Tobiasly’s Blog

All my predictions were pretty much correct, except that Bush’s electoral victory was smaller and his popular victory was larger than I guessed.

While we did win two seats on the Clark County Council, I expected Jim Smith to be one of those two! Since he is currently on the council in a district seat, the Ds attacked him pretty hard (although he still did better than two of the three Democrats). However, concentrating their efforts on Jim meant that Monty Snelling and Danny Yost were able to get in. So now we have 3 Republicans on the Council out of 7 members… not quite a majority, but a historic feat nonetheless.

We definitely worked longer and harder this year than we ever have in the past. Thanks to Mitch Daniels’ Final Mile campaign, we were also able to have an order of magnitude more grass-roots workers in the final days of the campaign.

A Floyd County friend of mine, Abe Navarro (who works in prosecutor Keith Henderson’s office) told me that a Democrat attorney said to him the day before the election: “Abe, I heard there is an army of Republicans knocking on every door in Clark and Floyd counties. Is this true?” To which Abe replied, “yes it is.” We weren’t really trying to knock on every door, but it makes a good story nonetheless! I’d guess we did talk to (or leave information for) over 30,000 households.

Since I ran over my camera a couple weeks ago, I unfortunately wasn’t able to take as many pictures of our 11th-hour activities as I would have liked, but suffice it to say we had lots of fun and everyone had a well-earned sense of accomplishment. I didn’t sleep for about 40 hours in a row, but once we found out that Mike Sodrel won by less than 1500 votes we knew it had all been worth it. I was more worried about his race than any of the others, but knowing that southern Indiana finally has a representative who actually represents our values sure is a great feeling.

I loved Peggy Noonan’s article wrapping up the election, especially this quote: “The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.” (Please note that neither Ms. Noonan nor I intend this as a slam against Obama, who is indeed a rather eloquent speaker and who I’m sure will be a respectable senator).

I was really looking forward to Michael Moore’s analysis of the election, especially considering that he realized months ago what a poor campaign Kerry was running, but he has been strangely silent since the election.