WaPo’s Jonathan Weisman sees a trend:
In the shadow of the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut, angry voters in three states showed their discontent last night by unseating two incumbents and choosing a candidate who campaigned against his primary opponent’s bipartisan past. The defeat of Georgia’s outspoken Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D) and Michigan moderate Rep. John J.H. “Joe” Schwarz (R) appeared to confirm the strong headwinds that polls suggest members of Congress will face in November from an angry electorate looking for change.
Uh, against how many incumbents who won their primaries? Don’t they signal anything?
Oddly, since I tend to vote Republican, I have paid no attention to the Schwarz contest. I gather that he was, like Lieberman, defeated by a candidate more closely aligned with his party’s base.
McKinney is, well, McKinney. Slapping a police officer, making one outrageous statement after another, and an even nuttier dad making constant idiotic statements to the media were, shall we say, not helpful.
Now, I don’t doubt that there’s a strong anti-incumbent wind out there. But three losses easily explained by the idiosyncracies of the individual contests are hardly further evidence for it.
