As I sit here just before 8 am in Portugal the US Presidential race is still too close to call although it looks like Bush is leading and that Ohio is the deciding state. I’ve also seen that we might have to wait a bit for the definitive answer as provisional ballots in Ohio won’t get counted for 11 days. So, if Bush’s (current) margin is less than the number of said provisional ballots we might have to wait. All speculation of course.
However, there is one result that is solid. You might recall that the Guardian ran a campaign called Operation Clark County. The idea was to get varied Euro-lefties to write polite letters to voters in this swing county in a swing state and get them to vote for Kerry. (That’s not what they said but is what they meant.) The original news can be seen here and you might want to notice some of the comments both at my place and at Tim Blair’s. The essential feeling was that such letters to the famously ornery good citizens of the Mid-West might backfire. Given the content of the public letters from some of the UK’s intellectual glitterati this might seem a fair assumption. They fairly reek of condescention.
Tim Blair then goes on to up the ante as I reported here by launching a letter writing campaign to the Guardian, something that provoked outrage, a flood of emails and the closing down of the whole thing. A sample letter was this:
To: Grauniad
cc: Jonathon FreedlandDear Sir:
Fuck off and die.
Sincerely,
America
So far all of this is just good clean election year fun (although your mileage may differ). Much more interesting is to look at the final effects. Clark County results are now out (100% counted) so what were those results?
Clark 100/100 %ge votes
Bush 50.96% 34,444
Kerry 48.56% 32,824
Badnarik .27% 183
Peroutka .21% 144
What were the results in 2000? I don’t have access to comparable figures and the mocking of al-Grauniad does not merit further research so here are the figures that were given at the beginning of Operation Clark County:
In the 2000 election, Al Gore won Clark County by 1% – equivalent to 324 votes – but George Bush won the state as a whole by just four percentage points.
So, the County moved from a 324 Gore margin to a 1,620 Bush one. Further, more rigorous analysis (perhaps with more nuance) might show differently but at first blush that looks like Euro-weenie letter writing campaigns convert Democrats into Republicans to the tune of a two thousand vote shift in the margin. No doubt those at the Guardian who thought this up are simply hugging themselves with delight at the proof of their effectiveness. Or maybe it’s Karl Rove doing the happy dance as the hunt for his deeply buried mole inside the Euro-left continues. Whichever.
It just doesn’t seem to have been a very bright idea really does it?
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