Too many Democratic deserters cost Berkley a U.S. Senate seat

[brentspeak]

In short: a) A better Democratic candidate likely would have defeated Heller
b) This was one race where Karl Rove's machine and dark money did make the difference for the GOP

http://ralstonreports.com/blog/too-many-democratic-deserters-cost-berkley-us-senate-seat

Too many Democratic deserters cost Berkley a U.S. Senate seat

Submitted by jon.ralston on Wed, 11/07/2012 - 14:59

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Yes, it’s rank speculation. But I have to believe a serious subset of those people were prospective Berkley voters who would never vote for Heller but who could not bring themselves to hold their noses and vote for her because the stench of unethical behavior was too pungent...Since September 2011, when the New York Times first exposed her congressional actions that could have benefited her kidney doctor husband, Berkley has been weighted down by the issue and a subsequent House Ethics Committee probe. Heller and outside groups relentlessly pounded her in ads, driving her negatives up to Harry Reid-like levels. For those who didn't know here before or didn't know her well -- and there were hundreds of thousands of those -- it was not the nicest of introductions. Her campaign tried to muddy the waters by raising questions about Heller's ethics, but they were not nearly so potent and she constantly seemed to be flailing to find a good line of attack.

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Yet: She almost won...

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That is testament to the power of the Democratic machine and the drag Mitt Romney was on Heller, which his campaign realized a month or so ago, and his team began to fret about whether he could hold on. He barely did.

Exit polls show Berkley ran up the score (40 points!) with Hispanics, but lost independents by too wide a margin (20 points) to survive. If she had just run a little stronger in Clark County, the result would have been different, too.

So Heller becomes the only GOP Senate candidate to hold on in a state that went blue in the presidential race, garnering the lowest percentage of the vote (just under 46) in decades for a U.S. senator and showing that he needed every dollar of those Crossroads/AFP millions spent here to save him. Now we get to find out the answer to the mystery: Which Dean Heller will we see during the next six years? The “No Labels” Dean, the Tea Party Dean or....the Latino-loving Dean?