In the wake of this year's election results we're seeing all too familiar phenomena: Republican surprise that rigged voting didn't carry key states, lagging provisional and absentee ballot counting still turning elections and a steady widening of Obama's margin of victory in the national popular vote. Before the election, we had months of skewed polls from Rasmussen and Gallup that pushed up the averages of all polls to portray a much closer election than it actually turned out to be, enabling media pundits to play to their favorite "horse race" memes.
All of these could be seen as independent parts, but they're really all part of one key trend: the Republicans have been badgering average white people to vote for them for years, but this year their voodoo started to wear off big time. And what the voodoo had been covering up is that for more than a decade the average white voter had really begun to lose their faith in what the Republican party could deliver them. They had been voting for losers who were not protecting their interests and they knew it, but the Republicans' ability to make them afraid to look out of step with their friends and neighbors kept on working long enough to warrant a few more years of victories.
But time is running out on this scheme. And, I believe, with a strong push into "red states" in 2014 we can break the back of the "power at all costs" party in a big way.
More just south of the Mason-Dixon swirl.
It's been a two-pronged attack. The skewed polls, backed by shrill far right media pundits pointing to them, help to keep voters showing up to the polls for candidates who would otherwise be shown up to be the losers that they really are. These polls say in essence to them, "Don't worry, if you vote for Republicans you won't look stupid." But the Republican message got so inane this year that in spite of hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising the Republicans could barely turn out enough of their faithfuls to eke out their built-in advantages through vote rigging and suppression.
The fake polls prod unwarranted turnout and the vote skewing amplifies it just enough to avoid rational discussions - except in Ohio in 2004, where the Republicans threw caution to the wind and jiggered the electronic voting so radically that highly reliable exit polling was declared by the media to be faulty so as to avoid the ugly truth that Bush's re-election was even more rigged than his first election. But in the end, even in spite of their radical gerrymandering of Congressional districts, the Republican machine can't hide the dwindling of their margins any more. The only thing that really holds it up at this point is their iron grip on the "red states" - there they can run up fake margins much more easily, now free from the scrutiny of exit polls in most instances.
I think that the lack of polling in reliable "red states" this year was one of the most overlooked aspects of this year's elections. The rigging of the national polls relied heavily on data showing Romney with heavy leads in red states - yet in spite of these fallacious polls, Romney came out at least 2.5 percent behind Obama in the national popular vote, with many red states showing Romney with only a five percent or so margin over Obama. Without exit polling in these states, however, we can't really verify whether in fact Democrats may have been even closer to overtaking Republicans in those states' races - not only for the presidential race but also for congressional races.
In other words, are "red states" really reliably Republican, or are they in fact just reliably riggable for Republicans because Democrats weren't challenging them there?
With 50-state campaign support, proper scrutiny, aggressive law enforcement and good exit polling, could it be that 2014 races can flush out enough voters for good Democratic candidates in "red states" to overcome even the gerrymandering and skewed polls? A 50-state strategy worked in 2008, forcing Republicans to spread their expensive anti-reality campaigning very thin. The truth is cheaper to defend, ultimately. So I think that it would be well worth it to go all-out in 2014 for pushing hard into "red state" territory. If the skewing is as bad as it appeared to be this year, then white voters in "red states" are probably ready to switch over if they're given good candidates to take them to the blue side.
The 2012 has shown that the Republicans are truly paper tigers - their "fearsome" power is as thin as the dying newspapers that prop up their machine, thin as the reality on their television and radio cheerleaders' programs. We need to push hard, wide and deep into "red state" territory in 2014 to break the back of the Republican anti-democracy machine. I do believe that many voters are ready to respond if we do - especially when they start to see that Obamacare was worth waiting for. We don't want to overplay our hand, but with hard work at giving people confidence to vote for truth-telling Democrats, then 2014 could set the stage for a great 2016 election year.