Democrat would have had a clear majority, which she didn’t get.
The truth here is that the Democrats wanted the election to be about Medicare. Much of the reporting is projection rather than reality, due to millions of dollars going to ads like this:
Another regularly repeated mantra is that the TEA Party candidate was taking votes from the Democrat. Of course there were no exit polls, so it is impossible to know. Any polling was pre-election (these polls are often inaccurate). But there was a clear attempt by Hochol to lump Davis in with Republicans.
The most important lesson here is that the third-party candidacy very likely cost the Republicans this race. Davis wanted to Republican nomination earlier in the process and didn’t get it, so he ran as the sour grapes candidate. Inter-party sniping and sour grapes will only cause people to lose. The Democrats benefited from a third-party spoiler, which has been the pattern of third-party candidacies.
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