GOP finishes third in congressional election

Rural upstate New York joins San Francisco and East St. Louis in the growing list of places where the Republicans are now literally a third party.

In the special House election today in northern New York to fill the seat vacated by right-wing Republican John McHugh, the GOP has just finished in third place - in what has long been a heavily Republican district. In second place is a buffoonish nobody named Doug Hoffman - the candidate of New York's Conservative Party. In fact, Republican candidate Deirdre Scozzafava was trailing so badly in polls that she effectively quit her campaign on Saturday.

Even the right-wingers are abandoning the Republicans now???

Who do the Republicans have left? The GOP had been bleeding support since 2005, and now even the conservatives have abandoned them too?

For the record, the Democrats really didn't even have a candidate running in this election. Instead they ran one Bill Owens (not to be confused with the right-wing former Colorado governor of the same name), who isn't even a registered Democrat and opposes health care reform. Nonetheless, Owens won - giving the Democrats another net gain in Congress.

What's really interesting about the Republicans' bad showing is that this is just going to encourage the Republicans to move further right to recoup the losses on that end. And this will just alienate everyone else even more.

If there ever was a circular firing squad, it's the modern Republican Party.