On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Recall Justin's story of how incredibly chaotic the [Dem] GOTV operation
> was in Ohio.
To be fair to the Dem side, the chaos Justin described was not due to uncoordinated GOTV machine -- it was chaos generated by the Republican's voter suppression tactics strafing us. That's an asymetrical disadvantage. Our counter-voter-terrorism operation might not have been as good as it should have been, but the other side isn't burdened with one at all.
It's also not clear the Dem GOTV machine was out-fought in Ohio. It's clear that w/out voter suppression they would have romped, so in pure GOTV terms, they did better.
And I still believe the odds are they won even with voter suppression -- that Ohio was stolen.
Besides all the other reasons that have gotten a good airing, there's something that's always bugged me from famous Matt Bai article in the NYT Magazine describing how the suburban Republican machine worked so efficiently. One thing he made a big deal about was that the Republicans were all done voting early in their small town while the Democrats voted far into the night. But the early returns favored the Democrats -- it was only in the late afternoons that the lead changed and then held up throughout the night.
If Bai's picture is correct, that doesn't seem to compute.
Michael