Holy Crap! Charles Djou Pulls Even in Hawaii Special Election

Now this has to be a stunner by any account.

But according to a more recent poll reported by Atlantic magazine, Case and Djou are now tied with 32 percent of the vote, with Hanabusa in third place at 27 percent. About nine percent of the respondents were undecided, Atlantic reported, citing a Democratic source who’d seen results of a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poll.

This is a Democratic source too so this might be about as real a poll as you can find. I think the mainland Dems attacking him as protecting tax breaks for firms that send jobs overseas might have hurt them. They should have just sent their money to Case or Hanabusa and let them run an ad showing one of them interacting with local people or introducing their family instead.

From what I have seen, Hawaii doesn't like bare-knuckled Chicago-style politics. They like positive candidates that rarely sling mud or talk trash about their opponent. Also Hawaii certainly doesn't like having outsiders from the mainland slinging mud in their local politics at all.

Finally, handicapping this race for people that don't know about it is pretty easy. We have Case who is a pretty good guy as far as I can tell. In fact I voted for him once over the last machine politician they ran against him. However he is hated by the Democratic machine here in Hawaii. His cardinal sin was "not waiting his turn" and jumping the late Patsy Mink's husband in the "line of hereditary Democrat progression" that they have going on in Hawaii. The Dems here want him destroyed at any cost.

Then we have Hanabusa who is basically the Harry Truman of Hawaii. She would be the Congresswoman from Inouye and not the Congresswoman from Hawaii. She has the blessing from the establishment and no matter how weak a candidate she might be they are going to do everything that they can to get her into power. It doesn't help that she voted for a tiny pay cut right after voting for a 38.5% pay raise during the start of the recession when people were getting fired left and right.

So Djou might be able to swing this thing just because his two opponents might do everything that they can to destroy one another. The machine politician verses the hated political outsider that "doesn't know his place" for the Democratic nomination for Congress. There is certainly too much bad blood for everyone to play nice so that the GOP candidate doesn't win.

I am still shocked that Djou pulled even so quickly but I guess the people of Hawaii are just too fed up with the machine to send yet another one of their cogs back to the Congress. Well, I just might be sending money to the second politician in my life on April 21st.