Does Karl Rove have election tricks up his sleeve?

People are saying watch out for Rove stealing the elections. Republicans have been seriously hammered in the polls for over a month now–but Rove and Bush still seem oddly confident, even complacent, that they won’t lose on Tuesday. Is it all bluff and bravado, or has Rove prepared something underhanded to steal enough elections to keep Republican control of Congress? How many things could go wrong with the elections? How many things could be manipulated?

Rove said in an NPR interview last week:

“Yeah. Look, I’m looking at all these, Robert, and adding them up. And I add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House. You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math. I’m entitled to ‘the’ math.”

It’s too late and the conservatives are too far behind for any open tricks like an “October Surprise”. At this point, Rove’s either lying to the country, lying to himself, or planning on massive fraud.

Well, what do you expect him to say: Yeah, we’re going to lose.

It’s part bravado and part belief in the Republican’s get-out-the vote machine, which everyone (even the Democracts) say is much better than the Democrat’s. I think privately they’re just hoping and praying they can hang onto the Senate, because they know the House is all but gone.

YES, Johanna! Yes, the evil genius Karl Rove has a diabolical plan to subvert democracy and make George W. the President forever! There is NOTHING the Democrats can do to stop such a mastermind!

Ye gods, Rove is a semi-competent political strategist at best, and I find it hilarious how much awe he inspires in his enemies!

Rove has a backup plan. He’s going to burst out of his human body-shell, scuttle over to his prepared escape ship, and flee to his home planet. But he’ll be back!

Seems to me it’s a variant on the old truism “nothing succeeds like success.” There is a fair segment of the population that casts its votes solely on the basis of who they think is going to win, so they can feel like they’re part of the winning side, rather than on the basis of who they think would be the better government representative. In other words, they try to predict who will be victorious, and cast their votes accordingly, so they don’t feel like they “voted for a loser.” (I don’t know what the size of this segment might be; that’s probably an argument in itself. But no doubt there is some fraction of the masses for whom this is true: consider it the “casual Yankee fan” syndrome.) Seems to me this phenomenon contributes at least in part to the “political waves” that sweep the country every ten or twenty years; one side appears to have the momentum, and is likely to come out ahead, so by sheer emotional inertia it acquires even more political force.

Rove and Bush, therefore, have to keep pretending that the Republicans aren’t going to get their asses handed to them next week, because they don’t want that “vote with the winner” group to abandon them as well, and make things worse, whether by staying home or heaven forbid voting for the other side. At this point, it’s just damage control, and turnout management, nothing more.

The problem the Republicans have is that they hadn’t planned to have to put so much effort into many races that were thought to be safe. “No one could have predicted” that Allen would implode in VA, for instance, not to mention the many House races that should have been a “cakewalk”, like Foley’s district in FL. The Republicans are going to get their asses handed to them, and deservedly so. From the polls I’ve seein, the independents are leaning 2-1 Dem and even self-described evangelicals are showing up 50/50 Dem in the polls.

Ya think? Read this book. It outlines how many amazingly clever things Rove has done since he joined forces with W.

Well, there’s good reasons why he might not want to predict total assured success.

First, there’s his professional reputation. If he predicts a major Republican victory and the election produces a Democrat sweep instead, Rove’s image of being a political mastermind will be greatly diminished and his ability to do his job (part of which is based on his reputation) will be weakened.

Second, there’s the need to motivate the base. Rove should be telling every potential Republican voter that it’s going to be a close race and every vote is needed. Otherwise, he risks the possibility that some Republicans will take him at his word and stay home on Election Day feeling their vote isn’t necessary.

Third, there’s setting the bar. A lot of politicians have been burned by getting expectations too high. If Rove predicts the Republicans will keep a majority in both halves of Congress, then losing a majority in the House will be an unexpected defeat. If Rove predicts the Republicans will lose both halves of Congress, then keeping a majority in the Senate will be an unexpected victory.

Okay, pop quiz:

In the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign, if you had been George W. Bush’s campaign manager, would you have sent him to California, where he had zero chance of winning?

Karl Rove did!

Does that sound like a genius at work?
Semi-competent is a generous description. Liberals only make themselves sound ridiculous when they treat him as anything more. Worse still, it allows them to avoid asking themselves hard questions. When a party loses elections, it’s SUPPOSED to start asking “Where did we screw up? How did we alienate the voters?”

By blaming everything on the evil machinations of Karl Rove, liberals have let themselves off the hook- they’ve been able to pretend that they’ve done nothing wrong, that the ONLY reason they lost was because the diabolical Karl Rove was orchestrating grand schemes against them.

Given all the watchdog groups out there closely monitoring elections nationwide, I sincerely
hope the Rove & co. do try something, since they’ll likely get caught red-handed.

And then the watchdog groups will inform the Republican administration, the Republican appointed court system, and the newly re-elected Republican Congress that the Republicans stole the election. And they will be told they are shocked by these allegations and will almost certainly consider the possibility of an investigation at some undefined point in the indeterminate future assuming sufficient evidence emerges to justify this otherwise unnecessary expenditure over an event that nobody can prove happened in the first place.

The left wing hate machine is all wound up, ready to say “the election was stolen”. Usually they say “people are too stupid to vote properly”. 3rd generation “Family of Swine” Robert Kennedy will be out saying “My family knows stlolen elections…we are great using crooked labor unions and Cosa Nostra mobsters”. ^They tried to do it in 2000…saying the Florida election was over before polls closed in the panhandle and tried to throw out absentee ballots, telling any military members who prtotested to shut up under the UCMJ.

Ah, it’s always such a pleasure to encounter the fresh insights and reasoned discourse of a new contributor to our board.

The left wing hate macine told you to say that.

That’s as may be, but the book I cited doesn’t touch on any “evil machinations.” No mention of lies or spin, no mention of the possibility of stolen elections, no mention of Diebold vote-rigging or Republican voter-intimidation tactics. It’s all about perfectly lawful and (mostly) honest things Rove’s team has done over the past six years to build up lasting Pub advantages in the elections. E.g., repudiating the veiled racism of the “Southern Strategy,” and reaching out to black and Latino voters, and to others traditionally overlooked by the Pubs, such as Russian Jewish immigrants. The Pubs don’t hope to capture any of these votes as a block, only to attract enough social-conservative members (and there are many) of these groups to make the difference in close elections. Also “racial gerrymandering,” the creation of “minority-majority” districts, which have in fact allowed a lot more black politicians to get elected to Congress and state legislatures, but which have also had the effect of reducting the aggregate number of Dems and increasing the number of Pubs in those bodies (because, say, black voters who formerly formed a loyal minorities in several white-majority Dem “safe seat” districts are now packed into one black-majority district, creating one safe seat for the Dems surrounded by several safe-seat districts for the Pubs). All very clever, and all done with a view to long-term effects.

If liberal complaints were confined to the kind of simplistic generalities you’re dealing in, you’d have a point. But we don’t. We complain about the deliberate use of bogus felon rolls compiled by ChoicePoint to suppress tens of thousands of black voters in Florida in 2000. We complain about very well-documented hackability of Diebold voting machines and the very suspicious returns in Ohio in 2004 that would lead any person to suspect hacking. We complain about Karl Rove because he has a long and well-known history of political dirty tricks. We complain about these and many other very specific issues.

Frankly, given the lengthy and well-documented history of Republican dirty-tricksterism, we’d be just plain dumb NOT to complain.

But thanks for playing.

I was listening to NPR about an hour ago, and a guy from the Pew Research Center was discussing this recent poll that shows Repulicans making remarkable gains in the generic ballot question recently. Maybe the base is getting energized afterall.

Sorry, my friend, but you have your facts slightly wrong:

(emphasis added)

As for predicting the election before the polls had closed in the panhandle, I agree that the networks erred by not waiting until all the polls were closed in the state. However, do you have any evidence that there was any conspiracy to do this…and, if so, why did they not call it right when the polls closed in the eastern part rather than waiting for most of the extra hour to elapse? It is also worth noting that the call of Florida for Gore was technically correct in the sense that a majority of the voters did intend to vote for Gore (which is what the exit polls measure); we know that some of these mistakenly voted for Buchanan because of the butterfly ballot (and, also, I believe, a higher rate of ballots not registering a vote in strongly Democratic areas than in Republican areas).

No one here claiming that the Saddam verdict is the “surprise”?