Last Call

The bottom line is that there's two very, very likely outcomes from the NY-23 race's "Doug Hoffman effect" :

With Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman running neck and neck with the Democrat in Tuesday’s special election in New York, some other disaffected Republicans are seeing the third-party route as more viable.

And it could hurt the Republicans in those races.

In Virginia’s 5th district, state Sen. Robert Hurt’s entry into the GOP primary has spurred little-known candidate Bradley Rees to switch to the Virginia Conservative Party. And in Ohio, another GOP primary contender said this week that he’ll run as a Constitution Party candidate.

Both will go at the GOP nominees from their right flanks and try to expose some unhappiness in conservative ranks. They might not be as well-funded as Hoffman or be filling quite as big a vacuum as the one left by Republican Dede Scozzafava’s left-leaning politcs, but they could steal valuable votes.

Rees isn’t afraid of playing spoiler to the establishment-favorite Hurt. He even suggested his third-party candidacy could help freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) stay in Congress.

“It may amount to only drawing enough votes from the Republican candidate to ensure Tom Perriello a second term,” Rees told the Lynchburg News and Advance.

“If so, so be it. Maybe then the party will understand that we are trying to save the GOP from its worst enemy — not the Democrats, but themselves.”

Scenario A is that third party candidates split the Republican vote and Democrats win. Scenario B is that the GOP embraces teabagger/birther/tenther nutjobs in the primaries and get smashed in the general. I've been leaning towards B for quite some time, but in a lot of House races I most certainly see A popping up, especially in red districts.

Which one of these should have the Dems shaking in their boots again? I'm a little fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing here.

In the Dune novels, the Holtzman Effect is what allows for personal shields and anti-grav flight, but if you shoot one with a laser, you get the equivalent of a resonant nuclear explosion (it's why they use knives.)

New tag so I can officially keep track of this phenomenon where third party teabagger candidates cause a resonant nuclear explosion when they come in contact with the GOP: The Hoffman Effect.

Boom.