Sunday’s New York Times carried a front page story on how both parties are registering voters at a good clip. They looked at county by county date and discovered that in traditional Demo counties the registration has increased by 250 percent since January over the same period in 2000. The GOP registration has increased only 25 percent in Republican areas. "While comparable data could not be obtained for other swing states, similar registration drives have been mounted in them as well, and party officials on both sides say record numbers of new voters are being registered nationwide. This largely hidden but deadly earnest battle is widely believed by campaign professionals and political scientists to be potentially decisive in the presidential election." I have been hearing about this massive drive by the Dems from GOP operatives for many months; they are clearly worried about it. The Demos were organized early and threw a lot of money at it, most of it by soft money groups like America Votes, which will spend about $300 million on the project nationwide. As the registration drive winds down, emphasis will be placed on keeping in touch with voters and then making sure they vote. In Franklin County (Columbus) it is claimed that almost all potential voters have been regsited; it had 650,000 registered voters in 2000, and is now up to 800,000.
One reason why I have been warning against smugness for months.
The Dems have a much larger pool of unregistered people to dip into.
Republican "registration" is largely a matter of re-registering people who have moved to a new address. It’s necessary and helpful, but it doesn’t add new people to the electorate.
The key is to discourage the newly registered Democrats from voting. And the key to that is for Bush to build a strong lead and pound Kerry into the ground with negativity.
"The end of liberal credibility" (C-BS scandal) is irrelevant to the dopes whom the Democrats dredge up from the proletariat and the underclass. If they even know about it.
We see the Democratic machine, including
C-BS self-destructing, but this is noticed mainly by sophisticated voters. Among sophisticated voters, the Dems will still hate Bush and the Republicans didn’t need the C-BS scandal, etc., etc., to vote for him. All these crazy outrages by the Democrats might pump up our turnout and activism a little bit, but this may not be enough to counterbalance the Democrats’ superior ground game.
Bottom line: Bush’s presidency hangs by a thread. And the Democrats will not accept any close result. A close election will be decided in the courts, not at the voting booth.
I wonder how many of the Dems’ new registrants are dead, in country illegally, or never existed.
No way to know. Just as worrisome is how many are "brain-dead."
The only thing "brain dead" here is this discourse ( I use the word loosely). Rather than hurling petty accusations as to the class or education level of Democratic voters, perhaps one should consider that intellectual prowess does not necessarily demand a Republican mentality.