Christine O’Donnell For Senate Again?

O'Donnell

Christine O’Donnell is suggesting she might make a bid to run against Chris Coons again:

At a special GOP convention Saturday to elect Charles L. Copeland state chair, O’Donnell said she did not know when she would make a decision about a campaign. She referenced persistent tension within the party, strife that was evident in 2010 when grassroots conservatives from southern Delaware feuded with moderate northern Republicans over her primary campaign against then-U.S. Rep. Mike Castle.

“We have to rebuild the foundation in the party,” O’Donnell said.

Some Republicans still believe such rebuilding needs to happen without O’Donnell.

“She’s contributed to the demise of the Republican Party,” said House Republican leader Dan Short, who said nothing has changed about O’Donnell or her role within the party since 2010.

State Auditor Tom Wagner, the party’s only statewide elected officeholder, said he thinks support for O’Donnell has faded along with the tea party fervor of 2010. “She’s just lost a lot of steam,” he said.

But Steve Grossman, a local Republican operative who worked on O’Donnell’s 2010 primary campaign, said her tea party base still represents a third of the Delaware GOP.

“The message is still out there, and they will vote,” he said. “There’s a segment of the party that will support a candidate like minded of Christine O’Donnell.”

I’m sure Chris Coons is encouraging O’Donnell to run.

FILED UNDER: 2014 Election, US Politics, , , , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Ben says:

    Oh please god, yes. Let’s all donate to make sure this happens again

  2. al-Ameda says:

    Yay, she’s back!

  3. OzarkHillbilly says:

    She’s not a witch. She’s a zombie.

  4. Gustopher says:

    Although she is entertainingly stupid, I have to ask how her voting record would differ from any other Republican?

  5. CSK says:

    She’s taking a leaf out of the Palin playbook: Hint that you might run, get people to donate to your pac, announce you’re not running at the last possible moment, and use the pac as your slush fund.

  6. Senyordave says:

    What’s up with the picture accompanying this story? Except for a twirling knit hat, it looks like something out of the opening credits to the Mary Tyler Moore show.

  7. CSK says:

    @Senyordave:

    Well, with this announcement (or whatever), she’s certainly taking Chris Coon’s nothing day and suddenly making it seem all worthwhile.

  8. Franklin says:

    She’s still more entertaining, and more importantly, unpredictable than Palin.

    /prettier, too

  9. The Voice says:

    Please read http://www.teapartytribune.com/2013/07/18/establishments-flat-world-ineptitude-not-tea-party-or-odonnell-to-blame-for-gop-senate-failures/ to fully understand the dynamic of what truly transpired in Delaware and not just the establishment-Beltway babble.
    The below post by Erick Erickson in August of 2010 just proves what we all knew was logically possible but the ARROGANCE of the “Delaware Way” and their Lord of the Backroom mentality proved too tempting for the Bidens, Castle, etc.:
    ( http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/08/02/why-is-mike-castle-running-from-christine-odonnell/ ):
    “If Mike Castle becomes the next United States Senator from Delaware he is going to get sworn in, serve a bit, then become a Democrat, resign, and let Beau Biden get an appointment.
    It’s a done deal. The deal has been made already. I’m hearing this not just from Christine O’Donnell people, but party regulars in Delaware, some of whom support Castle. It is insane.
    In fact, Christine O’Donnell is actually ahead of the Democrat in the polls in Delaware. Read that sentence again people because too many of you think we must support Castle to win the seat.”

  10. Anonne says:

    The right wing grift machine is ready to support her, I’m sure!

  11. Caj says:

    She’s back. The witch who said she’s not a witch! Well, she can’t be any worse than all the other nut jobs in there already. She just be one more to roll around the isles laughing at again. This comedy show gets better and better! Run Christine run!

  12. Scott says:

    Is she out of work? Does she need a job? Why do these people think they have something to contribute? Boy, there are a lot of narcissists in this country.

  13. Gromitt Gunn says:

    @The Voice: Does your newsletter come in a print edition? I’m running out of bird cage liner.

  14. legion says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: Nah, Palin’s a zombie – O’Donnell’s just thick-headed and apparently unemployable outside politics.

  15. Caj says:

    @Scott:

    Yes she does need a job. She was refused the part of the wicked witch of the west in the new version of The Wizard of Oz. Hope she’s not wearing Dorothy’s red shoes when she goes out on the campaign trail. Click her heels three times and end up in Washington. Oh my God, it doesn’t bear thinking about!!

  16. edmondo says:

    Chris Coons ought to buy lottery tickets! Nobody is this freaking lucky.

  17. An Interested Party says:

    Chris Coons ought to buy lottery tickets! Nobody is this freaking lucky.

    Well, to be fair, the President you now despise has also been lucky with the opponents he ends up facing…

  18. edmondo says:

    @An Interested Party:

    Well, to be fair, the President you now despise has also been lucky with the opponents he ends up facing…

    True, but you never get accused of being a racist if you don’t like Chris Coons

  19. anjin-san says:

    Please, please, please…

  20. Jenos Idanian says:

    Oddly enough, O’Donnell was in the news (well, some news; not much in the mainstream press) when folks were reminded that, on the very day she announced her prior candidacy, her private and confidential tax records were leaked — including a very embarrassing and very inaccurate report that she’d been subjected to a lien for unpaid taxes.

    Funny how opponents of Obama have their private and confidential tax records leaked — O’Donnell, the Koch Brothers, the references to Romney not paying taxes for years, etc. etc. etc. Those “rogue IRS agents in Cincinnati really got around, didn’t they?

  21. legion says:

    @Jenos Idanian: Huh. And yet not a word was said about that _during_ her candidacy. That she lost. Due to her own incompetence and unelectability.

    Keep trying, Jenos. One day that chicken will say “yes”.

  22. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @Jenos Idanian:

    You have got to be joking if you think that a Democrat in Delaware, ANY Democrat, would have done anything to hurt O’Donnell’s chances of getting the candidacy. She was a Democrat wet dream. They WANTED her to be the candidate. She handed them a Senate seat that they otherwise were pretty certain to lose had Castle ran. That they picked up Castle’s House seat in the bargain, because he couldn’t run for both, was just icing on the cake.

    Much like they dropped a cool million bucks helping Sharron Angle win the Nevada Senate candidacy, because Reid wanted to run against Angle. For obvious reasons …

    You guys need to figure out that these looney tunes candidates, and their tea party backers, are your biggest problem.

  23. Jenos Idanian says:

    @HarvardLaw92: It is a fact that O’Donnell’s records were illegally accessed. It is also a fact that information from those records — in inaccurate form — were used to try to discredit her.

    As far as the notion that the Democrats wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her as she was such a weak candidate… bullshit. Nixon was already heading for a landslide in 1972, but Watergate happened anyway. And besides that, the people who elected Joe Biden vice-president twice have forfeited the right to make the “we wouldn’t do that because it would be stupid” argument.

  24. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @Jenos Idanian:

    Spare me, Jenos. This information was released almost immediately after she announced her candidacy for the Republican primary.

    Not after she had won the primary. Right after she announced that she intended to TRY to do so.

    Do Democrats pull dirty tricks at about the same rate as Republicans? Sure, that’s the way the real world works, but no Democrat would have targeted her that early in the cycle. At that early stage, she barely registered on Dem radars (beyond thinly veiled laughter and a sense of schadenfreude for Castle).

    She, and her potential to screw up the Senate race for the Republicans, was a great big, huge glaring blip (and as it turns out rightly so) for the GOP. The Dems had nothing, at all, to gain at that early stage by attacking her or trying to get her out of the race. They WANTED her in the primary race, for obvious reasons. The GOP did NOT want her in the primary race, again, for obvious reasons.

    It doesn’t, or at least it shouldn’t, take a rocket scientist to see that the most likely culprit is the one with the most to gain from attacking her. Trying to torpedo her primary run would only have benefited one group. Can you guess which group that was?

  25. legion says:

    @Jenos Idanian: Let’s see if you can follow this, Jenos…

    As @HarvardLaw92 points out,

    Spare me, Jenos. This information was released almost immediately after she announced her candidacy for the Republican primary.

    Not after she had won the primary. Right after she announced that she intended to TRY to do so.

    This sounded interesting enough to get me to actually read the article YOU YOURSELF linked to as “evidence”. In it, we find such tasty gems as:

    In April, Ms. O’Donnell was told the investigation into her case was closed, though she was given few details about the findings.
    During a one-hour interview with Mr. Martel this year, she was given the name of the man believed to have accessed her records and shown his photo. The man had also friended her on her personal Facebook page, she said.

    and

    As she was considering a Senate run, Ms. O’Donnell said she was told by a prominent political figure in Delaware that if she challenged Mr. Castle, the IRS and others would “F with her head.”
    Ms. O’Donnell said she has reason to believe her political opponents were behind the scheme.

    That name I highlighted? “Mr Castle”? That’s Mike Castle, the GOP incumbent for the seat she was running for.

    In case you’re having your usual problems thinking through your own arguments, I’ll spell it out: the investigation – and O’Donnell’s own suspicions – point to her own fellow Republicans as the ones who compromised and leaked her IRS info.

    You really do take the cake as the dumbest representative of a dumb political party.