This Is How They Do It

I've shown today how the progressive movement is trying to attain electoral success, by demanding accountability and using grassroots action in the primary process. Here are a couple stories about how the conservative movement is trying to keep a toehold on power.

In Texas, Tom DeLay resigned his seat back in June, leading to a ballot fight which ended with him being forced to stay on the ballot (he tried to weasel out of his primary win and choose a handpicked successor), and led Republicans to have to resort to a write-in campaign to defeat Nick Lampson. So now, Texas Republicans, led by their governor, have fought back, calling for a special election to fill DeLay's seat for all of two months, most of which would not see that lame-duck Congress in session anyway.

As if the race for Tom DeLay's old seat weren't confusing enough already, what with a hyphenated Republican write-in candidate, now voters will also have the opportunity to elect a temporary representative to fill the empty seat from November through January. The elections (general and special) will take place the same day.

As a benefit of Gov. Rick Perry's move, voters will now see at least one ballot with the name of the official GOP candidate. Perry's spokesperson says they waited this long because of DeLay's legal wranglings.

This is a round of "Let's make the election as confusing as we can in the hopes that we can win the seat." There is no reason to hold a special election for two months except to increase name recognition of the preferred Republican candidate, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. So the governor is using the election process to favor one candidate over another.

In Ohio, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is getting his brains beaten in by Rep. Ted Strickland in their race for governor. Some Blackwell supporters thought it would be helpful to their cause to do an elaborate bit of astroturfing:

On August 20th, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that a Republican named Nathan Estruth showed up at a Clermont County Democratic rally to give Ted a chance to persuade him.

Link

In a county that proudly paints itself political red, where about 70 percent of voters backed President Bush in 2004, Nathan Estruth showed up at a park Saturday morning to hear the blue people.

In particular, he wanted to listen to Ted Strickland, the Democratic candidate for governor who, with U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, was headlining a three-day bus tour promoting the party's statewide ticket in some of Ohio's most Republican counties.

Estruth, a father of four who typically votes Republican, milled in the back of a partisan crowd of about 100, one of just a handful of people not wearing a shirt promoting a Democratic candidate. At the urging of a friend, he came to give the Democrats, who have been out of power in Ohio for more than a decade, a chance to win his vote.

"It's just common sense that we need change," Estruth said at Veterans Memorial Park in Union Township. "Frankly, it's about change for change's sake."

[...]

After the 40-minute rally, Estruth said he was not ready to vote Democratic. He was put off, he said, by their harsh rhetoric.

"I wanted to see if he was an executive with clear plans for fixing the state," he said about Strickland. "What I got was partisan talk. He confirmed my worst fears."

However, there might be another reason that Mr. Estruth wasn’t ready to vote Democratic. Via Buckeye State Blog, we learn that he happens to be the president of Common Sense Ohio, a Blackwell-supporting group that’s been running hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising across that state attacking Ted.

So, to sum up, the Democratic way: grassroots action and holding legislators accountable. The Republican way? Busting into election battles in partisan ways, and faking open-mindedness to fit media narratives.