Moving from 1st place to 2nd place to 3rd place to ZERO, how disappointed Republicans deal with their political remorse.

  

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been my hero since the day she was chosen to run for Vice-President on the Republican Party ticket in 2008. Sarah Palin has always epitomized the strong, patriotic female conservative with her Mama Grizzly and Lipstick on a Pit Bull attitude. Now I suspect she is about to consider the biggest mistake of her life and I am afraid a great number of her loyal fans will follow her. Jeff Poor wrote yesterday on The Daily Caller, "Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president responded to a Fox News Channel viewer’s Twitter question Saturday about the possibility of her and conservative talker Mark Levin abandoning the Republican Party and creating something called the “Freedom Party.”

When true Republicans stand fast on the traditional principles of their party they win elections. Unfortunately, there are too many Republicans In Name Only (RINOs) who have managed to destroy the image we represent. It was no coincidence that Sarah Palin was chosen to run along side one of the party's biggest RINOs, Arizona Senator John McCain. Without Sarah Palin on the ticket, I and a whole lot of other conservative Republicans would have probably stayed home on election day in 2008. This is not the first time that a strong liberal influence has taken hold of the Republican Party. I was there in New York when the state Republican Party was dominated by ultra liberals Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits. In fact, what the conservative Republicans did then in the early 1960s is just what Sarah Palin is thinking of doing now. Abandoning the Republican Party and creating a new political party. Sarah Palin is calling her party The Freedom Party, the disenfranchised Republicans in New York called their new party The Conservative Party.

If history has a way of repeating itself, Sarah Palin's Freedom Party will become relegated to a distant 3rd or 4th place in the national political power base. The New York State Conservative Party was only successful in electing one candidate to a national office in the last 50 years and that was James Buckley who became a one term U.S. Senator. James Buckley was the brother of noted columnist William F. Buckley and shared his notoriety. From the inception of the Conservative Party their greatest influence was in cross-endorsing a handful of conservative Republicans in local elections. Their one-time success at cross-endorsement was when they helped elect Republican Alfonse D'Amato to the Senate (also for one term) but on the national level there are only 8 states that allow fusion tickets combining vote tallies from more than one line: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, South Carolina and Vermont.

Wikipedia has a rather complete story about the history of the New York State Conservative Party. 

The Conservative Party of New York State is a political party in the United States active in the state of New York, holding "Line C" on ballots directly below the Democratic and Republican parties. It only operates in New York State, and is not part of any larger party.

In New York State's elections, the Conservative Party is ranked fourth place in terms of membership, behind only the Democrats, Republicans, and the Independence Party, but ahead of the Greens and Constitution Parties.^[1] As of November 1, 2011, a total of 147,993 voters, or 1.3% of New York State's total enrollment, are registered with the party.^[2]

History

Electoral History of the Conservative Party of New York State
The Conservative Party of New York State was founded in 1962 by a group including J. Daniel Mahoney, Kieran O'Doherty, Charles E. Rice, and Charles Edison, out of frustration with the perceived liberalism of the state's Republican Party. A key consideration was New York's fusion voting, unusual among US states, which allows individual candidates to receive votes from more than one party. The Liberal Party of New York, founded in 1944, had earlier benefitted from this system.

The Conservative Party founders wanted to balance the Liberal Party's influence. One early supporter was National Review founder William F. Buckley, who was the party's candidate for mayor of New York City in 1965. In 1970, his brother James Buckley was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Conservative Party candidate; in 1976, he ran for reelection as a candidate of the Republican and Conservative Parties, losing to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In the 2004 U.S. Senate election, the Conservative Party endorsed Marilyn O'Grady to oppose Republican candidate Howard Mills and incumbent Democratic Senator Charles Schumer.

My strongest advice to Sarah Palin is in the words of someone she may admire: "You don't change horses in the middle of the stream." And it comes from the mouth of the most famous Republican of all, Abraham Lincoln. From an 1864 speech by Abraham Lincoln, in reply to Delegation from the National Union League who were urging him to be their presidential candidate. 'An old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams."

As far as national politics goes, third party movements only manage to split the conservative vote. Put a Democrat on the ballot against a Republican and a Third Party candidate and if the third party candidate is a conservative, the Democrat usually wins. The only recognizable third party we have today is the Libertarian Party but in spite of their conservative leanings, they seem to have been created for the sole purpose of legalizing marijuana. The Libertarian Party has virtually no international platform and wants a whole slew of state and federal laws repealed to prohibit one activity or another. In several noted examples, when a Libertarian Party candidate ran in a local election the Democrat always won and usually the votes gathered between the Republican and the Libertarian was greater than what the Democrat had received. A few noteworthy Libertarians such as U.S. Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Thomas Massie won their elections in Kentucky by running on the Republican Party ticket. And that is the only way to win.

My name is Nelson Abdullah and I am Oldironsides.