Do the Vote

The most important single factor in the 2012 election is who will successfully vote.

The Obama campaign is concentrating on ground game in the swing states, and right now on early voting.  They're racking up impressive numbers in early voting but there are a lot of challenges ahead.  There's people getting complacent if they think Obama is a lock (which most people polled do.)  There's people who need to believe there is a major crisis or a messiah on the ballot in order to set their priorities to get themselves to a polling place (which in certain cities and states is actually the commitment of hours in line.)  So far the polls suggest the youth vote is just not fired up.  (Although this is comforting--Obama can do less well with college students and still meet his 08 totals.)

Then there's GOPer registration cheating, through the now discredited firm that has forced the RNC to cancel their registration drives in five swing states.  So some Dems can show up thinking they are registered when it fact their registration forms have been torn up because they checked the wrong party box.

And there's the people discouraged from even showing up, either by new GOPer voter suppression laws, or more and more, by the misinformation about the laws.  That remains a problem in the good news/bad news in the basically positive but deeply moronic court decision in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

The basic decision said that the voter suppression ID law would not be in effect for this year's election--that is, voters won't need the ID they couldn't get anyway.  But the judge inexplicably decided that election officials can still ask to see ID, even though they can't turn away anyone for not having one.  Plus the Commonwealth can still keep running TV ads telling people they need a certain kind of photo ID to vote, even though they don't. (No, this isn't the Andy Borowitz/Onion version.  This is the actual decision.)

So the question is--and in PA it won't be answered until election night--is all this confusion going to discourage people from voting?  Because much of President Obama's margin is located in areas where this could be the greatest problem--even his big polling lead may not be absolutely safe, if Dem turnout isn't heavy.

There is the theory that all the publicity and the on-the-ground activity concerning the voter suppression law has energized the Democratic base and the party apparatus, so turnout is going to be big.  The head of the PA Dems seems to think so--he sound angry, and sounds like other people are angry.  And why not?  This is a Reconstruction-style attack on their rights they can do something about.  They can do the vote.