Keep Digging, Jay

Brian Scheid of the Bucks County Courier Times provides a bit of analysis today concerning the election last Tuesday in which Jim Cawley was returned to office as a Bucks County Commissioner along with his partner Charley ("I Have A Semi-Open Mind") Martin over Steve Santarsiero (and kudos to Scheid for leading off his column with a reference to "The Simpsons" by the way).

I think it's pretty safe to say that the degree to which we were snookered here is beginning to sink in, by the way, based on this...

While it would be impossible to determine if Bucks residents who voted for Russell would have voted for a Democrat instead if Russell weren't on the ballot, John Cordisco, chairman of the Bucks County Democratic Committee, said it “clearly impacted us.”

Cordisco said votes for Russell, a Northampton wholesale gardener who campaigned on a motorcycle with a bare-bones budget, might have been “anti-incumbent” votes that might otherwise have gone toward the Democratic candidates, who were both neophytes to county politics.

I supposed Scheid is right about that regarding Steve and Diane (possibly meaning that they didn't know how scummy Cawley would get with his tactic of using Jay Russell as a decoy?), but I don't know what that has to do with anything exactly.

And as for Russell himself...

Russell, who ran as a Constitution Party candidate and who scored from five to 819 votes in every Bucks municipality, laughed off claims that he was a spoiler in Tuesday's election. Russell said his supporters were neither Democrats nor Republicans and might not have even voted in the commissioners race if he were not on the ballot.

If they would not have even bothered to vote without Russell on the ballot, then they're as dumb as he is.

This, however, shoots a hole in Russell's supposed argument...

About 15 percent of Bucks voters are registered as independents or members of a third party, including Green and Libertarian party members. However, only 56 voters in Bucks are officially registered as members of the Constitution Party (Russell ran supposedly representing this party), which has a Bible-based platform and supports candidates who “uphold the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States,” according to its Web site.

That means that less than 1 percent of the 5,792 voters who cast ballots for Russell could have been official members of his political party.

An excellent analysis by Scheid; I'm glad the paper gives him this column on Saturdays (nothing against Kate Fratti or the mysteriously-much-improved J.D. Mullane, but Scheid is a reporter as opposed to a pundit type, and it shows).

And by the way, speaking of "not even bothering to vote," an editorial in the paper today tells us that the Bucks County turnout on Tuesday at the polls constituted approximately 24 percent of eligible county voters.

Therefore, any members of the remaining 76 percent who have a problem with Cawley and Martin (or even Diane Marseglia) have automatically forfeited their right to bitch about anything.