I was listening to the radio on the way to a client meeting today when a caller came on to attack the evil that is the RINO. One of the points they made was the the GOP is only successful when they are pure conservatives and that this is why they won in 1994.
Being a political junkie and a bit of a numbers freak I decided to go back and take a look at the truth of that statement and perhaps not surprisingly found out that the RINO was actually key to the success in 1994.
For purposes of this discussion I will again look just at the states of the Northeast, consisting of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
In 1994 those nine states sent nine Republicans to the US Senate. Of those nine, at least five and perhaps as many as seven would fall in to the RINO category (the only absolutely true conservatives would be Santorum of PA and Smith of NH. Gregg of NH and D’Amato of New York fall into the not-sure category).
So if you subtract just the five clear RINO Senators and replace them with Democrats then you end up shifting the 54R-46D senate into a 51D-49R Senate.
On the House side, these states sent 32 Republicans to Congress and most of them would fall into the current RINO category. Assuming a fairly modest 2-1 split between RINO and ‘real Republican’ you get 20-21 RINOs. Shift those out out and move them over to the Democratic caucus and you have the 230-205 Republican House become the 225-210 Democratic one.
Short and simple, without the RINOs in 1994 Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich would have remained Minority Leader Newt for the rest of his career.
And if the GOP keeps up the purity tests, the next Republican Speaker will be sworn in on the moon.
Rino photo: shutterstock.com