What happened in Colorado with Allard? (Vanity)

The Democrats failed to enegize their base, plain and simple. It takes alot of energizing to inspire the rate of voter fraud that we have seen in past elections.

It takes alot of energizing to inspire the rate of voter fraud that we have seen in past elections.

Plus, it can be really hard to get all those dead people to wake up and vote on nothing more than Social Security scare tactics - since they're dead, Social Security is not a hot-button issue for them.

A friend in Longmont pointed out that Strickland did an interview where he was asked who his clients were.

He said "I don't know" (of course, he did know, but did not want to say their names on the air).

Three days before the election, the Allard ads came out, pointing out his big-dollar clients vs. the clip of him saying "I don't know".

Zogby was all over the place with his polls in the last month. His credibility has dropped way off. Part of Allard's final advantage was the "Bush Tidal Wave" spreading from east to west. That's why VNS pulled all their exit polls. They did not want to depress western Democrat votes. But the early call on Jeb Bush (+19% when it was made) in an "even" race, set the tone for the evening!

Most polls underestimate Republican strength. That's because they poll ALL eligible voters. Zogby changed all that some years ago when he decided to poll only LIKELY voters. He became famous when his results were consistently far more accurate than other more established pollsters.

But his method of predicting who are LIKELY voters seems to have completely broken down in Colorado this fall. One big reason, as others have mentioned already, was his inability to foresee the effects of the GOP's first attempt ever to do a major, major push to increase voter turnout in GOP precincts in the waning days (the last 96 hours) of the campaign. The Dems traditionally have done this for years, largely via a free army on tbe union payroll. But Republicans have been slow to fight back on this battlefield.

Even the GOP was taken by surprise when roughly twice as many volunteers as they'd anticipated (including myself!) showed up for the "96 Hour" push. I don't believe they were even aggressively advertising for people to come. I only found out about it because I started calling the County party the week before, anxious to do something to help Sen. Allard - and repeatedly left messages on their answering machine. I was starting to think they didn't WANT any help!

So I found their website with a list of their officers, and started looking up the names in the phonebook until I finally got ahold of a live person after about the 8th name. The Colorado GOP was really scrambling around the last week to find enough seasoned veterans to act as team leaders for this enthusiastic mob of rightwing volunteer do-gooders!! So one thing the Party apparently did was to put a lot of pressure on candidates who were unopposed or who were 20 or 30 or points ahead of their opponents in the polls, to peel off some of their staff to help lead the 96 Hour effort. My teammate the first 2 days related a similar experience of having a hard time contacting the GOP to volunteer his services - leaving messages all over before first making real contact! I wonder if our experiences were the norm? - I.e. strangers ringing their phones off the hook anxious to help, instead of the other way around?

The 4th day ( Election Day) I was a poll watcher at a single polling place, meeting at 6:15 AM for my assignment, and not leaving until 8PM. Yet though I was there all day, the Democrat pollwatcher came by exactly once for maybe 20 minutes. There's no way they could have placed a fraction of the phone calls that I did, to party members who hadn't yet voted. (Poll watchers have access to the names of who has shown up to vote. And, unless their party is incompetent, they have a list of all known names and phone numbers of party members in the precinct).

Besides a general fear of seeing Democrat gains nationwide, another strong motivation to work as hard as I could was an expectation that the Unions were out in full force working against us during that same time, and assumedly doing a better job than us because of their much longer experience with this.

So it was a pleasant surprise to read how disorganized and panic-stricken our opponents were, in a Denver Post article from yesterday. I'll print the first few paragraphs, which are the best part of the article.

I hope you enjoy the pleasing aroma of Toasted Liberal as much as I do! ...

Low turnout of minorities, poor splits Dems on tactics
By Susan Greene
Denver Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 10, 2002 -

It was 5:35 p.m. on Election Day, and Colorado Democrats were panicked. With fewer than 90 minutes until polls closed, party operatives grabbed volunteers off street corners and out of phone banks, herding them to northeast Denver to help get out the vote.
"It was total chaos. ... We were supposed to knock on random doors, as if at that point people would really listen," said Bill Vandenberg of the Colorado Progressive Coalition. "Not until the last hour of the last day of the 2002 election did the party remember the low-income people and the people of color. It all seemed pretty desperate, like an exercise in futility."
Many Colorado Democrats are decrying their party for failing to galvanize its traditional base. Some are especially frustrated by Senate contender Tom Strickland, who they say went too far to the center and paid too little attention to low-income voters, minority groups and opponents of a war with Iraq.
At the same time, state Republicans usurped traditionally Democratic methods by staging their most expansive get-out-the-vote movement ever, after launching an aggressive and successful voter registration campaign.
Experts say those efforts, coupled with a more clearly defined political platform, led the GOP to trounce Democrats both in Colorado and across the nation.
"What was missing was a Democratic ideal, a Democratic plan of action," pollster Floyd Ciruli told a group of Denver Democrats on Friday. "The Republicans were passionate, committed and fired up. But for the Democrats ... there was nothing to turn them out."
This year's GOP triumph statewide and nationally has prompted more than the usual post-election self-flagellation and finger-pointing among liberal Democrats.
Activists are grumbling particularly about the party's performance in largely African-American north Denver - a longtime Democratic stronghold that is home to Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. Precincts there had a 35 percent voter turnout - slightly more than half of the 67 percent turnout citywide. ............

BTW - on a more serious note here ... I started thinking on what that one activist was quoted saying above - about the Dems only remembering at the very last minute - "Oh, yeah! The Poor People! We forgot about the Poor People! Quick! Go out and round 'em up!!!"

And I thought about how you often see articles about the self-destructive habits that people in poverty have that keep perpetuating the cycle of poverty in their lives and their children's lives. And it just dawned on me that one thing you never see included in that list of reasons that REALLY should be there - in fact, should probably be at the top of the list ------
The single worst self-destructive habit of poverty-stricken people is that they put all of their trust and their hopes in the Democrat party.

A blast from the past, to disepl the media poll worshippers and doom and gloomers on FR, who say webb is ahead.