For some reason, I decided to sit through this pit of awkward National Review desperation coupled with Jim Geraghty's awful haircut brushed into what can only be called a giant turd bang:
Jump to about 8:00 in, where Geraghty starts talking about early voting in Ohio:
"And the other thing is, and this is my most controversial one, this is the one where, um, where viewers out there are entitled to be skeptical. Early voting just finished in Ohio. The total there was about 28,000. That is out of 8.2 million. So you're looking at somewhere between 3/10ths of one percent and 4/10ths of one percent. That's an astonishingly low number. People were saying that they wanted to get people out for this early voting period that just concluded. Mark, any guess of what's going on over there?"
Mark Hemingway replies:
"I have no idea, but I will say that that in and of itself is a very interesting piece of evidence. If there's anything out there that would suggest that this Obama turnout machine that they've been throwing millions of dollars at and Democrats have been building up for eight years now may not be this fear, you know, monster that's going to swallow us all. That's really potent and really telling."
There's only one problem with this. Everything Geraghty said was totally and without fail wrong.
Early voting in Ohio is still ongoing. What just ended was a statutory overlap that allowed same-day registration and voting. Early voting continues until November 3rd, meaning that Geraghty is either dumb (yes) or dishonest (yes), or just wants to add a little bit of clusterfucky confusion to an already burdensome voting process (double yes).
Then, there's the 28,000 number, which probably comes from this story.
Statewide totals weren't available, but a check of the five counties with the most voters showed that of the nearly 28,500 people who had voted in person in those counties since Sept. 30, more than 5,200 also registered in that time frame.
Keep in mind that's five counties. Out of 88 total.
So, yes, we could determine that the Obama GOTV machine is a total and utter failure, were we to base that on a series of totally incorrect facts assembled as sloppily as humanly possible. Also, I read on the internet that Barry Bonds is making the Japanese market fall based on fears of Chinese melamine. Thank you, USA Today, for making knowing things so much more easier.
I've e-mailed Geraghty about this. I predict a response involving ACORN, William Ayers and/or a reference to my nonexistent vagina. We shall see.