To Win An Election It's Better To Beg Forgiveness Than Ask For Permission

Disclosure: I am going to reference MyDD and TalkingPointsMemo a fair bit here. I have given some (modest) money to both in the past, to fund their work (polling and reporting, respectively).

As we head into the final days of the 2006 midterm election a lot of people are trying to figure out whether the GOP's vaunted ability to 'close the deal' is going to pull them through to victory again. At this point even the mainstream media is speaking in terms of waves (Newt Gingrich's revolution in '94 is the last time we had such), but this time a Democratic one. The generic congressional ballot, a measure of general attitude of the voters toward the parties, has been at historic highs that favor the Democrats. In the last few days that may have started to turn around:

Over the last eighteen hours, two generic ballot polls have given me real pause. Pew just came out with a new generic ballot poll showing the Democratic lead in the generic ballot down to only 47%-43% among likely voters. This is a shift from 50%-39% last week, and the closest it has been in Pew since before Hurricane Katrina. The Pew numbers give more solidity to the ABC-WaPo numbers earlier in the day, which showed the Democratic lead down to 51%-45% among likely voters, after it was at 54%-41% two weeks ago. Granted, the Newsweek poll conducted during the same time period shows Democrats still ahead by a whopping 16 points, 54%-38%, and the Time poll (PDF) of likely voters shows Democrats with a fifteen point lead, 55%-40%. All of these poll still show large Democratic leads among registered voters (9%, 10%, 15%, and 16% for an average of 12.5%), and several more generic polls will be coming out between now and Tuesday morning. Still, this does certainly make me even more skeptical than usual of forecasts predicting a massive Democratic wave.

The generic ballot measure is an imperfect predictor of how elections will go. It certainly points in the right direction but the Republicans have large structural advantages over the Democrats. Although the Democrats have been better able to compete monetarily this year, the Republicans still have a lot of cash to spend. Take it from Karl Rove:

"For most Americans, particularly the marginal voters who are going to determine the outcome of the election, it started a couple weeks ago," he said. "Between now and the election, we will spend $100 million in target House and Senate races in the next 21 days."

Karl Rove is the architect behind President Bush's campaigns and of GOP campaign strategy in general. 100 million is a lot of clams. Could it be that that massive expenditure is having an effect? How would one spend that money in a way that might turn things around? Polls on Iraq show high public disapproval of the war. A wave of scandals (financial and, ah, personal) has largely set the Republicans back on their heels and kept them there. The economy isn't great. I can't find the attribution, but I have read a rather common sense statement to the effect that, if you have to convince people of it, then the economy isn't doing well. On terror the public now, by a very slight majority, prefers the Democrats to Republicans (a first). So there isn't a lot for the GOP to grab onto in a positive way, to either motivate their base (which is dispirited) or to persuade independent voters.

There are other ways to skin the electoral cat though. If you can't get your people out to vote, keep the other side's votes at home. As an historical example of how this was done, a brief synopsis of the NH Phone Jamming Scandal of 2002 (I pulled much of this from TalkingPointsMemo and TPMMuckraker. If you want to dig into this yourself, plug "Phone Jamming" into the TPM's search box (upper right). More articles than you can shake a stick at!):

...the New Hampshire Republican party hired a Northern Virginia telemarketing outfit -- GOP Marketplace -- to jam the phone banks at the offices of the New Hampshire Democratic Coordinated Campaign and the Manchester Firefighters' Union Local on election day last November.

Both phone banks were being used that morning for get-out-the-vote efforts.

According to the Union Leader, GOP Marketplace hired Idaho-based Milo Enterprises to place repeated five-second-and-hang-up calls to the phone banks' numbers, thus effectively shutting them down on election day. After a few hours, Verizon stepped in and shut the operation down.

One of the major tasks that any good campaign engages in is last minute Get Out The Vote efforts. On election day that includes calling people to see if they have voted. The jamming wasn't a lone wolf operation, the NH GOP new about it:

The FBI's 2003 interview with NHRSC Executive Director Chuck McGee is especially revealing in this regard [we've posted it here]. McGee, who has said he originally hatched the plan to jam Democrat's phones, told the FBI that he'd discussed the jamming before Election Day with the NHRSC's Chair, the Vice Chair, Finance Director, and four other senior level Republican staffers in the state. McGee pled guilty for his role in the jamming and has already served his time.

McGee said that the Party's Chairman John Dowd gave him the go-ahead the night before the election [Dowd, for his part, admitted to The New Hampshire Union Leader that McGee told him of the plan, but said he did not authorize it]; that the Vice Chair gave him the number of the Manchester Professional Firefighters Union, one of the jamming's targets; and that the Financial Director, who signed the check to pay for the jamming, disclosed to the FEC that the money was for "GOTV" (Get Out the Vote efforts) when she knew what it was really for [she corroborated this in her interview with the FBI].

Heck, there's evidence that the Whitehouse knew about it:

James Tobin, the RNC's regional political director in 2002, was convicted for his part in orchestrating a scheme to jam Democrats' phone lines on Election Day, 2002. Turns out he was in more or less constant contact with the White House Office of Political Affairs through much of that day.

Tobin called the White House Office of Political Affairs, which was run by now-RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, more than 75 times from Sept. 30 to Nov. 22 of 2002. That much was reported today in New Hampshire's Union Leader. You can see the analysis that was based on here. He was also in touch with the White House on the day the phone-jamming was taking place.

He called the White House twelve times on the day of the phone jamming, the first time at 11:20 AM -- not long after Verizon intervened to shut down the scheme. The conversation was five minutes long.

Ken Mehlman is now the head of the Republican National Committee. The RNC paid the legal fees of Tobin during his trial (he was convicted), without comment. So what does this have to do with Tuesday's election? In a stunning display of chutzpah, the RNC is engaging in phone based monkey business in NH again. This time they are flooding voters with repeat calls (robocalls), some of them early in the morning.

For the second straight day yesterday, Democratic field offices received dozens of phone calls and e-mails from frustrated voters upset about repeated automated phone calls they thought were coming from Democratic candidate Paul Hodes - though the calls were paid for by a Republican group instead.

The National Republican Congressional Committee spent nearly $20,000 on the calls last week. Depending on the rate, that could mean more than 300,000 automated phone calls into the Second Congressional District.

The RNC said that the calls would continue, despite the Republican incumbent, Charlie Bass, asking them to be stopped! A cynic would say that this is just good theater - it allows Bass to appear independent and moral, while still reaping the benefit of the calls all the same. And these calls do have the desired effect:

I was handing out leaflets for John Hall yesterday at a grocery store. There were two tables, a democratic one and a Republican one.

When I was handing out palm cards, several people said to me something like, "I WAS going to vote for John Hall, until I got all those phone calls. I got seven or eight, right at dinner time."

The guy from the Republican table, who was a local district leader-- friendly and chatty, actually came over to me and said, "You know, most of those are coming from Sue's office, but don't tell anybody."

I don't know how high his connections are to the Kelly campaign, but that's the information he volunteered.

You probably noticed that the candidates mentioned are Kelly and Hall, not Hodes and Bass. That's because the above quote is from a district in New York. That district is getting the same sort of calls. It is being duplicated around the country, in fact. And there are other efforts at disinformation and discouragement of Democratic voters. I'm looking at the front page for TalkingPointsMemo. The proprietor, Josh Marshall, has asked for readers to send in comments on what they are observing, as many of his readers are Democratic activists. This is what's going on on just the page for Nov. 5, 2006:

Harassing and deceptive robocalls in New Hampshire.
Similar robocalls in New York.
Similar robocalls in Kansas, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California.
Signs saying "Encourage Terrorists. Vote Democrat." in Texas.

My personal favorite is this one (from the same page at TPM):

On Monday morning, when Chapel Hill lawyer Bob Epting approached the early voting center at Morehead Planetarium, he . . . was approached by a female college student who asked whether he was a registered Democrat.

"Yes I am," he said.

She replied, "Good, here's a list of our judicial candidates."

Epting thanked her, folded the piece of paper without looking at it and put it in his pocket. . . .

But after exiting the poll, he remembered the piece of paper and removed it from his pocket. Standing at the top of a dozen or so marble steps, he scanned the list in disbelief. It was a list of Republican candidates.

Lovely. And that's just what I've been able to read today. Never mind the racist ads in Tennessee and Idaho, the RNC ad implying that if you want to die, vote Democrat, the accusation of a GOP candidate that an Iraq war vet, who lost both her legs in combat, wants to 'Cut and Run', and all the other nastiness that's been floating around for the past few weeks. To be fair, there is some of this on the Democratic side of the aisle too. Albert Wynn won his primary in Maryland using some pretty underhanded tactics. Hopefully the Democrats will turn him out in two years. The majority of what I am seeing right now is on the GOP side though.

Misinformation (and a sprinkling of fear), seems to be the national strategy of the GOP in the last days of the campaign. In NH the Attorney General got involved and put a stop to it. It seems such calls are against the law. In particular, there is a $5k fine in NH for calling anyone on the Do Not Call list. With hundreds of thousands of calls, it is estimated that the RNC could have engendered a $100 Million fine because of these (ironic, that's the sum Karl Rove was touting). I suspect though, if this turns the election in their favor and keeps the Congress Republican, that it will be seen to have been worth it. The GOP fears the investigations that a Democratic House would bring. Winning at any cost is the objective now, the fallout can be dealt with later.

I could list a score of instances of other dirty tricks used in the last few elections, deployed at the last moment, that can turn a race. People do it because it works - by the time the law catches up to you, you've already won election and the bar to oust a sitting congressman is a bit higher than for the plebes.

So, please, whatever your orientation, try to find a source you trust on your local races, cut through the noise, and vote (if you haven't already done so).

Oh, an obvious prediction: close elections will be followed by lawsuits. The GOP will be filing a lot of them, I think. No special source of information for this, just a gut feeling born of observation of past behavior.