Ben Quayle Wins GOP Nomination
Politico reports on how Ben Quayle won the GOP nomination to run for Arizona's 3rd district:
After a cascade of accusations and ever-shifting denials that he wrote for a raunchy website under the name of a fictional porn star, it seemed even Ben Quayle thought he was going to lose a 10-way Republican primary in Arizona.
Quayle, the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, went so far as to cancel a victory party he had planned to hold Tuesday night to watch the returns in the race for the GOP nod to replace retiring Rep. John Shadegg in the 3rd District.
But the more than 14,000 Republicans who voted for him either didn’t know about the accusations, didn’t care or cast early ballots for him —and they were enough to give him the 22 percent of the vote needed to win the election.
“The very foundations of America’s greatness are under attack in Washington, D.C.,” Quayle, 33, said at a victory speech that was finally delivered at 5:30 pm EST Wednesday . “I have some news: the counter-assault begins right now.”
The day after the primary, his Republican opponents and GOP political hands in Arizona were at a loss to explain a victory that almost no one expected.
“I was surprised,” said state Sen. Jim Waring, the second-place finisher in the race and a former staffer for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Waring said his campaign’s internal polls predicted accurate vote totals for all of the top four finishers—except for Quayle, who beat his campaign’s prediction by 8 points.
“Very few things shocked me in politics but that was just bizarre,” said one GOP consultant who worked for another of Quayle’s rivals. “He not only got embarrassed nationally once for the whole rent-a-family thing that got on Jay Leno, but also for the whole thedirty.com thing.” Quayle was criticized earlier in the campaign for a mailer that showed him with two girls that were his nieces, not his daughters.
