Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Jon Bruning’
May 15th, 2012 at 1:41 pm
GOP Establishment About to Take Another Hit in Nebraska?
Posted by Print

As the 2012 election cycle has progressed, one of the growing memes on the left has been that the Tea Party has lost a lot of the anti-establishment momentum it had in 2010, when it was responsible for electing U.S. Senators like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Florida’s Marco Rubio. The pundits have been a little quick on the trigger finger.

Last week, 35-year Senate veteran Richard Lugar went down to defeat in Indiana at the hands of the Tea Party candidate, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, a race that we chronicled at length here at CFIF. Today, voters heading to the polls in Nebraska may deliver a similar shock to the GOP establishment.

The establishment choice, state Attorney General Jon Bruning, has been under fire for exactly the kind of crony capitalism that has come to define Tea Party distaste for business as usual. It was long thought that State Treasurer Don Stenberg — who enjoyed the support of Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, FreedomWorks, and the Club for Growth — would be the conservative alternative to Bruning. But in recent days, Bruning’s numbers are falling without Stenberg’s rising proportionately.

The reason is a third candidate, State Senator Deb Fischer, who has recently emerged from relative obscurity thanks to endorsements from Sarah Palin and Congressman Jeff Fortenberry. According to recent polling, there’s a very real possibility of Fischer pulling off an upset of epic proportions and walking away with the nomination. And while Stenberg’s supporters aren’t happy to see their man failing to close, they’re already suggesting that Fischer would be an acceptable alternative to Bruning and the business as usual he represents.

We’ll have to watch the polls tonight to see how this thing resolves, but one thing’s for sure: even the worst-case scenario for Tea Partiers (a narrow win by Bruning) would send a powerful message to the GOP establishment in Washington: the Tea Party is here to stay.

March 7th, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Dems Can’t Seem to Find Salvation in Nebraska
Posted by Print

Last week, I posted about how the defection-masquerading-as-retirement of Maine’s liberal Republican Senator Olympia Snowe set back the GOP’s hopes for winning back the Senate by putting an open seat in a deep-blue state into play for this fall’s elections. The results of some new polling in another contest halfway across the nation, however, should tamp down some of Democrats’ more enthusiastic expectations for Election Day.

Ever since the Senate’s most conservative Democrat (a designation akin to being the MVP of a Pygmy basketball league), Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, announced just after Christmas that he would be retiring with the end of his term this year, the party has been distraught. Nelson’s situation is almost a mirror image of Snowe’s. Considered an ideological apostate, he is little loved by his party’s base. His personal popularity, however, has kept safe a seat that would otherwise fall easily into the opposition’s hands (Nebraska is just as safely Republican as Maine is Democratic).

Democrats thought they had cut the Gordian Knot by recruiting former Senator Bob Kerrey back from his new stomping grounds in New York City (after quite a bit of hemming and hawing) to contend for the open seat, with many analysts believing (quite plausibly, I might add) that Kerrey was the only Democrat with the potential to hold the seat.

According to some new polling from Rasmussen, however, the dream seems to have been premature. The results show Kerrey (who is a known commodity in Cornhusker State politics, having spent four years as Governor and 12 years as a U.S. Senator) trailing the Republican front-runner, Attorney General Jon Bruning, by 22 points. State Treasurer Don Stenberg, who has earned the endorsement of Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, is up 18 on Kerrey. Thus far, it looks like the Democrats’ hopes that a single transformative figure could lead them to the promised land were quixotic. If only there were an example from recent history that could have warned them of that possibility …