Recall petition volunteer forms / Melissa Ryan
Greg Sargent reports that recall signatures keep piling up:
In another sign that the Wisconsin GOP’s quick passage of the bill to roll back bargaining rights is only causing the fight to escalate, Dems have now collected over 45 percent of the signatures necessary to hold recall elections for eight GOP state senators, the Wisconsin Democratic Party tells me.
Dems have now collected over 56,000 signatures supporting the recall drives, according to party spokesman Graeme Zielinski, after another surge in organizing activity over the weekend. That’s up from rougly 14,000 after last weekend. This means Dems are well ahead of schedule: In each targeted district, Dems need to amass the required signatures — 25 percent of the number who voted in the last gubernatorial election — by a deadline of 60 days after first filing for recalls, which happened nearly two weeks ago.
In other words, Dems are reporting they are nearly halfway to the finish line, with roughly three-fourths of the alloted time remaining.
Today is actually only the 11th day after the start of the recall drive, so we are not even through 20% of the time allotted for signature collection. That's an excellent pace, but keep in mind there are two good reasons why it's important to gather far more than the minimum number of required signatures.
The first reason is to make sure that in the event of challenges to the petitions, there is a comfort zone when they are filed. We need as many signatures as possible in order to guarantee that the petitions are certified and the recall elections take place.
The second reason is because signing a recall petition is a first-rate means of identifying voters for the recall election. Anyone who signs a petition can be easily targeted for GOTV operations. As such, the closer we get to 50%+1 of the votes cast in 2008 just through recall signatures, the closer victory becomes.
Tomorrow at noon, Daily Kos will be releasing polls of all eight state Senate districts where Wisconsin Republicans are targeted for recall. If you would like to receive the topline results of these polls over email tonight, don't forget to sign up here.