Today was a good day. I did office work in my Harrisburg office, and began preparation for the last pre-election legislative session days we will have on Monday, October 23, 2006 and Tuesday, October 24, 2006. Then I walked over to the offices of the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee (
http://www.pahdcc.org) on North Second Street, exchanged information with staff members, and made fundraising phone calls.
Then I drove to Philadelphia, happily anticipating the award this evening that my 89 year old mother Florence Cohen was going to receive from two organizations with which she had long been been active, the 17th Ward Democratic Executive Committee and the Ogontz Area Neighbors Association.
My happy thoughts were interrupted by Shawn Hannity, who was decrying the fact that a lot of people were going to be voting Democratic this year. Hannity exhorted his audience that it was far better not to vote at all than to vote without being fully informed.
Hannity spent a lot of time expounding on the evils of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, which essentially come down to her agreement with the vast majority of Daily Kos readers on the vast majority of issues.
The more I thought about what Hannity was saying, the happier I was. It was the first time I ever heard a conservative voice urging many of his own supporters to stay home on election day. If this is not desperation, I do not know what is.
Reactionary Republicans are facing ther terrible problem that their vaunted get out the votes are going to be getting out a lot of Democratic votes this year, as disillusioned conservatives announce they have had enough of an administration that talks pro-life but delivers tax cuts for the wealthy, that talks morality but coddles sexual predators, that talks the language of populism and delivers the meat of plutocracy.
I do not have polling numbers in front of me as I write this, but from the polls I have seen and you have probably seen the Republican dilemma is obvious.
If there was a group of 100 solid Republicans this year, there may be only 70 solid Republicans left. (Actual numbers differ from community to community.) If these 100 formerly solid Republicans go 70 to 30 for the Republicans, that means that the Republican margin of victory is down to 40 among a group of people where the margin was previously 100.
By urging people to stay home, Hannity is fighting to keep the Repubican majority in this hypothetical group only down from 100 to 70. This is sound political strategy, but pursuing it shows an incredible amount of desperation.
It also has risks. Republicans disillusioned with Bush may not be disillusioned with their Republican state legislators, for instance. Getting them to stay home may help Democrats at the lower levels.
Six years of perhaps the most conservative Republican President in the history of our country has created too much disillusionment and disgust among former backers to be successfully countervailed during the final weeks of the campaign.
Whatever Hannity and company do is unlikely to be enough to stop a return to the Watergate era level of Democratic landslides.