Remember when Scott Brown signed autographs and added the number “41” — signaling to voters he was poised and ready to become that critical vote against health care reform? Delaware voters are getting the same signal, with tea party darling Christine O’Donnell (R) promising to single-handedly block any Democratic agenda during a lame-duck session of Congress if she’s elected.
Delaware’s Senate race is unlike any of the other critical midterm face-offs Nov. 2 — the winner will be seated immediately and not in January like most of the rest of the Senate victors.
As she battles longtime-but-less-so-these-days frontrunner Rep. Mike Castle for Tuesday’s Republican primary, O’Donnell talks about this being a “special” election every chance she gets, calling herself a key “filibuster” vote. But no one seems to realize just how right she is.
It seemed like a simple enough question, but it took 17 phone calls to various Delaware offices and even Capitol Hill staffers to find out the answer.
“It’s not a special election,” one staffer with a government office told TPM before passing off the call to another government office. Actually, it is.
“Well, I had to look it up. It’s probably never happened here before,” Elaine Manlove, Delaware’s State Election Commissioner, told TPM in an interview.
Here’s what happened. On Election Night in 2008, Joe Biden was elected vice president along with Barack Obama’s winning the White House, but he also was reelected to a six-year term for the Senate seat he’d held for three decades. (Beating, coincidentally, one Christine O’Donnell.)
Biden even took the oath of office for a seventh Senate term, only to resign and become vice president. Then-Gov. Ruth Ann Minner appointed longtime Biden aide Ted Kaufman to temporarily fill the seat.
“Whoever wins the election will be sworn in right away,” Manlove said. Here’s the state code explaining how it all works. The winner would be seated within a few days of the results being certified this November.
Democrats are pulling for an O’Donnell win on Tuesday because they think candidate Chris Coons is more likely to beat her than Castle, a popular former governor and moderate Republican who has been the favorite for months to win the seat.
But O’Donnell is taking a page from Scott Brown’s book to tell voters she’d offer them more than just another Republican vote.
O’Donnell told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto last week:
Because this is a special election for the seat once held by Joe Biden, there’s a spotlight on this race because the winner can be sworn in the day after election day and serving in Harry Reid’s lame duck session where bills like cap and trade could come up.
She accurately noted that both Castle and Coons support cap-and-trade system for cutting carbon emissions.
“Nobody wants this bill,” O’Donnell said of voters. “So, in this race, I am the only candidate who has pledged to not only vote against it but advocate against it so people are looking at this as perhaps me being that filibuster vote.”
The Tea Party Express — which has pledged to spend $250,000 for O’Donnell — also is using that appeal. In their endorsement last month, Tea Party Express officials told supporters, “Christine O’Donnell could be the deciding vote in the U.S. Senate to block the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda during the ‘lame duck’ session after November’s elections, but before the new Congress is sworn in.”
Watch O’Donnell make her pitch:
[Ed note: this post was edited after publication.]
