Christian Right Honcho Ralph Reed to the Rescue? How Clueless Romney Could Still Win
It’s not Halloween yet, but this should scare you….
AlterNet / By Adele M. Stan
Christian Right Honcho Ralph Reed to the Rescue? How Clueless Romney Could Still Win
The left shouldn’t underestimate Reed’s billionaire-bankrolled right-wing voting machine.
September 25, 2012
The recent spate of Romney gaffes and big old screw-ups has elicited braying from the liberal punditry class , a number of whose members have declared the election over, adding ‘loser’ to the resume of the successful businessman and not-so-successful former governor who bears the standard of the Republican Party in this year’s presidential election.
Not so fast. The truth is, national polls don’t amount to a hill of beans in this election. What counts is turnout and, as AlterNet reported in July , political operative and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed is putting together an impressive get-out-the-vote operation, via his organization, Faith and Freedom Coalition, which funded by right-wing billionaires. Now that the New York Times weighed in with a front-page Sunday piece by Jo Becker about Reed’s organizing, perhaps the liberal establishment will take a deep breath and reassess whether its triumphalism is warranted — or even helpful to the liberal cause.
The reason the national polls don’t so much matter in 2012 is that an ever-shrinking percentage of the electorate remains undecided about whom to vote for, with this year’s ‘persuadable’ voters estimated at around 6 percent. And Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, appearing Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, suggested that as few as half of those pollsters identify as persuadable ‘likely voters’ will actually make it to the polls.
That all adds up to a mere handful of states actually deciding the election, given our winner-take-all electoral college. On our polarized political landscape, the red states will vote Republican, the blue states, Democratic. That leaves a total of nine states deemed battlegrounds by Politico (and, yes, love them or hate them, Politico is really good at this kind of thing).
President Barack Obama may be pulling ahead in the national polls, but among those nine battleground states, only one — Wisconsin — shows Obama with a commanding lead. While Obama is gaining ground in the remaining eight, they are still marked as ‘toss-ups’ by the poll geeks at Real Clear Politics.
And guess where Ralph Reed, with a reported $10 million budget (and maybe more), is working? In every one of those states.
——-> Continued…..