Freedom Line Blog

If you follow the debates over whether voters should be required to present a photo ID at their polling place, you’ve probably heard the standard Democratic refrain before: there’s very little real voter fraud out there and voter ID policies are just a cynical Republican plot to suppress turnout amongst key Democratic constituencies. As is the prevailing tendency, however, liberal rhetoric is now being undermined by stone cold facts.

Last week, the U.S. House’s Administration Committee heard testimony on a Colorado study that used the 2010 election to put claims of scarce voter fraud to the test. The results, as The Hill reports, were shocking:

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, told the panel that his department’s study identified nearly 12,000 people who were not citizens but were still registered to vote in Colorado.

Of those non-citizen registered voters, nearly 5,000 took part in the 2010 general election in which Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet narrowly defeated Republican Ken Buck.

Colorado conducted the study by comparing the state’s voter registration database with driver’s license records.

We applaud our Democratic friends for their efforts to increase voter turnout. We just wish they’d stick with legal voters.

According to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, here are the bottom ten of the Top 20 leaders of the American Tea Party movement:

11.  David Koch, industrial magnate

12.  Rand Paul, GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Kentucky

13.  Jim DeMint, Republican Senator from South Carolina

14.  Judson and Sherry Phillips, founders of Tea Party Nation

15.  Michael Leahy, blogger

16.  Mark Williams, former chairman of the Tea Party Express

17.  Ken Buck, GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Colorado

18.  Mark Skoda

19.  Joe Miller, GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Alaska

20.  Sal Russo, chief strategist, Tea Party Express

The rest of the Top 20 will be released soon.  In the meantime, go here to read more about the figures listed above.

It’s nearly a week later, but on this Sunday talk show-eve we can be guaranteed that tomorrow’s beltway chatter will be dominated by talk of Christine O’Donnell’s upset of Mike Castle in the GOP senate primary in Delaware. To save you the pain of sitting through Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union, here are the basic talking points you’re going to hear all morning: O’Donnell’s win proves that Tea Party radicals are taking over the GOP, ruining their chances for a majority this year and imperiling the long-term existence of the party.

Put aside the obvious bias of these remarks (remember how two years ago the GOP was imperiled because it was losing? Now apparently it’s imperiled because it’s winning). The truth is a lot more complicated.

It’s undoubtedly true that O’Donnell’s nomination makes it much likelier that Democrats will retain the Delaware seat that used to be held by Joe Biden. Delaware is a solidly blue state and O’Donnell’s deep Republican red — regardless of her virtues or vices — is never going to play as well as Castle’s fuschia statewide.

The Tea Party’s stated goal, however — moving the Republican party closer to the principles of small government — is on track for success in most of its other contested senate races throughout the country. Ken Buck in Colorado, Mike Lee in Utah, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Marco Rubio in Florida are among the Tea Party-backed candidates who appear on track for victory. Joe Miller in Alaska is a strong bet too, though Lisa Murkowski’s misbeggoten attempt at a write-in candidacy may tighten that race. Only Nevada’s Sharron Angle presents similar difficulties to O’Donnell, but on a far narrower basis. As of this writing, she’s polling essentially even with Harry Reid.

But there’s an even bigger misperception at work here. Since pundits only discovered a few weeks ago that Republicans had a shot at taking over the senate, they were able to put their Prozac back in the medicine cabinet with the O’Donnell win. This is a mistake. For while Delaware may have just slipped out of reach, two seats that were not previously part of the electoral calcuation are now in play.

The first is in Connecticut, where former WWE CEO Linda McMahon has pulled within five points of the supposedly invincible Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. The second is West Virginia, where the seat formerly held by Robert Byrd was expected to be an easy win for Democratic Governor Joe Manchin. However, industrial executive John Raese has closed the gap to within five points as well. Given the strong conservative turnout expected this year, these could both be sleepers come election night.

Don’t despair, conservative America. We’re just getting started.