Hey, we have 4 years to find a liberty candidate to run as a Democrat
This guy --
http://www.claytonforsenate.com/issues.html (Parents were Goldwater repubs.) He ran for senate in 2008, losing the dem-primary with 30k votes to the winner's 60k votes; the eventual dem nominee lost badly to Lamar Alexander that year. In 2012, the day after Clayton won his second attempt at the seven-way-split dem-primary for the 2012 senate race in TN with ~30% of the votes (48k this time around), the dem-establishment totally disowned him. From what I can tell, he got *zero* dollars in donations --
http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/can_detail/S8TN00279 He lost to Bob Corker pretty badly, 700k votes to 1500k votes... but Corker had $10m in cash, and spent $5m.
If we can get Clayton to run again in 2014, with some cash from liberty-folks, there are two seats up for re-election, one senate seat and one governorship. Clayton will be 38 then, and therefore will be 40 in time for the next presidential election -- just old enough to be seen as a 'serious' dem candidate. (Historically, repubs like candidates in their mid-50s and older, but dems prefer mid-40s candidates: JFK was 43, RFK'68 was also 43, Bill Clinton 46, Obama 47.) Incidentally, Biden is going to be 74, and Hillary is going to be 69. Rand is unlikely to have the curse/luxury of facing Hillary -- an upstart like Gillibrand seems more likely.
Anyways, as for TN races, in 2014 Lamar Alexander will be up for re-election, and at age 74 he is prolly to old to have a shot at the presidency... which he attempted back in 1996 and 2000 at age 60 btw... but he is certainly not too old for re-election to the Senate. (The average age among incumbent-senior-senators was 74 in this past 2012 cycle, and of the 74-and-up crowd, only two of the fourteen retired willingly. Most run again at 74 and 78. Running again in your 80s is rarer.) Seems unlikely that Clayton would be able to beat Lamar, even with strong outside funding. Lamar gets ratings of 78% fiscal + 55% constitutional, similar to Wicker/Hoeven/Johanns, a bit worse than Lindsay Graham.
The other race is the gov-race, and the incumbent repub there is a first-term guy elected in 2010, ranked as the absolute worst repub governor by CATO on fiscal issues. (To be fair, the CATO analysis merely ranks year-by-year *changes* in state spending... Gov Christie hiked the already outrageous NJ spending by 2% and got a super grade whereas Gov Haslam seemingly-more-dramatically-hiked the very low TN spending by 14% and got a failing grade). Here is a blogger which has a lot of anger regarding the current Governor, partly on tax & spend, but mostly on federalization (cf tax&spend of course) plus some liberty issues --
http://tncampaignforliberty.org/wordpress/tag/haslam/ Also worth noting, total spending on the dem-races seems to be about $1 or $2m during the primaries, versus $5m in repub-primaries.
I don't know any liberty-movement folks in TN. Is there somebody on the ground there, or familiar with statewide politics, that can comment on whether or not a young unknown dem with a liberty-leaning message would have a shot at unseating the current gov? Polls earlier this year show he is very strong: dems and indeps gave Haslam 60% approval, repubs and tea gave him 80%. (Only 13% were in the tea-party.) TN economy rated v.bad by 20%, fairly bad 35%, f.good 40%, v.good 3% ... but 30% blamed obama, 25% statehouse, 12% gov. That said, 55% disapproved of obamacare, and haslam is pushing for it, so they might begin to blame him by 2014, when the Obamacare penaltax really kicks in. There is also the question of whether liberty-candidates on the repub side already exist for TN senate and TN governor seats in 2014 -- I've not heard of any. Still, running a liberty-candidate in the repub-primaries would not preclude us from running Clayton in the dem-primaries simultaneously.
