The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

With all the hot air surrounding the Foley scandal, it's hard to discern facts from spin.   Earlier today, I said that it's "politically stupid and morally wrong" for Randy Kuhl to remain silent about this episode.  Those words may sound overblown, but let's re-examine the cornerstone of Tom Reynolds' and Dennis Hastert's  defense:  the notion that the first email correspondence they received was merely evidence of an "overly friendly" relationship. 

The initial email [pdf] from the page to an adult he trusted has been posted by most media sites.  What Hastert and Reynolds want us to forget is the page's reaction to Foley's emails:

Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but seriously.  This freaked me out.

I talked to another page that was here during the school year and the first part of the summer...(her name) said that there was a congressman who did hit on pages.

sick sick sick sick sick sick sick

In any institution where adults have responsibility for teenagers, something that made one of the kids this uneasy would start an investigation.  The teen who sent the email, along with the kid reporting the rumor of an adult who hit on teenagers, would be interviewed.  In other words, established procedures would be followed.

The House of Representatives, like your local High School, is an institution with established procedures where the well-being of teenagers is entrusted to adults.  High School leadership who ignored evidence like this letter, and circumvented procedure, would be fired. Similarly, voters can expect that leaders who ignored the procedures of the House should be punished.

Tom Reynolds is a party leader, just like Dennis Hastert, because Reynolds is in charge of the '06 election, perhaps the most important job in the Republican Congress.  He has no "supervisor". He's The Man when it comes to the election, and he begged Foley to run after seeing this email.

Randy Kuhl doesn't have a role in the scandal itself.  But I think Eric Massa is right to ask him where he stands.  I stick by my judgment that Kuhl's silence is "politically stupid and morally wrong".

One of the many bills rushed through the House last week was the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This bill, which Randy Kuhl wholeheartedly supports, received a lot of attention from the media because of the showdown between John McCain and the White House over the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. Lost in the noise was the equally important suspension of habeas corpus contained in the bill.

Kuhl's spin on the bill is that it would let us "prosecute terrorists". The question that we need to ask him is: who's a terrorist?

The answer is that a terrorist, a.k.a. "enemy combatant", is a foreign national or US Citizen who the President deems dangerous to the country. Once a person is named an enemy combatant, they are offered a very limited set of options for appeal of that designation. Specifically, the right to challenge one's detention in open court (habeas corpus) is suspended.

Habeas corpus is a fundamental right enumerated in the Constitution:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. (Art 1, Sec 9)

Since the War on Terror is not a "Case of Rebellion or Invasion", a law that suspends habeas corpus is unconstitutional. Arlen Specter, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, believes that it is, as do a number of legal scholars.

Legislators only pass obviously unconstitutional bills for political reasons. In this case, Republicans were afraid of appearing "soft on terror" and instead chose to pass a bill that they knew would immediately end up in court.

I have no issue with letting the President designate enemy combatants and lock them up. It's a legitimate tool of war. But when one man has the right to single out a citizen of the US as a terrorist, and that citizen doesn't have the right to challenge his detention in court, we've weakened, not strengthened, our laws and our nation.

Weren't Republicans once the party that defended basic liberties against the big-government Democrats? I guess those days are gone, and John R "Randy" Kuhl is a little part of the reason why.

The Foley scandal has all the trappings of a story that will occupy the media for days and perhaps weeks. Republicans are calling for the resignation of the leadership in Congress. Hours of video of Foley making hypocritical statements are circulating, and there are probably more IM transcripts to come.

Closer to home, it's clear that Tom Reynolds is in big trouble. What about Kuhl and Massa?

For Randy Kuhl, being a back-bencher is a huge blessing in this matter. If he has any political sense, he'll refrain from buying Hastert's silly distinction between knowledge of the "overly friendly" letters and the sexually explicit IMs. That brand of b.s. won't play the Northern 29th, where every suburban parent's spider sense is exquisitely tuned to the signs of the potential molester. Kuhl should demand investigations and accountability, and that's it.

If he plays it smart, the only damage that I see to the Kuhl campaign is a further lessening of enthusiasm in his base.

Though one might think that Massa would benefit from the fallout of the scandal, given his campaign's current status, I think Foleygate is a wash at best. All of the Rochester media market's limited bandwith will be occupied by Reynolds-centric Foley coverage. Perhaps the Corning/Elmira markets will spend more time on the race in the 29th, but I doubt that Rochester will see any in-depth Massa/Kuhl pieces in the near future. In addition, Rochester will be bombarded with ever-more strident Davis or Reynolds ads, which will just increase political fatigue as well as voter confusion.

Massa's own poll shows his name recognition at 39%. Anything that keeps his campaign off the airwaves or out of the paper is not positive for him at this point in the campaign. He may reap some incidental benefit from this scandal, but it's hard to see any concrete, direct benefit for him.

Non-partisan political analyst Stuart Rothenberg pours cold water on positive Democratic polling reports from second-tier races, especially in nearby NY-25. Since the Massa campaign has just released a poll similar to those he discusses, his article is worth a read. Rothenberg thinks that these polls merely reflect a generic desire for change, and that there's no solid evidence that the challengers are gaining any momentum.

Some of what he says about NY-25 is applicable to the poll released this weekend by the Massa campaign. Massa's name recognition is relatively low, so many voters might just be for him as a "generic" Democrat. But, unlike the 25th, Kuhl's negatives are pretty high: 38% negative on him as a person, 47% negative on his job performance. That means that generic voter dissatisfaction might be transmitted as a specific vote against Kuhl.

Rothenberg's advice to incumbents in these races is to "pound away" at challengers, making them the issue.

Like most truisms, "it's all about turnout" is overused and undervalued. In the 29th, this is especially true. Since GOTV is so important in the 29th, I want to take an in-depth look at what's known about GOTV, beginning with "the book" on GOTV, Get Out the Vote! - How to Increase Voter Turnout.

GOTV! summarizes major recent research of the late '90s and early 2000s. It looks at partisan and non-partisan GOTV efforts, and it tries to assign a price per vote on common GOTV efforts.

The first interesting fact about GOTV studies is that there aren't many of them. Most campaigns don't want to be part of an experiment where half of the potential voters who serve as a control aren't contacted. The other interesting fact is that campaigns spend a lot of money on technologies, like robo-calls, that aren't very effective.

The main conclusion of this book is twofold: Personal approaches are more effective than impersonal ones, but personal approaches are harder to replicate on a large scale.

So, not surprisingly, the studies reviewed in the book find that the most effective approach is door-to-door canvassing. It's interesting that it really doesn't seem to matter what the canvassers say, as long as they meet a minimum level of competence. It's all in the personal contact, which puts a face on the campaign of one of the candidates.

The downside of knocking on doors is that eligible voters are hard to find, and that it's hard to find the teams of volunteers, or hard to manage paid canvassers. Canvassing is also hard to scale - you can contact a few thousand voters this way, but getting to hundreds of thousands of voters is much more difficult.

Leaving leaflets (such as door hangers), the poor cousin of canvassing, is less effective than direct personal contact, but partisan leaflets have been shown to increase turnout by a small but statistically significant amount.

Methods that don't involve feet on the street still have some effect, but that effect is again proportional to the personal contact. The effectiveness of phone banks seems to be directly related to how "conversational" the contact is. If the script is carefully constructed to solicit interaction with the person being called, and if the volunteer or professional making the call takes time to slowly and carefully go through the script, phone banks can have some effect.

Robo-calling, which is impersonal and non-conversational, was shown to have little or no effect. Repeated calling doesn't seem to work well either, and calls are more effective if they're closer to the election.

Direct mail is even less effective than phone banks, and it is the least effective with marginal voters. The partisan base can be motivated by direct mail, but even so, it is expensive.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book was the price-per-vote summary. Canvassing costs approximately $19/vote, using contract labor. Obviously, free labor is cheaper, making volunteer canvassing the cheapest known way for a campaign to increase its vote tally. Leafleting may be a bit cheaper ($14/vote) to motivate a partisan base, but further study is needed to confirm that as fact.

Volunteer telephone banks cost about $35/vote, assuming that the volunteers are well-supervised and use a good script. Professional calls with long scripts and good supervision cost about $45/vote, but low-quality professional calls can cost upwards of $200/vote. Robo calls don't work, so cost per vote can't be calculated.

Direct mail costs $59/vote when addressed to base voters, but $200/vote when directed to sporatic voters. Email doesn't work (no surprise there).

What I take home from this study is that it isn't money alone that gets out the vote. Campaigns can spend a lot of money with little or no effect. To get out the vote effectively, campaigns must plan well in advance and have enough staff to coordinate expensive GOTV efforts.

With the "scientific" base of GOTV covered, the next GOTV post will examine how the campaigns in the 29th will turn out voters next month.