NY23: Scozzafava Quits, What Does This Mean for Republican Party?

A bomb just went off in New York. After the latest Siena poll that showed that the Republican candidate was taking a nose dive, the Scozzafava campaign announced that they were suspending:

Dede Scozzafava, the Republican and Independence parties candidate, announced Saturday that she is suspending her campaign for the 23rd Congressional District and releasing all her supporters.

The state Assemblywoman has not thrown her support to either Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate, or Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate."

Today, I again seek to act for the good of our community," Ms. Scozzafava wrote in a letter to friends and supporters. "It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so. I am and have always been a proud Republican. It is my hope that with my actions today, my party will emerge stronger and our district and our nation can take an important step towards restoring the enduring strength and economic prosperity that has defined us for generations."

This will free up Hoffman to take most of the voters that would of voted for Scozzafava. There really haven’t been any polls that I’ve seen, yet, that say how many of the her supporters will support Hoffman, but I would say that it is more likely that most will support Hoffman rather than support Owens.

On Twitter, Jordan Raynor asked a good question:

Does Scozzafava dropping out diminish the implications of a Hoffman win nationally? #ny23

I don’t think that it does diminish what has be accomplished by the grassroots Hoffman revolution. In fact, it validates all that it was supposed to achieve. The local Republican party made the choice of running someone who is more middle of the road because they believed that voters were looking for candidates that were more like Obama and other more liberal candidates not like Reagan. They had a rude awakening ever since Palin’s endorsement of Hoffman brought the race into the national spotlight even more than it already was. Palin made the people in the NY23 district take a closer look at Hoffman, and they liked what they saw from him much more than Scozzafava.

As a result, her numbers plummeted, and Hoffman pulled into a virtual tie with the Democrat Bill Owens. Hopefully, the national party is taking notes. We don’t them to run people like John McCain. We need them to realize Reaganism isn’t dead. The liberal agenda of the Obama Administration is awakening people to remember why they don’t want the United States to become a more liberal country.