Dems expected to succeed in placing "insurance" candidate on ballots

Democrats expect to be successful in their effort to recruit an additional Democratic candidate on many Senate recall races statewide.

The weekend has been bizarre - across the state, activists are scrambling to collect signatures for this effort, all the while having to explain to a confused electorate exactly what is going on here.

The best I can make of it: Democrats are explaining to their confused signatories that they are responding to a GOP effort to place "fake" Democrats on the ballot so the "real" Democrat candidates will have to face a primary. These GOP efforts have two implications: one, the GOP can pull their candidates and put the date of the election in flux, exercising control over election day will occur statewide; and two, GOP voters could vote in a Democratic primary against the establishment Dem candidate.

Rather than recruit "fake" GOP candidates and respond in kind, Democrats are instead recruiting what in some elections is a third candidate for a primary election. The strategy seems to be that they hope for some kind of detente with GOP, or at the least, to force all the elections to occur on the same day regardless of what the GOP does. It's a valiant decision from Mike Tate and the Dems - if you have a full understanding of the decision made here, they really are responding to an aggressive, and really abusive, tactic from the GOP.

Here's to hoping everyone can just calm down and let this thing play out the way it's supposed to.