In the coming weeks we will be organizing on the ground in several key states for 2010. At this point, we are gathering demographic information and thinking of the smartest ways to elect good representatives. Remember that elected officials should not primarily be leaders, but should be a representative reflection of your beliefs and ideals.

Just as the hatchet/scalpel analogy was used in the debates with regard to the size of government, I would like to use a sniper/turret analogy here. In our current position (we will be defending more seats than the Democrats in the 2010 senate race), we will need to build a fort around our incumbents and mow down any opposition. I see AT LEAST two likely vacancies coming from our side and we will need good candidates to fill those spots. On the other side, there are some big name Democrats in states that are not yet competitive that we can’t take out, i.e., Barbara Boxer and Pat Leahy. Devoting any funds towards opposition campaigning would be a waste of money. However, if you are in Vermont or California, look to the House and local governments.  However, there are several seats that I think we could pick off. Lone stragglers who will be well defended but the demographics of the state could be used in our favour. They have two years unleashed and that is opportunity for them to make mistakes.

If you are a reader of this site and are at all interested in running for something such as city council, state assembly, whatever, leave a message below and we will contact you. The country needs good federalists who believe in the letter of the Constitution and that this country bestows the individual, not the government, with the power to achieve anything.

We are not Neo-Cons although we support Israel’s right to exist and thrive. We are not Compassionate Conservatives although we want to help all those in our communities achieve their highest potentials. To do so, we need to empower the individual and the best way to do so is to unshackle the market and let entrepreneurs achieve.  That is the argument that our people need to make to the American people.

In yesterday’s WSJ, Karl Rove noted:

It is a tribute to his skills that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, won in a country that remains center-right. Most pre-election polls and the wiggly exits indicate America remains ideologically stable, with 34% of voters saying they are conservative — unchanged from 2004. Moderates went to 44% from 45% of the electorate, while liberals went to 22% from 21%.

We are still a center right country and can win back the trust of the American electorate. We need the right people to make the case.

We at “Trust, but Verify” have started a Facebook Group to get the word out today.  Feel free to join and please invite all those who want a New Leadership, Big Ideas, and Conservative Roots.  Join HERE. 

- Yossarian

To leave you with some hope of change, Katherine Kersten from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Over the years, America has experienced countless zigs and zags in economic and social policy, but has repeatedly proven its ability to right itself and avoid long-term damage. When liberal politicians in power over-reach, as they usually do, we can count on common sense to provide a corrective.

Take the 1930s, when the nation — buffeted by the Depression — seemed ripe for a lurch toward socialism. Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” strategy for recovery was grounded in a vision of big government as savior.

The New Deal’s centerpiece was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which became law in June 1933. Roosevelt lauded the act as “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”

The NIRA created a vast new bureaucracy to micro-manage the economy. Across the country, planners divided up markets — and set prices, wages and production quotas or rules — in sectors ranging from the steel industry to Mom and Pop grocery stores. Six months after the act’s passage, the burdensome industrial “codes” it sanctioned already covered 60 percent of American workers.

An anxious nation initially cheered Roosevelt’s plan. But the president and his “wise men” had overreached, as soon became clear. The NIRA raised prices, slowed recovery and stoked widespread resentment. By late 1934, many of Roosevelt’s staunchest Democratic allies were denouncing it. The act stood no chance of reauthorization, and in 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

Roosevelt’s grand plan failed to pull the nation out of the Depression. Nevertheless, in the 1940s and ’50s, America’s political class assumed that some form of state-controlled economy was inevitable, both here and in Europe. Republicans — led by a pliant Dwight D. Eisenhower — did little to resist its march.

Then, in the mid-1950s, an intellectual insurgency spearheaded by Buckley dared to speak truth to power. Buckley took on “a vast, complacent and apparently immovable status quo,” according to his colleague John O’Sullivan. He used a wry smile, a capacious intellect and an “emperor has no clothes” attitude to challenge an entrenched liberal orthodoxy.

Buckley brought together a remarkable collection of thinkers who laid the philosophical groundwork for the modern conservative movement. Once it gained political momentum, it gave birth to the Reagan Revolution — and an era of low taxes, free trade, enhanced competition and remarkable prosperity.

Yet conservative control didn’t last forever. In 1992, the Left enjoyed a new burst of optimism when Bill Clinton took office and promptly proposed a massive government takeover of America’s health care system. Once again, “big government” overreach provoked a reaction. In 1994, Republicans swept the U.S. House of Representatives.

Clinton spent his next six years in office accommodating his policies to America’s free market vision. Under him, Reagan’s legacy became entrenched in initiatives ranging from welfare reform to NAFTA.

We’ve just elected a Democratic Congress and a president whom the non-partisan National Journal has named as America’s “most liberal senator.” We can expect them to overreach, as their predecessors did. And in today’s global economy, the harmful consequences of economic missteps will likely become apparent far more quickly than in the past.

It’s time for conservatives to mount a new insurgency. That insurgency will proclaim that economic policies focused on wealth redistribution, rather than wealth creation, cannot produce prosperity. It will remind Americans that, despite their vague promises of “hope” and “change,” big-government enthusiasts are sooner or later revealed as emperors who have no clothes.

Oh, let me count the ways. Almost all of this, by the way, is lifted from Mark Bluemthnal’s outstanding Exit Poll FAQ. For the long version, see over there.

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote. Many of you will recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that John Kerry would have a much better day than he actually had. But this phenomenon was hardly unique to 2004. In 2000, for instance, exit polls had Al Gore winning states like Alabama and Georgia (!). If you go back and watch The War Room, you’ll find George Stephanopolous and James Carville gloating over exit polls showing Bill Clinton winning states like Indiana and Texas, which of course he did not win.

3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year’s primaries. They overstated Barack Obama’s performance by an average of about 7 points.

4. Exit polls challenge the definition of a random sample. Although the exit polls have theoretically established procedures to collect a random sample — essentially, having the interviewer approach every nth person who leaves the polling place — in practice this is hard to execute at a busy polling place, particularly when the pollster may be standing many yards away from the polling place itself because of electioneering laws.

5. Democrats may be more likely to participate in exit polls. Related to items #1 and #4 above, Scott Rasmussen has found that Democrats supporters are more likely to agree to participate in exit polls, probably because they are more enthusiastic about this election.

6. Exit polls may have problems calibrating results from early voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, exit polls will attempt account for people who voted before election day in most (although not all) states by means of a random telephone sample of such voters. However, this requires the polling firms to guess at the ratio of early voters to regular ones, and sometimes they do not guess correctly. In Florida in 2000, for instance, there was a significant underestimation of the absentee vote, which that year was a substantially Republican vote, leading to an overestimation of Al Gore’s share of the vote, and contributing to the infamous miscall of the state.

7. Exit polls may also miss late voters. By “late” voters I mean persons who come to their polling place in the last couple of hours of the day, after the exit polls are out of the field. Although there is no clear consensus about which types of voters tend to vote later rather than earlier, this adds another way in which the sample may be nonrandom, particularly in precincts with long lines or extended voting hours.

8. “Leaked” exit poll results may not be the genuine article. Sometimes, sources like Matt Drudge and Jim Geraghty have gotten their hands on the actual exit polls collected by the network pools. At other times, they may be reporting data from “first-wave” exit polls, which contain extremely small sample sizes and are not calibrated for their demographics. And at other places on the Internet (though likely not from Gergahty and Drudge, who actually have reasonably good track records), you may see numbers that are completely fabricated.

9. A high-turnout election may make demographic weighting difficult. Just as regular, telephone polls are having difficulty this cycle estimating turnout demographics — will younger voters and minorities show up in greater numbers? — the same challenges await exit pollsters. Remember, an exit poll is not a definitive record of what happened at the polling place; it is at best a random sampling.

10. You’ll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election. But exit polls are really more trouble than they’re worth, at least as a predictive tool. An independent panel created by CNN in the wake of the Florida disaster in 2000 recommended that the network completely ignore exit polls when calling particular states. I suggest that you do the same. 

I’m getting a tip that voting machines in Philadelphia were showing votes for Obama BEFORE the polls even opened

In the run-up to Election Day there was a nasty, partisan scuffle with the Board of Elections. Four GOP workers were removed by a liberal judge because they were “the minority party.” They purged the Republicans and deprived them of the ability to supervise the voting process.

The same thing happened in the City of Brotherly Love in 2004. About 2,000 votes were preemptively tallied for Kerry. Unrelated, but equally scary, there were reports of someone using a gun to intimidate poll workers there that year as well.

More from Redstate:

I went to Philadelphia last week as part of the ‘Lawyers for Bush’ campaign. We went to the ‘battleground state’ of Pennsylvania and were caught in a battle of physical force. We had heard about the political ‘ground war,’ but instead found ourselves in the middle of an outright war. At the end of the day, I was cornered in a parking lot by roughly 10 large men, whom the police later identified as ‘union goons.’ After trying to tip over the minivan I was sharing with another attorney, punching it relentlessly, breaking parts off and failing to drag us out, they chased us in and out of the dense urban traffic in their high-powered SUVs. Only after a frantic 911 call and a police roadblock were our assailants apprehended. Even then, a growing mob surrounded us and we had to be secreted out of town to safety by a police escort. Our experience was not unique; several other ‘Lawyers for Bush’ teams in Philadelphia reported similar violence.

Update: Amanda adds:

GOP Election Board members have been tossed out of polling stations in more than half a dozen polling stations in Philadelphia because of their party status.

A liberal judge previously ruled that court-appointed poll watchers could be NOT removed from their boards by an on-site election judge, but that is exactly what is happening.

It is the duty of election board workers to monitor and guard the integrity of the voting process.

Denying access to the minority (in this case Republican) poll watchers and inspectors is a violation of Pennsylvania state law. Those who violate the law can be punished with a misdemeanor and subjected to a fine of $1,000 and sent to prison between one month and two years.

Those on site as describing it as “pandemonium” and there may be video coming of the chaos.

Some of the precincts where Republicans have been removed are: the 44th Ward, 12th and 13th divisions; 6th Ward, 12th division; 32nd Ward, Division 28.

“Election board officials guard the legitimacy of the election process and the idea that Republicans are being intimidated and banned for partisan purposes does not allow for an honest and open election process,” said McCain-Palin spokesman Ben Porritt in a statement to Townhall.

The City of Brotherly Love was roiled in controversy during the 2004 election because of rigged voting machines that showed nearly 2,000 votes for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry before the polls had opened. A man also used a gun to intimidate poll workers at Ward 30, division 11 in 2004.

UPDATE

MM and Hotair have a video of Black Panther Militants “guarding” the polling stations in Philadelphia.  City of Brotherly Love?

“Let me give you the state of the race today. We have 22 days to go. We’re 6 points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.

“What America needs in this hour is a fighter; someone who puts all his cards on the table and trusts the judgment of the American people. I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her. I have fought for you most of my life. There are other ways to love this country, but I’ve never been the kind to do it from the sidelines.”

 [sigh]

More than 30,000 Florida felons who by law should have been stripped of their right to vote remain registered to cast ballots in this presidential battleground state, a Sun Sentinel investigation has found.

Many are faithful voters, with at least 4,900 turning out in past elections.

Another 5,600 are not likely to vote Nov. 4 — they’re still in prison.

Of the felons who registered with a party, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.

Florida’s elections chief, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, acknowledged his staff has failed to remove thousands of ineligible felons because of a shortage of workers and a crush of new registrations in this critical swing state.

Browning said he was not surprised by the newspaper’s findings. “I’m kind of shocked that the number is as low as it is,” he said.

Asked how many ineligible felons may be on Florida’s rolls, Browning said, “We don’t know.”

Just keeps coming