With Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava suddenly dropping out of the 23rd Congressional District race in upstate New York yesterday, Election Day will see a battle between Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens. But Politico points out that people shouldn't have been shocked, "Over the past decade or so the New York Republican Party has emerged as the political gang that couldn't shoot straight, an operation so inept that it's sometimes hard to believe it exists in the nation's third-largest state," calling her campainn's collapse "an illustration of the utter ruin into which the state party has fallen. In just a few short years, the party's presence in state politics has dwindled to the point of extinction-or irrelevance." more ›