Fascinating post from political pollster and superstar data analyst, Nate Silver on his FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York TImes yesterday about the precarious position the Tea party movement has put the Republican party in as the final primaries of the season take place today: If two surging-in-the-polls Tea party-backed candidates—Delware’s zany Christian conservative Christine O’Donnell and lawyer Ovide Lamontagnein in New Hampshire—win then the GOP’s chances of taking the Senate will fall dramatically. Why? Because they’re both going to be unelectable come November. Read Silvers’ analysis here.

Even atheists should be praying for crazy anti-masturbation spokeslady O’Donnell to take the GOP nomination today. For one, she’s a flaming nutcase, to the right of Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” character on SNL and would no doubt provide some spectacular Sharron Angle-sized yucks along the way to the general election. And two, as Silver points out, there is almost no chance she’ll win it. To me, that adds up to a win/win situation!

This is the problem that the Republicans have going into the Fall with these Tea party-backed weirdos like Sharron Angle and Rand Paul dominating the party’s electoral line-up: During the primary election matchups with more moderate/electable GOP candidates, the vocal and highly-motivated Tea party-types have backed some seriously demented horses who will have next to no appeal to voters outside of Tea party circles or unrelated demographics. This is what the Democrats have been hoping for, obviously. an unelectable slate of Tea party-backed opponents in November. By and large, they are getting that.

So much for a resurgent GOP and so much for the influence of the Tea party. Having Sarah Palin’s endorsement during the primary season has been helpful for a few GOP candidates, but this same nod will be Kryptonite to moderate voters in the Fall. Unless voter turnout is low, and then it becomes meaningful. (Say what you will, but Sarah Palin fans are going to vote in force this year). Will the Democrats be able to bridge the apathy gap of their base? That’s going to be a very big factor also and so far, I’d have to say that it doesn’t look that way. Maybe losing in House in 2010 might be the best thing that could happen to the Democrats come 2012.

The media keeps pointing out that approximately 25% of the country sympathize with Tea party aims. So what. these folks are just the die-hards within the GOP that were there to begin with. The far more important information that never gets teased out of this equation is that 75% of the country is not in sympathy with Tea party viewpoints.
 
Below, then calling herself a “Christian activist,” a hapless Christine O’Donnell appears on a 1998 episode of Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect with Martin Mull, Eddie Izzard, and Jasmine Guy. What must O’Donnell made of Eddie Izzard?!?!
 

 
In Part II she makes a total fool of herself. How can anyone overtalk Eddie Izzard like this???