Rhode Island, says New York Times number-crunching blog FiveThirtyEight, is the most politically elastic state, meaning that “a large swatch of its electorate are persuadable voters unaligned with either political party.”In a separate piece on political elasticity Nate Silver describes elastic states as “those which have a lot of swing voters — that is, voters who could plausibly vote for either party’s candidate.”
It’s one of the reasons, FiveThirtyEight reports, that we elect a lot of Democrats to the General Assembly and a lot of Republicans to the governor’s office. (We haven’t had a Democratic governor in almost 20 years!)
But it’s also one of the reasons why our hugely-Democratic legislature generally passes some pretty conservative legislation … Just consider our landmark pension reform law that conservatives around the country are so fond of, or our new voter ID law – we’re the only blue state in the country to have one!
Speaking of State House races … only in East Greenwich (okay, and also Barrington and Greenwich, Conn.) is an upper-middle-class, fiscally-conservative/socially-liberal, white, male professional “not your typical General Assembly candidate” because he is a doctor rather than a lawyer or a businessman! EG needs to diversify like Central Falls needs tax dollars; the difference is one deficiency is debilitating and the other is easy ignore.
The reality is, because of the aforementioned attributes, Dr. Mark Schwager couldn’t be a more demographically typical state legislator. He’s also the best candidate in a three-way race to replace Bob Watson (the outgoing fiscally-conservative/socially-liberal, white, male professional from Agrestic … er, I mean East Greenwich). Schwager’s medical experience would serve the state well on Smith Hill and, even more importantly, he possesses impeccable character – an increasingly rare quality in politicians in particular but also people in general…
…And speaking of upper-middle-class, white East Greenwich professionals with impeccable character, EG owes a huge thank you to Patch Editor Elizabeth McNamara, who covers her community as well as any other reporter in Rhode Island.
Mark Binder says Gordon Fox is for sale. A serious allegation. Now that the ProJo put it on the front page, they ought to go out and ferret out the truth. Grab that list from Binder, call and ask everyone on it what their expectation was for their donation and then let us know what they say.
“Like Lazarus, Cicilline appears to have risen from the ranks of the political dead,” Cook Political Report on the Congressman’s comeback, according to Ted Nesi.
Bob Kerr on grinding: “Come on, people, June and Ward Cleaver left the building a long time ago.”
I’m with Mike Riley on this one … Jim Langevin should have done the WPRO debate with him and Abel Collins.
And here’s another instance of me agreeing with a conservative on a fiscal matter.