Last week, I complained about a stupid, ill-conceived campaign by the British paper The Guardian. The left-wing daily encouraged its European readers to send letters to residents of Clark County in the swing state of Ohio. Presumably to share European discomfort with the prospect of four more years for President Bush.
I criticized the campaign as ill-conceived and horribly counterproductive, however well-intentioned in may have been. I can imagine John Kerry's Ohio allies cringing at the inevitable bad PR generated by this story. I wrote that if The Guardian's editors think this campaign will be a net benefit for the cause of defeating Bush, then it's clear that they don't have a clue about American culture. I give them the same advice I'd give our government in Washington: don't mess with what you don't understand.
Abiola over at Foreign Dispatches cites a Slate article with some concrete numbers.
Al Gore won Clark County by 324 votes. And since Ralph Nader received 1,347 votes, we can assume Gore's margin would have been larger without Nader on the ballot. On Tuesday George Bush won Clark County by 1,620 votes.
But that's not all.
The most significant stat here is how Clark County compares to the other 15 Ohio counties won by Gore in 2000. Kerry won every Gore county in Ohio except Clark. He even increased Gore's winning margin in 12 of the 16. Nowhere among the Gore counties did more votes move from the blue to the red column than in Clark.
Dear Guardian editors, Karl Rove sends his thanks.
1 comment:
But on the plus side it helped to generate some of the best flames that I have ever read. I mean, how else would we get gems like this: "Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys."
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to rewind "Red Dawn" and bring it back to the video store.
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