Cooked

So the polls tell us Indiana and other Bush-lovin’ states are very tight, forcing McPalin to campaign hard in what should be safe bets. But I think it’s a safer bet that Obama wont win Indiana. Why?

1. The Bradley Effect, in which white voters tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, but then don’t in the ballot box. That’s been figured as high as 7% in past elections.

2. The Supreme Court’s horrendous decision in April to deny voting rights to poor and rural and black Indianans: based on zero evidence of voter fraud, the state now demands a government-issued photo ID at the polls, and some 14.7% of the state’s potential electorate don’t have driver’s licenses, which are the de facto government issued ID.

Indiana, which nearly elected a Klansman governor in the 1920s until he was revealed to be dipping his white Protestant wicket in a woman not his wife (morality saves the day!), shows itself quite southern with this outrageous voter suppression law.

Combined with the usual dirty tricks, voter intimidation and suppression, voter list purges, and the denial of citizenship to 5.3 million people in the criminal justice system -- not to mention the inequitable distribution of voting machines, etc. -- the race is already cooked in some states. (Check out the Brennan Center's report here; an example of the New Jim Crow: in three states, 20% of the black male residents can't vote because they're serving, or have served, time). There’s been very little attention paid to these issues, which are hardly new. There was some news about a Virginia effort to strip college students of their voting rights, but that brought howls and was abandoned.

Simply put, as a minority-appeal faction, the GOP must aggressively cheat, and has to count on low voter turn-out. For instance, remember the so-called Gingrich Revolution? Less than a quarter of the American electorate actually voted for it .