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Tag: republican primaries

  • Eric Cantor Defeated in Surprise Primary Landslide

    House majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his Republican primary election Tuesday night. Instead of once again running for Virginia’s 7th congressional district this fall, Cantor’s challenger, David Brat, will be on the ballot. Cantor is now the first House Majority Leader to lose his party’s primary.

    The loss came as a surprise to almost everyone. Pollsters and political observers had assumed that Cantor could easily defeat his Tea Party-backed opponent. An internal poll from the Cantor campaign had showed the representative with a 34-point lead as of Friday and other polls also showed Cantor with a comfortable lead. Election returns show Cantor lost the election by more than 7,000 votes, with nearly 56% of the vote going to Brat.

    “You know, I know there’s a lot of long faces here tonight and it’s disappointing, sure,” said Cantor during his concession speech. “But I believe in this country. I believe there’s opportunity around the next corner for all of us.”

    As House Majority Leader, Cantor was a senior figure in House leadership and second in command to House Speaker John Boehner. Boehner issued a statement Tuesday night saying, “(Cantor is) a good friend and a great leader, and someone I’ve come to rely upon on a daily basis as we make the tough choices that come with governing. My thoughts are with him and Diana and their kids tonight.”

    Cantor’s challenger, David Brat, is a professor of economics at Randolph-Macon College. His candidacy was backed by Tea Party groups and figures related to the Tea Party movement, including former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. During the primary campaign Brat had run heavily on immigration, painting Cantor as a supporter of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

    Cantor’s defeat provides a new twist in this election year’s conventional wisdom that establishment Republicans are taking back their party from the Tea Party. Cantor and others in House leadership have been struggling to accommodate hard-right Tea Party Republicans in the House in recent years, culminating in last year’s government shut down.

    Brat will face off against Democratic challenger Jack Trammel in this fall’s midterm elections. Trammel is a colleague of Brat’s, a sociology professor at Randolph-Macon College.

    Image via Facebook

  • GOP Candidates’ Official Websites Pretty Hackable

    GOP Candidates’ Official Websites Pretty Hackable

    Now that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appears to be (finally) pulling away from his tenacious opponents, it’s expected that election news will slowly pivot towards this fall’s general election. As the country moves into that leg of the race, you can expect that much will be discussed and debated regarding the issue of national security. An aspect of this that should be included in the dialogue is most certainly national cybersecurity. President Obama himself has said that cyber threats are “one of the most serious economic and national security threats our nation faces.” Given that hackers from China have infiltrated NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and former terrorism advisor to the White House Richard Clarke has claimed that every major U.S. company has been hacked by China, it’s worth any presidential candidate’s time to study up on cybersecurity and plan accordingly.

    While that’s what candidates should be doing, it’s not exactly what they are in fact doing. A new report from AmIHackerProof.com has revealed that all of the GOP presidential candidates’ official websites are vulnerable to hacker attacks. Between February 18 and April 2, 2012, AmIHackerProof.com scanned each candidate’s website for vulnerabilities, like a hacker would, to see how secure the top candidates’ websites are against being attacked. We contacted the campaigns prior to the release of this story, so that some of the information we are showing cannot be used by a would-be hacker. The results revealed that every Republican candidate’s website contained numerous vulnerabilities.

    Gregory Evans, cyber security expert and creator of AmIHackerProof.com, said in a statement, “Since President Obama was elected to office, more elite cyber security experts have been utilized than ever before, but this still is not enough to fight off China, who outnumbers us 8 to 1.” He added, “If you can’t protect your own website by hiring the right team, how can we be assured that you can protect the nation’s networks.”

    The most egregious amount of vulnerabilities were found on one-time (and one-time again) frontrunner Rick Santorum’s website, which contained 98 vulnerabilities.

    “When we saw the report on Rick Santorum we were floored,” says Evans. “There were so many gaps in security that we were in awe. Potentially, in the wrong hands, this type of information could be used to change his standing in the GOP race.”

    Indeed, is a hacker were able to penetrate one of the candidates’ websites, they’d could cause a range of trouble from fabricating press releases to accesses the entire email database of donors or supporters. Perhaps worse, a hacker could insert their own PayPal account information in place of the candidates’ and reroute any donations from the candidate and into the hacker’s account.

    Here’s how the four main Republican candidates’ websites as well as the official website for the GOP held up to AmIHackerProof.com’s test:

    Website Date Vulnerabilities
    ricksantorum.com 02/18/2012 98
    ronpaul.com 04/02/2012 60
    gop.com 02/18/2012 34
    mittromney.com 02/18/2012 29
    newt.org 02/18/2012 18

    For what it’s worth, using AmIHackingProof.com’s online scanner to search www.barackobama.com produced zero results. According to the site, sites only show up in the search results if they are found to have vulnerabilities so, given President Obama’s site didn’t show up in any of the report searches, his site appears to be relatively more secure.

  • Follow Super Tuesday Results With Google’s New Interactive Election Map

    Follow Super Tuesday Results With Google’s New Interactive Election Map

    With the Republican National Convention still over five months away, today could prove to be the most pivotal moment yet for the Republican presidential candidates vying for their party’s nomination. Super Tuesday, as you’ve no doubt heard the punditry refer to today’s primaries, represents the biggest piñata of delegates so far in the party’s primary race. Many pots will be stirring today as ten different states in four different time zones go to the polls to cast their votes in order to determine which candidate shall receive the delegates from their respective states.

    To help keep track of today’s busy election activity, Google has launched an interactive map of the United States that will help the country follow the results as they come in. The map contains election information about each of the fifty states as provided by the Associated Press, whom Google partnered with in order to compile the data for each state.

    The map shows the results of primary elections and caucuses that have already happened, the real-time results of states’ primary contests as they’re announced by the Associated Press (which should be useful as results come in this evening), and the date of future primaries of states yet to vote.

    By clicking on the individual states, users can view a county-by-county breakdown of how states voted as well as total amounts of votes cast for each of the candidates. Or, if you’re more light-hearted about it, use the map to reflect on candidates of primaries past who didn’t make it this far into the election.

    While other major news outlets like the New York Times or CNN have provided similar information-rich interactive maps to allow people to follow election results, this is Google’s first foray into Google+LatLong%29″>political landscaping. As the presidential election moves beyond the primary stage and into the general election this fall, expect more updates and, I’d imagine, more Google integration to the election map to make it stand out.

  • Romney Has A Santorum Problem (With Search Engines)

    You can’t bottle lightning, but you can at least flick the lights on and off really quickly to create a similar albeit campier effect. That seems to be what’s happening with online activists/pranksters trying to duplicate the magnificent hex Dan Savage cast upon Rick Santorum when he codified “Santorum” to mean something other than some guy’s surname, except the new target is Mitt Romney.

    While Romney’s last name isn’t getting quite the revulsive rechristening that Santorum got, it’s still becoming a legitimate issue as far as search engines are concerned. Searching “Mitt Romney” only summons news about Romney’s election as well as many websites that support him. Search only “Romney,” however, and the third return you receive is a link to www.spreadingromney.com.

    (image)

    In case you are hesitant to follow that link, romney has been defined as a verb that means, “to defecate in terror.” The word “terror” is a hyperlink that will send readers to story on Huffington Post recounting the time Mitt Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his car while driving to Canada. The dog reportedly “defecated in fear” while housed atop the vehicle. So you see, the name Romney and the verb romney have met on the other side of the track.

    A similar wind-up is happening with Newt Gingrich’s last name, although the arbitration of what exactly gingrich will mean is a more democratic process. Currently over at www.spreadinggingrich.com, visitors can submit their suggestion for what gingrich should mean with the eventual winner becoming the adopted definition of gingrich.

    Given how boar-ish (no, I did not spell that incorrectly) and lewd Gingrich’s personal life has been, the disgusting potential for what gingrich will eventually mean could be disastrously vile and possibly rival the gag-inducing definition of santorum. Blegh.

    So far, this phenomenon seems relegated to the liberal or Democratic pranksters. However, www.spreadingobama.com is actually a registered domain but nothing live is going on with it as of today (meaning: squatters). The domain is registered to Domains By Proxy, LCC, which is allegedly owned by GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons (thanks for the tip, Internet). Last year, Washington Post reported that several potentially derogatory domains related to presidential candidates were yoinked up by Domains by Proxy but, amusingly, while Obama seems to have been spared the risk of Santorum’s fate, Romney and Gingrich have been left to fend for themselves.

    Then again, given Parsons’ disdain for elephants, maybe this is a sly political maneuver? Subtle humor for the win!

  • Rick Perry Tweets He’s Continuing His Campaign

    After telling supporters at the Iowa Caucus last night that he was going home to Texas to “reassess” his campaign, Texas Governor Rick Perry is apparently going to stay in the race after all.

    This morning, he tweeted the following message from his personal account to his 113,000 followers:

    (image)@GovernorPerry
    Rick Perry    And the next leg of the marathon is the Palmetto State…Here we come South Carolina!!! http://t.co/ayZTVJAa(image) 55 minutes ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® · powered by @socialditto

    The attached image is the lead image above, which appears to be Perry out for a jog. Perry’s official campaign account, @TeamRickPerry also retweeted the tweet.

    Perry seems to be referring to one of the next stops in the primary race. The South Carolina primary will be held on January 21st.

    Perry had a disappointing showing in last night’s Iowa Caucus, finishing in 5th place with only 10.3% of the vote. Mitt Romney squeaked out a victory over Rick Santorum, posting a winning margin of only 8 votes.

  • Gingrich Rising In Polls, Facebook, Twitter, Everywhere

    This was so seven months ago so of course nobody remembers reading this breathless epic penned by Newt Gingrich’s press secretary, Rick Tyler, so here’s a refresher:

    Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

    Everybody had a collective laugh at Tyler’s words at the time but it now appears to have been a prescient statement as the Republican primaries will finally commence in less than a month with the Iowa caucus and Gingrich is poised as a legitimate front-runner. And as with all things serious and bold in our new American century, Gingrich appears ready to make it Facebook-official as he has amassed over 12,000 new fans on his Facebook page in just the past seven days. While that’s still far behind from his Republican rivals – Mitt Romney has a towering 1.2 million Facebook fans – Gingrich has demonstrated that he doesn’t really require the standard accoutrements typical of a succeeding presidential campaign. And of course such an accomplishment seems to only bolster Gingrich’s approval of Gingrich:

    @jacktemp
    Jackie Tempera    Newt Gingrich said his is, “the most frugal campaign of modern times.” http://t.co/gW8XGv8b 38 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    Accompanying the news of Gingrich’s surge in popularity, All Facebook provided a handy line graph to detail the swell of fans that have Liked the candidate’s official page:

    All Facebook goes on to explain, “Newt Gingrich is running away from the other candidates on Twitter, with more than 1.3 million followers. And Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have the most Facebook fans among the GOP presidential hopefuls, and they follow Gingrich in the latest poll.” It’s true, too: Romney comes in at a distant second to Gingrich on Twitter with about 188,000 followers. With Herman Cain bowing out of the race (albeit was labeled a “suspension” of his campaign), Gingrich would appear to only continue to make significant gains in popularity as he collects former Cain supporters.

    Of course, now we look to Twitter to unscientifically corroborate Gingrich’s swing in popularity.

    @ppppolls
    PublicPolicyPolling    Gingrich isn’t just rising- Romney is really falling. Down 13 pts from our last FL poll, 11 pts from our last MT poll. 5 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @washingtonpost
    The Washington Post    Newt #Gingrich emerges as clear front-runner in #Iowa http://t.co/b2yDzUzJ 3 hours ago via SocialFlow · powered by @socialditto

    @SteveSebelius
    Steve Sebelius    As @newtgingrich surges in Iowa, @MittRomney‘s supporters urge Romney to take off mittens (!) and go after Gingrich: http://t.co/yKY8D3Cb 6 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    @VotingAmerican
    Samiam60    Gingrich Climbs to Top in South Carolina Poll – Fox News http://t.co/coGWQ3mt 6 minutes ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

    @USPoliticsConvo
    Charles Seymour Jr    Sounds Like Rush Limbaugh Just Endorsed Newt Gingrich http://t.co/NcO51Cxq 6 minutes ago via twitterfeed · powered by @socialditto

    @mollyesque
    Molly Ball    Most Cain voters’ 2nd choice is Gingrich, according to @ppppolls: http://t.co/ZcobobKL 6 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    Seems pretty exciting, but after seeing the popularity of so many Republican primary candidates wax and wane like phases of the moon, it remains to be seen if Gingrich can actually sustain this momentum (he should probably be sending a pretty sweet Christmas card to Cain in a couple of weeks, too). Either way, Gingrich’s Twitter followers are huge so now the issue begs the question: is Twitter the new metric with which we measure a candidate’s election odds (or the popularity of anything, for that matter)? Has the Newtation of this election cycle officially commenced?