Unknown Unemployed man wins SC primary,.

[Crossroads Inc.]

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No-Name, No-Campaign Candidate Takes Dem Nom In SC-Sen Race
Rachel Slajda | June 9, 2010, 9:50AM
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SC Sen candidate Alvin Greene (D) and primary opponent Vic Rawl
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Alvin Greene, Jim DeMint, SC-SEN, Vic Rawl
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Alvin Greene is an unemployed veteran who has never held political office. After filing for the Democratic primary in the Senate race from South Carolina, his campaign seemed to stop. There is no Alvin Greene web site, no Alvin Greene bumper stickers, no Alvin Greene yard signs. There's not even an Alvin Greene FEC filing.

Nonetheless, Greene won last night's Democratic primary, beating Vic Rawl, a judge who served in the South Carolina legislature for four terms. A judge who had gathered $186,000 for the campaign.

"I wasn't surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much," Greene told Mother Jones.

Greene, on the other hand, didn't raise a dime. In March, he walked into the state Dem headquarters and handed over a personal check for $10,400, the filing fee to run in the Senate race. The chairwoman, Carol Fowler, was taken aback and told Greene he needed to start a campaign account and write the check from there. A few hours later he came back with a proper check, according to the Free-Times, and filed.

After that, nothing. Fowler says Greene didn't show up at political events, including the convention. Rawl has never seen him.

But somehow, Greene took 59% of the vote last night and will face Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) in the fall. There was, by conventional wisdom, little chance Rawl could beat DeMint, who has millions of dollars to spend on a campaign and is popular in South Carolina.

Fowler speculated to the AP that Democratic voters unfamiliar with both Rawl and Greene chose Greene because he appeared first on the ballot.

I just watched this guy be "interviewed" on Keith Olbermann tonight and the man was a JOKE! He mumbled and stumbled hsi way though te interview giving one word "yes" or "no" answers to most questions and saying "I can't comment on that" to much of the others.
The man is unemployed and up till recently was virtually unknown. It takes 10,000$ to register in SC for the election, where this guy got that is being investigated.

[MKSheppard]

Hell yes, I love this guy. And why does it cost $10,000 to register to run for an office? I can see a filing fee of $500 to discourage the cranks -- but $10,000???!?

[Stark]

If it's anything like AU you get it back if you win more than xyz of the vote.

[Coyote]

I did the same thing for a County position back in 2006. I filed and put my name on the ballot but did absolutely nothing to back it up beyond a minor word-of-mouth campaign among people I knew. I was up against a four-term incumbent Republican with a good rep. I still got 40% of the vote-- an unemployed veteran Democrat, back from Iraq in time to see the debacle of Katrina unfold, and there I was, riding a sea of anti-incumbency.

Although, that was for a County-level seat. I'm surprised he got a Senate-level seat.

[Invictus ChiKen]

I think I'll run if this guy made it. Heck I vote for him on the grounds I didn't like the other guys and thought a fresh unknown face might shake things up.

[eion]

Something is rotten in the state of South Carolina

[Crossroads Inc.]

I think I'll run if this guy made it. Heck I vote for him on the grounds I didn't like the other guys and thought a fresh unknown face might shake things up.

You might want to watch how he responds to an interview before thinking too highly of him .

[Flagg]

I think I'll run if this guy made it. Heck I vote for him on the grounds I didn't like the other guys and thought a fresh unknown face might shake things up.

So we have you on record as voting for a man charged with obscene acts?

[The Romulan Republic]

Hell yes, I love this guy. And why does it cost $10,000 to register to run for an office? I can see a filing fee of $500 to discourage the cranks -- but $10,000???!?

A red state like South Carolina wouldn't want a dirty, inferior poor person getting a voice in government?

[Garibaldi]

So we have you on record as voting for a man charged with obscene acts?

Showing porno to a college student is less obscene than what most Congresspeople do on a daily basis.

[CaptainChewbacca]

How could he possibly be a republican plant? They think the Republicans literally flushed $10,000 down the toilet on a candidate who never spoke, never appeared in public, and never ran a commercial? What kind of shitty plan is that where you count on people to vote for whoever comes alphabetically first? If they were going to put up a fake candidate, wouldn't they get one who's articulate enough to give a sound bite?

[Invictus ChiKen]

BTW didn't know about the charges till AFTER the election and really showing a college student porn... I think I'll save up and run.

[wautd]

I think I'll run if this guy made it. Heck I vote for him on the grounds I didn't like the other guys and thought a fresh unknown face might shake things up.

You might want to watch how he responds to an interview before thinking too highly of him .

Jesus Christ that was painful to watch. That guy seemed to come right out of the Idiocracy movie

[Jeremy]

There was a big push for Republicans to change affiliation temporarily and vote for Hillary as a spoiler, but I don't recall any financial contributions making the news. The open primary lends itself to a spoiler move.

The time delay worsened his appearance. At least doing this in a client studio would give him the reprieve from a face to face interview with someone like Olberman, and those sorts of interviews don't seem to have that level of time delay.

[Ariphaos]

He wouldn't have the advantage of his lawyer advising him on how to respond, then.

[eion]

How could he possibly be a republican plant? They think the Republicans literally flushed $10,000 down the toilet on a candidate who never spoke, never appeared in public, and never ran a commercial? What kind of shitty plan is that where you count on people to vote for whoever comes alphabetically first? If they were going to put up a fake candidate, wouldn't they get one who's articulate enough to give a sound bite?

SC is an open primary state, Republicans can vote in the democratic primary. Not saying it's true that he's a plant, just saying SC is one of the state's where it's more probable than most.

[Starglider]

It'll be amusing to see the Republicans campaign against this guy, because they usually champion ignorant, unqualified, foot-in-mouth 'working class real Americans' (Joe the plumber etc).

[Temujin]

Well if he is a plant, and this little ploy comes undone, it could result in another major scandal for the Republican party, which is the last thing they need right now; which is why I hope it does result in a scandal. The sooner these ignorant morons push themselves into total irrelevance with their lies, hypocrisy and stupid little games the better.

[The Romulan Republic]

What I'm wondering is, what's the point? What difference does this make? This is South Carolina. I have a hard time believing a Democrat would have won there regardless. The OP article even acknowledges this. Does this have any great effect, therefore, on the general election?

And if somehow this new guy won, well, at worst we'd have a dumbass Democrat instead of a (different kind of) dumbass Republican. Sounds like a fair trade.

[eion]

What I'm wondering is, what's the point? What difference does this make? This is South Carolina. I have a hard time believing a Democrat would have won there regardless. The OP article even acknowledges this. Does this have any great effect, therefore, on the general election?

Remember we were all excited about the possibility of Orly Taitz getting the nomination for Secretary of State in California because it would drag down the top of the ticket. If I was a Republican strategist sitting in a smoky backroom, and I had concocted a way to get unqualified and doomed people to win nominations in open primary states to ruin democratic chances in the general (both directly and by pulling other candidates down, or Taitzing them) I would do two things:

1) I would test it in a state where my plant has NO chance of winning the general election against my republican candidate
2) I would run the test in a midterm year with a democratic president so that a) my funding for polling was higher and b) the chance of the plant winning are further reduced

Jim DeMint is fairly safe. At last check he was polling 9 points ahead of a generic democrat with 15 points up for grab. That's not a huge lead, but Alvin Greene and his naughty pictures aren't going to hurt the Senator's chances.

It disorganizes the Dems, lets the Republicans paint them as corrupt and out of touch with "mainstream values", and in South Carolina specifically it lets them paint Rep. John Spratt, Jr. & Majority Whip James Clyburn (both incumbents for many years) with the Greene brush, so to speak and give the GOP a chance to take control of their seats. The Republicans would love to get rid of Clyburn almost as much as they'd like to get rid of Pelosi. Clyburn is almost certainly going to be reelected to his seat (he’s in the only majority African-American district in SC), but he might be forced to spend more time and money in his district than he’d like to, which will almost certainly pull funds out of the DNC in other marginal races.

So, again, if I were a shady Republican strategist trying out a new stratagem to derail and sabotage democratic primaries, South Carolina is EXACTLY the state I would choose to test it out in, and 2010 is exactly the year I would try it out in. And if the stratagem is successful, I could try it out in one of these other fine states come 2012:

Alabama
Alaska (You can change party affiliation AT the polling place)
Arkansas
California (with some jimmying)
Georgia
Idaho
Indiana
Kansas (some jimmying again)
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
North Carolina (jimmying returns)
North Dakota (Where you can't even register party affiliation)
South Carolina (of course)
Tennessee
Texas
Vermont
Virginia
Washington State
West Virginia (jimmying for sure)
Wisconsin

Is it likely? Perhaps not. Is it possible? Certainly.

[CaptainChewbacca]

The thing is, it was 'successful' against all rationality and logic. The man didn't ACT like a candidate, in fact his biggest selling point was the fact that nobody had ever heard of him. There's no way anyone could have predicted he would win, and he will be remembered as 'that crazy fluke'. There is no conspiracy, so take off the tinfoil and put down the kool-aid.

[eion]

There is no conspiracy, so take off the tinfoil and put down the kool-aid.

I wasn't advocating that it was, just performing a little thought experiment.

This is also worth posting:

The campaign of defeated Democratic Senate candidate Vic Rawl has assembled a team of national academic experts to review Tuesday’s perplexing South Carolina primary results that propelled a virtually unknown, underfunded and unemployed candidate to the party’s nomination over a veteran officeholder and public official.

Rawl campaign manager Walter Ludwig tells POLITICO three different teams of experts in election data analysis are combing through the results in the state’s 46 counties and already turning up some eye-opening trend lines.

The review is in response to the shocking victory by 32-year-old Alvin Greene, who, despite never giving a campaign speech or running any television or radio ads, managed to handily defeat Rawl 59 percent to 41 percent. The state party chairwoman has already asked Greene to step aside, and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) has speculated that he might be a Republican plant.

Greene has pledged to remain in the race and said he has “always been a Democrat.”

While Ludwig cautioned that the campaign is not jumping to any conclusions, he said the experts, who volunteered their services, have already uncovered some “curious” findings in the election data.

One potential red flag: A significant difference between the results of absentee and election day ballots.

According to Ludwig, of the state’s 46 counties, half have a disparity of greater than 10 percentage points between the absentee and election day ballots.

“The election day ballots all favor Mr. Greene. We don’t know what it means,” Ludwig said in an interview. “We did significantly better on absentees than Election Day, which is according to the mathematicians, quite significant. The other reason is, it didn’t happen in any other races on the ballot.”

In Lancaster County, Rawl won absentee ballots over Greene by a staggering 84 percent to 16 percent margin; but Greene easily led among Election Day voters by 17 percentage points.

In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count.

“In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast,” Ludwig said.

Greene also racked up a 75 percent or greater margin in one-seventh of all precincts statewide, a mark that Ludwig notes is even difficult for an incumbent to reach.

“This may add up to nothing. This all could be a clerical error. We don’t know, but [we] thought it was worth looking into,” said Ludwig, who added that the experts doing the unpaid research asked that their names not be revealed until they disclose their conclusions.

Ludwig said the experts could be prepared to offer their findings by late Friday but cautioned that it’s likely not to be definitive.

“These are not detectives, they look at huge amounts of election data that say this doesn’t look like it should, or it does,” he said.

Asked what else could explain Greene’s unlikely rise, Ludwig appeared at a loss.

He said the Rawl campaign sent 300,000 e-mails, conducted a quarter million robocalls and logged nearly 17,000 miles to Democratic events around the state.

“I was tracking the guy everywhere and there was nothing to track. Am I kicking myself in the ass? Sure. I’m just not sure what we would’ve done different,” he said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/06 ... z0qgIiI7C3

What's likely is Greene got a bump because he appeared first on the ballot, but I just don't know how that alone can account for his wide margin of victory. Who shows up for a primary without knowing who you'll vote for, and just picks the first guy? If I'm remembering correctly, the exit polls when they asked people why they voted for who they did, the Greene voters couldn't give a reason. This needs some deep investigating.

[D.Turtle]

Here's the summary of a post on 538.com on this:

Well, I think it's safe to say that the third possibility I raised in the previous post--GOP cross-primary infiltration--can be eliminated. There doesn't seem to be any direct or circumstantial evidence for that, and there were sufficient motives to participate in the very contentious GOP gubernatorial primary (especially with Nikki Haley running). So we can almost certainly eliminate the idea that there was a coordinated GOP effort to get Republican and/or conservative voters to pick up Democratic ballots with the intent of selecting Greene as DeMint's general election opponent.

That leaves what I think are now two scenarios:

A. The first is a combination of the first and second possibilities of my initial post: Greene was a nobody, but Rawl was darn near close to a nobody, and thus Greene's alphabetical ballot position, coupled with whatever signal the spelling of his surname sent to some African Americans that he might be (and in fact is) an African American, with a dash of Rawl's high disapproval among the 18 percent of survey respondents who had heard of him, combined to take what in theory might otherwise have been a 50/50 split among two broadly unknown candidates and turned it instead into a 59/41 race.

B. Somebody with access to software and machines engineered a very devious manipulation of the vote returns--but not so devious that he/she/they were unable to cover the tracks of the digit patterns in those results.

Basically, there is some weird stuff, but nothing so weird that is impossible. There is no indication of cross-over Republican voters picking a weaker candidate. Unless there is new, real evidence of tampering, concluding (or seriously suspecting) some Republican foul-play at work here is definitely premature.

[CaptainChewbacca]

A. The first is a combination of the first and second possibilities of my initial post: Greene was a nobody, but Rawl was darn near close to a nobody, and thus Greene's alphabetical ballot position, coupled with whatever signal the spelling of his surname sent to some African Americans that he might be (and in fact is) an African American, with a dash of Rawl's high disapproval among the 18 percent of survey respondents who had heard of him, combined to take what in theory might otherwise have been a 50/50 split among two broadly unknown candidates and turned it instead into a 59/41 race.

How is 'Greene' a signal that he's black?

[eion]

It's a common name, or at least is seen to be so, amongst African American families.