Republican Refuses to Run as Republican

Submitted by Steve Peterson on Sat, 10/11/2008 - 12:04am. Tags:

Politics

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi wins court case so that he can continue to be listed on the Washington State ballot as a member of the "GOP party".

Some voters might be confused about what "GOP" means, a King County Superior Court judge said Friday, but that's not reason enough to change the way gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi describes himself on the general election ballot.

Rossi, a Republican, used the Republican Party's nickname, "GOP," when he filed in June to run against Gov. Christine Gregoire. The primary ballot listed his party as "prefers GOP party," and that same designation will carry over to the November ballot.

The Democrats' court case, amongst other things, came too late in the race to have much chance of winning (the state has already printed thousands of ballots, including 2,000 already sent to the military).

Regardless, even Republican leadership admits that Rossi's tactic may cause some confusion:

The Democrats pointed to a Sept. 19 letter indicating that Republican leaders, too, have been concerned about polls by local pollster Stuart Elway showing that as many as 18 percent of Republicans didn't know that GOP and Republican are synonyms.

I would've recommended running as a Whig, thus enabling him to hark back to the illustrious Millard Fillmore and solidify the elusive cartoon duck vote.

Steven Palmer Peterson

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GOP Party? (#128918)

by stillnotking on Sat, 10/11/2008 - 10:26am

I'd vote against him simply for the redundancy.

The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.

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Yeah, that's been pretty funny (#128883)

by HankP on Sat, 10/11/2008 - 12:14am

he's been doing nothing but run negative ads against Gregoire during the campaign, too. She's been hitting back by tying him to Bush and very unpopular Republican policies.

In case anyone has forgotten, the Washington State gubernatorial race in 2004 was one of the closest races in US history. Rossi was really a slimy little weasel, lying and backtracking on his statements throughout the recount. While the polls are close now, I doubt he'll be able to pull it off this time either.

I blame it all on the Internet

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