Meet The Rightroots Candidates (Update & Bump)
[Good questions from commenters -- see update below!]
A group of conservative bloggers have worked on a developing a list of candidates in critical races this fall, not just for a show of support but also to allow our readers a single point where they could contribute to their campaigns. John Hawkins at Right Wing News began to organize this a couple of weeks ago, and we have selected a slate of Congressional and Senatorial races we think will get the most benefit from organized grassroots support on the Internet.
We call this effort Rightroots, and our site, powered by ABCPac, launched this evening.
The selection committee comprised the following bloggers:
John Hawkins from Right Wing News
Robert Bluey from Human Events Online
Mary Katherine Ham from Townhall
Erick Erickson from Redstate
Patrick Hynes from Ankle Biting Pundits
Lorie Byrd from Wizbang!
We have selected fourteen Congressional races and four Senate races we see as critical and close enough to warrant organized support from our readers. On our donations page, we give a description of the races and the politics involved. We deliberately avoided races where Republicans either have a large edge or face weak opposition. Each of these races may well come down to the last $100 for campaigning efforts, and winning all eighteen would provide a tremendous boost for conservatives across the nation.
All of these candidates have our unanimous endorsement for their races. We hope that you will join us in supporting these fine candidates, and follow along as we raise money for them. Bookmark the Rightroots page to see how well our candidate fare in the weeks ahead, and help us spread the word through the blogosphere.
We talk about the need to build conservative power in government -- and now we have the tool to do it.
UPDATE: I'm replacing the links with those for the posts of the other Rightroots members, so keep checking back.
UPDATE II AND BUMP: I've received some good questions from CQ readers, and I want to explain our decisions in answer to them.
Why isn't Candidate X on the list? Why not list all GOP candidates? - We hope that all Republican candidates win their races. However, we wanted to focus on competitive races or on seats that have a broader impact on national politics. Obviously, we still encourage people to contribute to other Republicans; it's just that we feel contributions in these races will have the most impact.
You don't list incumbents -- Given the natural advantages of incumbency in most cases, we felt that our efforts should focus elsewhere.
Michael Steele is almost 20 points back in some polls, so why include him? - I think that's an outlier, but even so, we felt that Steele's candidacy has a national impact. The same goes for Diana Irey, who wants to unseat John Murtha in Pennsylvania.
What about governors? - It turns out that having this sort of effort for governors gets too complicated in regard to contribution regulations, and we were asked to eliminate those from our list. We tried!
I noticed you passed over [insert RINO candidate here] -- Glad you noticed. However, we did not include incumbents as a rule, so don't take an exclusion to mean we oppose someone's re-election.
Your logo trips me out, dude -- Actually, John has several on his site, and I chose this one for the post. Feel free to put one of the others on your site and link back to the Rightroots page at ABCPac! (And if you come up with something better, let us know!
Posted by Ed Morrissey on August 1, 2006 11:00 AM | Comments () | TrackBacks (7)
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