Obi Wan Kenobi, on the races, twelve days out
TKS BLOG NRO
10/26 03:45 PM
A short while ago, the Republican National Committee sent an e-mail titled “Democratic Meltdown in the Senate,” spotlighting good news for Republican candidates in Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, New Jersey and Montana. Coincidentally, around the time I received that e-mail, I chatted with Obi Wan Kenobi, who had a similar vibe on the quintet – and hadn’t yet seen the RNC e-mail.
(For those of you who haven’t been reading since the Kerry Spot days, Obi Wan Kenobi is my secretive and wise mentor on all things political; he has been around Republican politics longer than I have been alive.)
Obi thinks these trends in the middle of the week are helpful, but it is key to see the trends continue. “The trend has to hold in that direction.”
In addition to those five, he’s watching George Allen’s race in Virginia. On the Virginia race, he notes, if Allen starts to pull away, it’s a sign of a late trend in Republican favor. If Allen starts to build a real lead, people are seeing through the noise. And if that happens, Obi suggests, there’s just a chance that some other trailing Republican - a DeWine or a Santorum is going to be the beneficiary.
Obi is particularly intrigued by Steele’s chances in Maryland. He’s not quite ready to guarantee a Steele win, but he’s in the neighborhood.
On the House races, he’s open about what he doesn’t know, and wishes others were as straightforward. “House race polls are generally worthless,” he said. “It’s always been tough for pollsters to stay inside the lines of House districts.”
However, he says the House races will trend late in the same direction as the Senate.
We share a sense that the last weeks of the campaign season tend to have a pendulum effect. The Democrats will get momentum for a couple of days, then the story shifts – say, Ford stumbles by crashing Corker’s event – and then after 24-48 hours of Republican optimism, the momentum shifts back.
What else should we be watching? Well, Obi wants to see the generic ballot question shift a few points in the Republican direction by late next week or even the Monday before the election.
Another roundup from the GOP ground game
10/26 02:21 PM
It's nice having a small Army of Davids Reporters to help fill in the details of how the ground game is working across the country. From Maryland:
As an active Precinct Chair, obviously I have a different view than your normal unaffiliated citizen. But inside the Montgomery County campaign it is the STRONGEST I have seen, which includes the 2000, 2002, 2004 elections.
Now we have had individual walks where the locations of each potential Steele/Ehrlich voter are signified by a dot on the maps given to the walkers. Then there are directions included as how to get from house to house of our targeted voters. Then there are sign lists, and all of our call lists are hooked in to a massive computer database. I have even been called to volunteer by other volunteers. We have meetings on the 72 hour campaign- we go to all the local city days with our candidates and supporters.
There are as many Steele yard signs as there are Cardin. This may be because Cardin feels he has it in the bag, but there are actually more Raeze for Senate signs on the streets (hard leftist candidate).
I've seen the Republicans under-perform in the Garden State too many times to ever pick Kean to win. But JP in New Jersey says he's seeing more mobilization in his old Morris County hangouts:
I don’t know what some of your other readers have been saying about the GOTV in NJ, but believe me, I feel it in full force and I don't even live there right now. I'm from Morris County which is a Republican strong hold and I've received phone calls via cell phone and emails a-plenty. I've been asked to make calls and attend rallies almost weekly from the NJGOP and the Morris County Republican Organization.
With these efforts coupled with the fact that GOP heavy weights like Mccain and Rudy Giuliani (who fellow Italians in NJ love) are stumping for Kean I think we have a shot at winning this seat and really shocking the Dems. Call it a hunch, call it what you will but I think that this is the Republicans best chance at picking up a Senate seat.
I wasn't entirely surprised by this report from Roger in Wisconsin:
Not sure what you'd say about it but here in Wisconsin, from Green Bay, to Eau Claire, to Madison, to Milwaukee, to Platteville to Wausau I can tell you Republicans are not shying away from signs supporting Mark Green for Governor or showing signs for their Republican congressional candidates. Even finding any significant number of signs for Democrats is a tough job. It is very strange. FAR fewer Dem signs than normally seen and I travel all over the state on business.
If Doyle comes up short on Election Day, I’ll bet lying about his record on guns and getting in a fight with the NRA was a key factor.
In Ohio, Matthew says his experience is that conservatives are “coming home,” even if they’re less than thrilled with their candidates.
Re: the Ohio guy who is on the fence about Dewine—I'm the opposite. Although I vowed in the past that I'd never vote for DeWine again, I'm not going to stand idly by when the Dems are running Sherrod Brown. In my opinion, Sherrod Brown is Howard Metzenbaum on acid... A far-right colleague of mine feels the same way, and he'll vote for DeWine too. What "conservative" would want Sherrod as senator, and Harry Reid as Majority Leader?... On another matter, my far right colleague is voting for Deb Pryce for the first time in his life. So, the point of my anecdote is that, even though there are some "conservatives" who may be sitting these races out, there are also those who are motivated to vote for the Republicans even though they otherwise wouldn't.
Joseph shares a story about the joys of working as a poll watcher in Florida:
Worked the polls in Jacksonville in '04 — heavily democrat precinct. The Dems had three poll watchers (lawyers paid at $100 per hour) and the Reps had me (volunteer). When the votes were counted at the end of the day….I walked out and called the votes in to the National Data Base. It led me to believe that the Reps knew who won Florida before anybody else…..I knew they were doing this State wide.
I volunteered to do it again this year, but they were completely booked on poll watchers (every precinct) in Duval. So I'm early voting, working the calls come this Saturday, and on November 7th I'm heading south to help work the polls for Joe Negron. Oh BTW the early voting does have an impact on election day….the people who early vote are the ones that vote in the evening when returning home from work. We (the poll workers and I) were quite surprised to see the effect in '04. The poll workers kept saying the crush would come after 5 PM…but it never materialized. The poll workers, who knew all the voters, started checking and then they realized most of the late voters had early voted.
BTW in '04 that precinct had a ~ 66 % turnout (George Bush got 82 votes out of 6700 cast) but I had a fantastic time with the citizens and the poll workers. I think everybody should work the polls at least once…..it does make you proud to be an American.
Another Florida report from Tim:
I live in Jeff Miller's Congressional District (FL-2) and I've early voted like some of your Florida correspondents. Early voting has been brisk here in the Panhandle and I don't see any signs of Conservative Ennui locally. Crist will win, Harris will lose but do better than expected.
Tim asks about Democratic Get out the Vote efforts. So far, few readers have written in much about what’s going on with their side. I understand that once again the Apparition-American vote in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Newark, and St. Louis are expected to break hard for the Democrats, with long lines at all of the graveyard polling places. The question will be that due to lack of ID requirements, the dead may vote more than once, which I would contend is cheating even by Democratic standards.
Interesting angle about the style of the Democratic outreach in Virginia from Steve:
I'd always admired Jim Webb as a man of integrity and George Allen has long been at the top of my '08 wish list. So I signed up with both campaigns to receive information/updates on the candidates back in the spring. George Allen sends me a nice letter once a month along with a request for contributions. Pretty standard campaign stuff. From Jim Webb I get 2-3 emails a week which include the usual donation requests along with innumerable statements (rants, actually) from Murtha, Pelosi, et al. expressing their support and explaining how Webb will single-handedly save the Union from the evil George Bush (I didn't know he was running for a Senate seat in Virginia!).
My impression is that Webb did not build a grassroots campaign as much as he stepped into a pre-packaged nutroots campaign. However, they are diligent nutroots whose efforts are more similar to the recent GOP GOTV efforts than are Allen's. So I'd give them an "A" for effort. As for substance, they have managed to destroy my respect for Webb; whether he really agrees with the things they say or not, he's letting those things be said in his name. With the kind of over-the-top hyperbole that the Webb campaign is employing, I don't think they're going to sway anyone whose mind isn't already made up. They seem to be banking on the assumption that they have a natural majority and that they just need to get them fired up to vote.
Yeah, I've wondered about how carefully campaigns screen volunteers and helpers for the kind of nuts who repel potential supporters. We've seen the Cardin staffer going on and on about "Oreos" and "Jewish noses," we've seen FireDogLake putting Joe Lieberman in blackface to help out Ned Lamont...
In "Applebee's America," Matthew Dowd details how the Bush campaign in 2004 had divided their potential supporters into 50some different categories with a motivating issue for each one - guns, taxes, abortion; some of them were surprisingly specific, like "access to Internet porn in public libraries." The genius of that campaign was the way they taylored each get-out-the-vote message to each potential voter. It wasn't just, "Vote for Bush,"; it was "Vote for Bush, or next year the number of abortions will go up." The Bush volunteers knew exactly what topic was going to most powerfully motivate each voter on their list.
Clearly, in Steve's case, they're not micro-targeting. They're presuming that everyone who is on Webb's list likes Murtha and Pelosi. That strikes me as a gamble, even in Northern Virginia.
When I was in Washington the past few weeks, I was struck by the number of Cardin television ads that presumed a) George W. Bush is a horrible person, and anyone who has ever spoken well of him is a horrible extremist b) that Iraq is a horrible war, and anyone who doesn't oppose it is automatically a horrible extremist and c) anyone who supports any restrictions on abortion ever at all is automatically a horrible extremist. I know the Maryland suburbs of D.C. are liberal, but there's a certain presumptuousness and arrogance in that tone that may not serve Cardin well.
It's a stark contrast to the comparable respectful tone of, say, Barack Obama's "pang of shame" he felt when he learned that his campaign was calling pro-lifers "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." |
