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December 30, 2004

Gregoire v Rossi

I guess it's not that surprising that the Republican loser of the Washington governor's race wants to throw the election out in favor of the new one. I don't see quite what the point is, though. I'm sure a high percentage of Republican activists in Washington state feel that they were robbed, but I doubt more than 20% of the overall electorate really cares that a Republican lost. (Maybe an additional 20% of the electorate on the Democratic side care, but they'll never vote for a Republican anyway).

It's odd, then, that Rossi has gone public with his request to throw out the result for a new election. Surely if there were a new election it would be easy for Gregoire (the winner) to paint Rossi as a sore loser, ala what Bush did to Gore during the Florida recount that, unlike Rossi, Gore actually had a good chance of winning if all of the votes had been counted.

So why would Rossi do something like this? It makes no sense at all to me. He was set up perfectly to run for the US Senate in 2006 as the "wronged" candidate who did the right thing by conceding to Gregoire so that she could start off governing the state with full legitimacy intact. Now he looks like a sore loserman.

The only thing I can think of is that history teaches us that you don't really get anything from being a noble loser. Al Gore did the "right thing" after the 2000 election and then was right on more than one high profile occasion in opposing Bush's war in Iraq. And he's not exactly our newly elected President now, and in fact, the conservatives who have benefited from the legitimacy he bestowed on Bush now hate him more than ever. I guess Rossi just thinks that you never win by admitting that you've lost. Regardless, Washington state has had an odd couple of months.

Posted by Chris at December 30, 2004 06:40 PM

Comments

I'm in Washington state right now, and have had a chance to catch quite a bit of local coverage. According to what I've seen here, Rossi has been under a lot of pressure from the national Republican party not to concede. No big surprise, I guess.

Posted by: Joseph G [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 31, 2004 01:02 PM

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