Not Drinking the Kool-Aid

The myth of the Silent Majority ready to magically appear in the ballot box rises again:

The GOP purportedly has a great financial edge. Indeed, the Republican National Committee has more money and is spending it more wisely than Howard Dean’s Democratic National Committee. Yet Democrats are compensating by relying on labor unions and other groups that are not formally part of the party organization.

To gain seats, Democrats need not outspend Republicans. Their candidates only have to raise enough money to be competitive. And as early as August, they had already reached that mark in key House races.

Gerrymandering is yet another ostensible barrier to a Democratic takeover of the House. The redistricting after the 2000 census did protect House incumbents, making it harder for the minority party to score gains. Six years later, however, the district lines are wearing thin. Because of demographic shifts, Democrats now have a shot at formerly safe GOP seats in Ohio, Illinois, Virginia, and elsewhere.

Other supposed GOP advantages have even less of a basis in reality. Some on the Left actually believe that that mass media have a Republican bias. It should not surprise NRO readers that content analyses and surveys show the opposite. Fox News is arguably an exception, but liberals overstate its impact. Bill O’Reilly’s audience is only a fraction of Katie Couric’s.

Oh yes, and then there is that Republican ability to cloud voters’ minds. According to linguist George Lakoff, Republicans have developed diabolical concepts — the death tax, the Healthy Forests Initiative — that “are instantiated in the synapses of our brains.” Yeah, right. This bunch cannot even drive home the distinction between odd e-mails and dirty instant messages.

I'm confident that the results won't be as bad as the LWM wishfully project them to be, but quite bad enough.

The question is, what will the GOP do about it?

Pissing off evangelicals and strong borders types is going to shrink GOP turnout every time it's tried.

Hopefully some RINOs will get picked off on Election Day (including the abominable Lincoln Chafee, whose primary opponent the GOP wise guys through under the bus so he could get his butt kicked by a real Democrat.)