Glenn Beck: And you win by 3 points? That's a victory? You've double‑teamed an accountant and you only won by three points. Boy, you guys are good... That's like the Yankees playing a high school team and winning by three runs. Oh, wow!
Here's what the Republicans should learn. The tea party movement, if you think you're going to run people that are going to be, you know, ACORN wannabes and they're just part of the corruption, part of the system, if you're going to run those people, you can expect a tea party guy to come out, and the tea parties, they'll help you lose every single election. ...So the Republicans have a choice to make. You can either spend a million dollars trying to destroy a third party accountant, or you could say, wow, this accountant probably would come in within three points of beating the Democrat if we combined our efforts, Republicans and Democrats, spent a fortune, had our candidate then drop out and campaign for the Democrats, we might be able to come in with about a 3‑point margin. You might want to just say, "Maybe we should go with the accountants. Maybe we should go with the regular people.”
Rush Limbaugh: See, this is the dirty little secret: If the party had gotten behind Hoffman from the beginning, he would have won going away. I have no doubt about that. I'll tell you something else. People are now talking about Hoffman's lack of charisma and familiarity with local issues. The huge story of
Erick Erickson, RedState.com: This is a huge win for conservatives … First, the GOP now must recognize it will either lose without conservatives or will win with conservatives. In 2008, many conservatives sat home instead of voting for John McCain. Now, in NY-23, conservatives rallied and destroyed the Republican candidate the establishment chose.
I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman winning would just be gravy. A Hoffman win is not in the cards, but we did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed GOP candidate.
Haley Barbour, Republican Governors Association conference call: The media and the left, they want to act like there's some great war in the Republican Party between conservatives and moderates. They point to this deal in New York. The crime in New York State was that the state party chairmen allowed a handful of people to pick our nominee. Instead of a participatory process, the state chairman--who, by the way, has been replaced--turned it over to a handful of people. I woulda been mad too, if they tried to do that in Mississippi.
John McCormack, The Weekly Standard: Even if you're not generally a fan of the winning-by-losing theory, Republicans and conservatives really should be glad that conservative Doug Hoffman chased liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava from the field in
So thank Doug Hoffman for showing the GOP establishment that a conservative can win in upstate
Karl, at HotAir.com: I always saw the NY-23 race as a sui generis clusterfark, so Hoffman coming up short did not exactly shock me.
Michelle Malkin: Better a donkey in office that acts like a donkey than a donkey in elephant’s clothing making a complete ass of the GOP.
The Editors, National Review: If there’s a lesson from the race besides the obvious — don’t let out-of-touch GOP officials pick liberal congressional candidates — it is that conservatives need to run campaigns based not only on their philosophical soundness but on the improved conditions that this soundness can be expected to generate.
C.K. MacLeod: As for movement conservatives still left with mixed feelings about what occurred, the lesson seems obvious, and is, I believe, already being absorbed: For the foreseeable future and on this side of the Apocalypse, the electoral action will remain in the R party of Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell – and Michael Steele and John Boehner and even Newt Gingrich – not in the fantasy 3rd Party of Glenn Beck’s musings or in the bloody shambles after a conservative night of the long knives. Big victories went to the unified party-movement –