UT-03

Wall Street Journal's Political Diary asks "Are Tom Tancredo's 15 minutes up yet?"

Yesterday's primary in Utah's Third Congressional District was positioned by the Rep Tancredo wing as a referendum on immigration. It is not clear that it remained clean after gambling and Satan entered the race, but Rep Tancredo's on a roll to challenge Kos and MoveOn.org for electoral irrelevance. All three of them want their whole party to follow them in the woods.

Holman Jenkins, in Political Diary, says:

The argument promoted by the anti-immigrant forces was that the Cannon race, in a district that remains strongly Republican and pro-Bush, would demonstrate that any Republican who voted for an immigration bill not focused solely on border enforcement was ingesting political cyanide. Late revelations that Mr. Jacobs had gambled in Las Vegas and hired an illegal Chilean couple undercut the clarity of his trumpet. And not helping was his complaint, confided to a newspaper editorial board, that "Satan" was militating on the other side. But Mr. Jacobs and his national supporters insisted the race was a referendum on guest worker proposals. So let's give them that.

Polling in the district showed the split between the candidates exactly mirrored the 44-40 split between voters who wanted a soft approach on immigration and those who wanted a border clampdown. In the event, Mr. Cannon took the race by a wide 56-to-44 margin. The anti-illegal immigrant cause is nothing if not the property of a passionate, noisy minority whose clout might be expected to be magnified in a lightly-attended primary vote. What happened?

Bad economics, bad politics.

UPDATE: Cannon won 63-33% in 2004 but trailed President Bush's 77-20%

Posted by jk at June 28, 2006 4:04 PM