Friday, December 16th, 2005...10:19 pm
Golly, I Hope That Those People Don’t Vote
One local político, who I will mercifully not name, was going through a voter file and voters were marked with different color highlighters.
“So, what do the colors mean?”
“Yellow are my firm supporters. Orange are soft supporters.”
“What about the blue?”
“Those are the ones we hope don’t vote.”
My fellow blogger Greg Patterson over at Espresso Pundit seems to have a similar attitude towards the upcoming race between Sen. Jon “Not that John” Kyl and Jim Pedersen. In a recent entry, he criticizes oft quoted numbers that show Kyl’s approval rating in that dangerous sub-50 range. He takes a look at the cross tabs and sees that Kyl, unsuprisingly, does better among self-identified conservatives, and poorly among Hispanics and moderates. Then Patterson says:
Of the aforementioned adults, who do you think is more likely to vote–the conservatives and fellow Republicans, or the Hispanics and political moderates?
So, I am hoping that Patterson isn’t saying that the Republicans are counting on low turnout among Hispanics and moderates. Yes, moderates tend not to show up in great numbers in primaries, but they do vote in general elections. If he is saying that there are enough hard core conservatives to elect a state wide candidate without significant amounts of moderate voters, fine, let the Republicans think that. They can ask Governor Matt Salmon how well that has worked in recent elections.
Here is the Republican spin that I just love: Kyl is supposedly hugely popular and invincible at 46% , but Governor Janet Napolitano is unpopular (naturally due to her Bolshevik policies) and will be taken apart by any Republcan at 65%. Someone will have to explain this one to me.
By the way, even the outlier Zogby poll that Espresso Pundit loves say “proves” that the Governor is beatable still shows Napolitano with slightly higher numbers than Kyl has.
3 Comments
December 16th, 2005 at 11:59 pm
Greetings from another blue city in a red state….
That’s because Kyl is beatable, unfortunately it’s against an unnamed Democrat, the same kind that currently would beat Tom Delay in his home district in Texas (layover at DFW, ick - we really should never have allowed that Republic to have joined the union, then they could have invaded Iraq). As a party, we just need to start translating the power of the unnamed D into victories in spite of the onslaught of Republican negative campaigning. Go Pederson!
December 17th, 2005 at 9:56 am
One thing I wonder — there are plenty of people who don’t have a real opinion of a candidate, who vote for him or her anyway (I grit my teeth every time I knock on a door to hand out info and a woman tells me that she just votes for who her husband votes for.) So we know that some of the undecideds will vote, just as much as those who have a firm opinion won’t vote. How does that balance out?
December 20th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
I got a phone call the other day from a ’survey’ organization. They asked me a bunch of questions about the Pederson-Kyl race, and by the end of the conversation, the last thing they asked is ‘would knowing the following make you more or less likely to vote for the candidate?’ followed by a bunch of positive things about Kyl and uniformly negative smears against Pederson. Obviously, they were calling in behalf of the Kyl campaign and trying out some negative campaigning.
So, Kyl is planning to run the way Republicans always run– with personal attacks, smears and distortions.
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