Politics – Page 90 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Standing Up for Candidates Can Be Dangerous

I stood outside for Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick all day in 2010 at a polling location with lots of elderly folks coming to vote. There was one woman driving a car that had all of us – Democrats and Republicans alike – shuffling down the sidewalk away from the doors to avoid being hit. We also all made sure to have our keys out so we could go move our cars if they ended up too close to any of the spaces (yes, plural) she was trying to pull into. Yes, it was really that bad.

Fortunately for us, it wasn’t this bad.

According to Jan Laverty, a volunteer at the polls, a man was driving slowly into a parking spot along the side of the fire company when he sped into the building, crashing into a side door that led into the polling place. …

Laverty said that people inside of the building believed the noise, and the accompanying smoke through the door, was a bomb.

So be careful, folks headed to the polls to volunteer. Don’t get run over.

What is Philadelphia Hiding?

Folks on the left tell us that actual voter fraud is not nearly the problem that Republicans imagine. I would tend to agree that it’s likely not extremely widespread, but I’ve seen enough close elections in my lifetime that it’s not something I am willing to risk. However, I have to question just how widespread it might be when I see Philadelphia election officials fighting oversight at every turn.

Hours before polls opened today, the Philadelphia election officials booted 75 Republican poll watchers from multiple polling places. The GOP has minority inspectors who were told by election officials that “no Republicans will be allowed in the polling place” at all today. There are some reports that the ban on Republicans in polling places got violent and that GOP inspectors were assaulted. The election officials who refused Republicans entry had to be ordered by the courts not to ban people based on their party affiliation.

Meanwhile, these same election officials set up voting machines right in front of a giant Obama mural promoting his 2008 campaign messages. Somehow, it escaped their notice. Yeah… And it took a court order to get it covered after it had been on display for hours.

This is a city that has unbelievably bloated voter rolls that they know contain dead people and others not eligible to vote. Clean elections advocates admit that their voter registration rolls are ripe for fraud because of how many invalid folks they have on them.

About two of every three residents of Pennsylvaniaâ€™s largest city are registered to vote â€“ more than 1 million of the cityâ€™s 1.5 million residents â€“ and that doesnâ€™t sit well with Zack Stalberg of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that works for fair and open elections.

Stalberg said the city has not done enough to trim its voter rolls to remove inactive voters, dead voters and former voters who have moved out of the city. Bloated voting rolls increase the chance for fraud to take place, he said, and in a one-party town like the City of Brotherly Love that can be a particular concern.

â€œThe numbers have been out of whack for some time now,â€ Stalberg told PA Independent. â€œIt just defies logic to think that two out of every three people living in the city can be registered to vote.â€

Yet, the city’s elected officials opposed voter identification measures at every turn. They have even opposed the education efforts to let people know about voter identification laws that will be in effect for the very next election. At some point one has to wonder, what exactly are they afraid Republicans will see in Philadelphia?

Don’t Vote Ignorantly

Ilya Somin makes a case against ignorant voting. When I first started voting, I felt like I had to cast a ballot in every race, no matter what. I tended to vote party in races I didn’t know about. Now I will abstain from races where I don’t know the candidates or the issues. Ignorance is a good reason to not vote.

NRA’s Outreach to the Undecideds

Adage has a really good profile on NRA’s recent campaign expenditures targeting undecided/low information voters in swing states. Here are some highlights:

[NRA has] invested upwards of $11 million this fall in TV, radio and online ads (not including a direct-mail and phone piece) aimed at undecided voters in the usual-suspect list of swing states that includes Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin and Virginia. A hefty 32% of that budget has been allotted for digital, including pre-roll video ads, full-page interstitial ads on news sites like denverpost.com, and page skins on Pandora, according to Brad Todd, a partner at the Republican media shop On Message Inc., which is handling the buying in electronic channels. …

[I]t’s suburban men who aren’t active hunters or shooters but who agree with the NRA philosophically or on the grounds of self-defense who are the focus of the ad campaign, which entered full throttle in October and will continue through Election Day. A decision was made to invest heavily in sports content and to mostly eschew news, a departure from the tack taken by Priorities USA and Restore Our Future, the super PACs backing President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Mr. Todd said.

“We believe that premium content matters for undecided voters because they don’t seek political news,” he said. “If they were political news seekers, they likely wouldn’t be undecided in October.”

Emphasis added by me. I just have to laugh about it. Low information voters are both annoying and a source of comic relief for those of us who follow politics. Hell, I had to raise an eyebrow at the woman wondering out loud this morning why we needed two lines – one of which was much shorter than the other. She didn’t even know that they were for two different precincts. I informed her, but I’m not sure she knew what a precinct was, she just kind of said “ah” and went quiet. But back to the topic of NRA spending, this is the breakdown compared to the campaigns in their October spending:

During the week of Oct. 15, for example, the NRA’s TV mix for the swing-voter campaign was 78% sports, 12% late-night (centered on the likes of David Letterman and Jay Leno), 7% prime time and just 2% news. Meanwhile, data Mr. Todd pulled for Obama backer Priorities USA for a week in October shows 40% of TV spending going toward morning programming — which suggests a focus on women — and that sports accounted for roughly 1% of gross ratings points purchased. Estimates for Romney backer Restore Our Future show spending more evenly balanced across times of day, but only 14% of GRPs going toward sports, Mr. Todd said.

There’s more detail in the story, so go read the whole thing if this sort of thing interests you.

We’ll probably be talking more about some of the things that NRA has done to really create a GOTV structure independent of parties and individual candidate campaigns this year that both Sebastian & I think has real promise at keeping the Second Amendment in the minds of voters who lean our way.

Time to Question Turnout Models

I know that many conservatives have been attacking polls that show their candidate down, and I have mixed feelings on it. It’s generally not a good idea to question everything you lose. You just can’t win every state. But when people started diving deeper into the presumed turnout models for these polls, it seemed like they were taking 2008 turnout to be the assumed baseline when we know that’s not realistic.

Today, we saw that in person at our voting location. We voted at about the same time of day as we did in 2008, and the sight could not have been any different. We have two precincts that vote in different rooms at the same school, and one has a far higher percentage of Democratic voters while the other is predominantly GOP. Our neighborhood is in the mostly GOP precinct.

In 2008, the Democratic leaning precinct line was out of the room (typical), down the hall leading to the voting room (typical), and down the main hall (not atypical), and out the door (extremely out of the ordinary), and halfway down the outside of the building (unheard of), with poll workers telling people it was more than a 3 hour wait. In 2012, the line was only about an hour long and did not grow while we voted. In fact, I overheard two female voters in the line complaining that they couldn’t get their friends interested in showing up this year.

In 2008, our precinct line was short – a couple of folks in front of us and a few people behind us. IIRC, we were around 140 for the voter count for the day. Today, we were 271 & 272, and the line was longer than anything I’ve seen in 2008 or even 2010 (where it was longer than 2008’s line). Interestingly, it continued to grow while we were voting. It was still only about a 15 minute wait, but the sign in sheet was extremely heavily Republican. My name went on the sheet about 2/3 of the way down, and there were only two Democrats signed in on the page.

Enthusiasm gap much?

Tomorrow, it Gets Real: Vote!

Tomorrow marks the end of this silly season, and I will be glad for that no matter what the outcome. For the past week or so, I have tried to tune out election related news, polls, etc. The only poll that matters is the one tomorrow.

Bloomberg’s Achievements

Pejman writes about the fallout from Bloomberg’s poor decision to hold the Marathon (which has since been rescinded), and he sums up his post quite accurately:

So to recap: Michael Bloomberg is a politician in good standing in the Nanny Caucus, the Failed Leadership Caucus, and the Self-Glorification and Aggrandizement Caucus.

And he endorsed Barack Obama for president.

Makes sense when you think about it.

Bloomberg’s Price – $257,000

Candidates who cozy up to Mike Bloomberg get a cool quarter million dollars plus in free advertising based on what he’s doing for the anti-gun Attorney General candidate here in Pennsylvania.

A super PAC founded and funded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending over $250,000 to boost Democratic Attorney General hopeful Kathleen Kane. …

The ad is airing on cable and broadcast in the Philadelphia market to the tune of $257,000, according to a buy tracked by the Sunlight Foundationâ€™s political ad sleuth.

This race is a problem for Pennsylvania gun owners. Polls show Kane holding a huge lead, but they often have a high margin of error and still show about 1/3 of voters haven’t made up their minds, even this late in the game. The race is still winnable, but gun owners need to help out.

I’m not just talking about knocking on doors or making phone calls. With so many voters not paying any attention to the race, one of the best and easiest things to do would be to talk to any friends and family members and just let them know your choice. You don’t have to get into the gun issue, just make remarks that Freed is your candidate of choice based on his record as a prosecutor and encourage them to join you.

Kane has already promised CeaseFire that she’s going to work on undoing the concealed carry reciprocity agreements with all other states – not just Florida that has been demonized by the media.

Kane received a perfect score on CeaseFirePAâ€™s questionnaire. In particular Kane has committed toa review of all concealed carry reciprocity agreements currently in place between Pennsylvania and other states,including Florida, and renegotiating or terminating those that do not meet Pennsylvaniaâ€™s standards.

To give you an idea of how extreme you have to be to get a perfect score on CeaseFire’s questionnaire, not even an NRA D-rated Democratic Senator from Philadelphia could get more than an 85% agreement with them in 2010 when he was running for Governor. That’s how anti-gun you have to be – a solid F with gun owners and more extreme than even entrenched urban Democratic politicians.

Lets Get This Farce Over With

I can’t wait until next Tuesday. Not because I am looking forward to casting my ballot, or for the excitement of seeing who won, but because I want this election to be over. This has been one of the most obnoxious media cycles for an election year in recent memory. For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to tune out election related news, most of which generally involve reading tea leaves based on this poll or that poll. There’s only one poll that matters, and that’s the one that happens next Tuesday.

I’m a Gun Guy, But …

Conor Whetsel, a person currently involved with the occupy movement,Â thinks the Louisiana RKBA measure on the ballot is dangerous, and also unnecessary because there’s already a Second Amendment. He notes:

During my military service, I was highly trained in weapons and tactical shooting, but even I doubt my own abilities to neutralize a threat in a classroom of hundreds of students; therefore, I highly doubt the ability of novice shooters to do the same. No amount of hunting, and practice at the range will prepare a student to make the life or death decisions necessary in a tactical shooting scenario.

I decided to check this guy out, and he did indeed serve in the military. How much do US Navy Petty Officers who work in the mail room of a ship receive advanced firearms training?Â I do not mean to denigrate service in a mail room aboard a ship; it is a fine and noble service to this country. But if, in the realm of public policy, you pass yourself off as a highly sophisticated military tactical shooter with an expert opinion, you have some ‘splainin to do if your resume says you worked in the mail room.Â I’m willing to be educated here by those of you with naval experience, if the Navy spends time and money to make their mail clerks expert tactical shooters, but color me skeptical.

I generally tend to be skeptical of anti-gunners claiming gunny credentials. I advise everyone else to do the same. Don’t trust, verify.