Doing the 3rd Congressional District Math: Mike Kelly vs. Kathy Dahlkemper

Written by Roberta Biros

The Primary Election is now past . . . seemingly long past. The election results are technically still “unofficial”, but we all know what happened. Allow me to summarize briefly . . .

Dahlkemper vs. Marin

In the race for the highly coveted 3rd Congressional District, the top vote getter on the Democrat ticket was Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper. She won her race against a not-so-impressive opponent in Mel Marin. Mrs. Dahlkemper ended up with 73.2% of the vote. Most interesting about this race was that Mel Marin managed to have 26.8% of the voters select his name over the current incumbent, which is symbolic of the number of DEMOCRATS that don’t support “their candidate”.

That means that roughly 27% of Democrats preferred to vote for “anyone but Kathy Dahlkemper”.

Kelly vs. Huber, Grabb, Fisher, Franz, and Moore

On the Republican ticket, six candidates battled it out for the nomination. The “unofficial” winner was Mike Kelly. The stunning statistic in this case is that Kelly managed the win with only 28.2% of the vote. That means that roughly 72% of Republicans preferred to vote for “anyone but Mike Kelly”. In the end, Mike Kelly’s actual vote count was only slightly higher than that of the Democrat candidate, Mel Marin. Hmmmm. Sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?

What does all of this mean?

When the final votes were tallied, 27% of Democrat votes and 72% of Republican votes are up for grabs in November. That is a huge number and it makes the race a difficult one to call.

I’ll be the first one to say that Kathy Dahlkemper has an enormous uphill battle to win re-election for her second term, but it is only fair to say that Mike Kelly isn’t going to have an easy job ahead of him either. This race IS NOT a gimme!

Mike Kelly has a very difficult task ahead of him. The very heated race for the Republican nomination left “the right” fractured. There were six really great candidates, and the supporters of each of those six campaigns were extremely loyal to “their guy” (or “gal”). In the end there are six different camps that need to be united. If Mike Kelly fails to be a “uniter”, he will also fail to beat Kathy Dahlkemper in November.

Mike Kelly’s campaign became a very public and personal battle with Paul Huber (the #2 vote getter). The negative attacks that transpired will be difficult for Huber supporters to shake off. They will NOT be inspired to get out to vote for Mike Kelly in the General Election without a HUGE effort on Mike Kelly’s part.

Grabb, Fisher, Franz, and Moore supporters were also left feeling empty in the end. Each of these four candidates managed to inspire their conservative supporters in their own ways, and those conservatives will find it difficult to get behind Kelly whole-heartedly. Again, without a very serious effort from Mike Kelly to court conservatives, those conservatives might decide to stick with “the enemy that they know” in Kathy Dahlkemper. This is a very dangerous possibility, and if Kelly isn’t considering it he deserves to lose in November.

Mike Kelly needs to motivate disenfranchised conservatives to support him, and he must also entice disgruntled Democrats to choose him over Kathy Dahlkemper. I realize that it is still early, but so far I’ve seen nothing of Mike Kelly . . . I mean nothing . . . like he disappeared off the face of the Earth!

Mike Kelly needs to act quickly or he risks losing the interest of concerned citizens. If things continue on their current path, Kathy Dahlkemper will be our Congresswoman again in November.

As always, just my opinion.

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