Plus, NC’s younger and I suspect more diverse. They seem to be heading in opposite directions, eh?
Big no-brainer mistake for Ayotte to come out in against a vote for the nominee so quickly. I guess she’s hoping to be picked for the ticket, but that plum will go to someone from a larger swing state … or to whatever bizarre choice Trump makes (Ivanka?)
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I haven’t heard much about Ayotte as a VP nominee. Mostly because I think the GOP is more concerned with losing her Senate seat than they are about winning NH. If she ran for both (I am not sure what the laws in NH are on that), she would almost certainly lose her Senate race.
But, the GOP does consider NH to be a “swing” battleground state. Every election.
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By the electoral numbers, Rubio, Portman, Kasich, Sandoval, Walker and Martinez would be more valuable swing-state VP candidates … to name just a few. And three of them are Latino.
What they’re trying to dog-whistle is that they want THEIR American people to decide, not THOSE American people.
Like a toddler who insists on having the RED popsicle, not the PURPLE one, and they’ll hold their breath until they get it!!!
Let’s hope he ends up “fried” in the election 
The American people did decide. We voted for President Obama twice. We want and expect you to follow the Constitution and vote on whoever the President nominates. And the people want someone other than a Scalia clone.
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I was born and raised in WI, been in NC for 20 years. It’s spooky how they’ve begun to converge, thanks to Koch pollution (ecological and political). Sad for WI to tarnish its progressive history, and NC its century-old Democratic majority.
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Here is my analysis on VP picks, and it really depends on who wins the nomination.
Neither Rubio or Cruz is picking a minority. No way the GOP runs two minorities at the top of the ticket.
Kasich will go with either Rubio or Bush, whoever does better in FL. The Ohio-Florida thing is the entire rationale for his campaign.
Cruz goes with ideology over geographic or demographc considerations. He pretty much has to.
Rubio or Bush leans more towards a female, Rubio probably more than Bush. Though both would be under pressure to put Kasich at the top of their list for the same Ohio-Florida thing.
Trump…who knows?
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Later, Johnson’s press secretary said “What the Senator meant was that he’d vote on the latest episode of The Bachelor.”
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Yep. Sounds about right, especially your Cruz thing.
I do think Kasich pairs better with Rubio to add experience to the ticket (like Biden for Obama). Not so much for Bush, because it’d be to old, white, not-so-charismatic, male Establishment governors.
But who knows about things like personal connection? Maybe, they can pull Dick Cheney out of his House of Anger to get him to head up a search committee so that he can pick himself again.
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Would you support deep fried, in hot oil?? LOL!!
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I would agree with that, but at the end of the day, if Bush beats Rubio by a significant margin in Florida, the bigger meme of Ohio-Florida dictates that they take Bush.
Personally, I’d pick Cruz just to see who in the Senate would vote for his creepy ass.
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Yeah. But I was assuming Kasich at bottom of ticket. LOL.
Too many words. You can stop now. You’ve already lost the argument.
IF (and thats a big if to me still) Kasich continues to do fairly well in SC,NV and beyond…then yep, his stock as a VP goes way up for nearly everybody (except Cruz and again…who the hell knows with Trump).
One of the problems with a Kasich VP pick though, is he is running his campaign on being “nice”. VPs, particularly on the GOP side, are expected to be attack dogs. And while Kasich certainly has that mean streak in him, I am not sure how you square that change in roles with the voters.
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We have a lot of STEM and Big Medical research here and a lot of aging people who used to have crappy to decent manufacturing jobs in textiles and furniture that are now all lost to imports, along with a lot of young people for whom lack of work for those without STEM degrees is the new normal.
Truth to tell, the Triangle and,subsidiary areas where the STEM/Med sector is concentrated aren’t the vital, exciting, cutting edge things they were in the 80’s and 90’s. The businesses are mostly aging into the post-innovation reliable dividend paying prosperity phase. And the banking sector isn’t really what it was in Charlotte due to mergers and such. But we’re still pulling a lot of smart people out of northern states to work for those companies and they’re mostly college educated Democrats. NC added 500K Democrats between 2004 (Bush +14) and 2008 (Obama +<1%).
Employment growth and opportunity stagnated during the recession and the first Republican General Assembly’s decision to make war on the University of North Carolina–the whole system and, indeed, the entire concept of higher education generally–has done enormous damage to the state’s economy and reputation as a place to do set up a new business. And by “war,” I mean savage cuts, huge tuition increases for both in-state and out-of-state students despite a constitutional mandate that it should be “as near to free as practicable” and direct, highly politicized interference in academic and administrative decision making.
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If Gore had picked up 8000 votes in NH (Naderski had 22,000), there would have been no ballyhoo in Florida.
Sadly, another close parallel to Wisconsin and the UW.