And why is Rove so insistent that the polls that only he sees point to a Republican victory in both the House and the Senate? Just askin …
After midterm election [NPR] interviewer Robert Siegel stated that “many might consider you on the optimistic end of realism” regarding Republican hopes to retain both Houses in November, Rove suggested that the NPR host was biased.
“Not that you would be exhibiting a bias or anything like that,” Rove said. “You’re just making a comment.”
“I’m looking at all the same polls that you’re looking at every day,” Seigel responded.
“No you’re not!” Rove exclaimed.
Rove said that he was reviewing 68 polls a week, and that “unlike the general public, I’m allowed to see the polls on the individual races,” as opposed to public polls reported in the media.
“You may be looking at four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes nationally, but that do not impact the outcome,” Rove said.
Rove claimed that the polls “add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House.”
Now call me crazy, but it seems to me there are only a few reasons Rove would go on NPR to make this claim. It can’t have much to do with firing up the Republican base to get out the vote, because they don’t listen to NPR.
And I don’t believe for one minute it has anything to do with suppressing votes among those inclined to vote Democratic this year. I don’t see either Democrats or Independents fed up with Bush’s misrule reacting to Rove’s arrogance and bluster by deciding they shouldn’t bother to vote since the GOP is just going to win anyway. Quite the contrary. They will be all the more dedicated to making him eat those words. No, he must has a different rationale for insisting, against all the evidence, that Republicans are assured of victory this Fall.
As I see it …
… Rove would only want to to use NPR to spread this message in order to sow doubt in the minds of Democrats and Independent voters. And why would he want to sow doubt in the minds of people likely to vote against him? There are only two likely possibilities.
One, assuming Republicans do lose control of either house of Congress, Rove’s pre-election public statements (and those of President Bush) have laid the groundwork for Republican post-election lawsuits, recount demands, allegations of Democratic election fraud and other assorted post election chaos. The goal would be to mount a last ditch defense of Republican control of Congress, and to make that defense credible they have to nourish the meme in the minds of the media and the American Public that the polls now show Republicans should win the election. The objective would be to prevent seating enough Democrats to keep control of the House or Senate in GOP hands after the dust cleared, or to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any Democratic victory, and thus seek to limit the power and authority of any Democrats in a position to investigate the White House.
Second possibility? C’mon, what do you think it will be? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America’s voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ”We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,” says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ”We didn’t have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush.