Joe the Plumber, the Republican working class hero whose name is not really Joe and who is not really a plumber, managed to get 24% of the votes in his run for a seat in the US House of Representatives from Ohio.

If you look at the positions that ‘Joe’ took during his ‘campaign’, a campaign in which he barely bothered to actually do anything at all, the fact that he got 24% is remarkable and prompts the question: What exactly do you have to do as a Republican to be considered so crazy that no one will vote for you? And remember that he actually won a contested Republican primary.

This is yet another indication that the 27% ‘Crazification Factor’, the absolute floor below which a Republican candidate seemingly cannot fall, is pretty sound, give or take a few points. John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey proposed this number back in 2005 and it has proven to be a remarkably robust estimate.

It is clear that about a quarter of the public will vote for a Republican candidate, no matter how crazy. It will be interesting to see what the corresponding floor for a Democrat is.