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Joe Miller Moves Forward With Senate Bid, Appears on Cavuto (+video)

Tea party favorite Joe Miller has filed Federal Election Commission papers to challenge incumbent Sen. Mark Begich, one of several sitting Democrats seen as vulnerable by the GOP.

“Support from the grass roots has been overwhelmingly positive, and we are moving forward within those guidelines organizing, fundraising, and coordinating with our volunteer base,” Mr. Miller said in a statement when Politico.com broke the news Tuesday.

Miller is best known for challenging incumbent Republican US Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010. With the backing of national tea party groups and Sarah Palin, he beat Senator Murkowski in the GOP primary by 2,006 votes out of 109,750 cast.

But Murkowski, a moderate Republican, came back to wage a write-in campaign backed by native corporations, political action committees, and some unions, dashing Miller’s hopes and holding onto her seat – the first time in more than 50 years that a US Senate candidate had won a write-in campaign.

Miller did not go down without a fight, however, challenging the election results up the Alaska state court system until a federal judge finally dismissed Miller’s suit and Murkowski was certified as the winner two months later.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Hispanic Vote in 2010

Before the 2010 election some commentators argued that the failure to address immigration would increase Hispanic turnout, while others argued it would cause them to stay home. New Census Bureau voting data show that neither of these predictions was correct. Hispanic turnout conformed to the pattern of recent mid-term elections.

Among the findings:

Prior to the 2010 election, the Center for Immigration Studies projected that Hispanics would comprise 6.8 percent of the national electorate in congressional elections. The new data from the Census Bureau almost exactly match this projection, with Hispanics comprising 6.9 percent of the vote.

Our projection was correct because it was based on the assumption that Hispanic turnout would follow past patterns for mid-term elections and that Hispanics would neither be especially animated nor especially disengaged in 2010.

The 31.2 percent of Hispanic citizens who voted in 2010 matches the 31.2 percent who voted in the 2002 mid-term election, and is very similar to the 32.3 percent who voted in 2006. All of these values fall within the margin of error of ± 1.7 percentage points and indicate that 2010 was not unusual.

In addition to the 6.9 percent of voters who identified as Hispanic in the 2010 election, 77.5 percent of voters identified as non-Hispanic white, 11.5 percent as non-Hispanic black, and 2.4 percent identified as non-Hispanic Asian.

Read More at CIS Steven A. Camarota, Ashley Monique Webster,Center for Immigration Studies