Jabber All You Want, You Left-Wing Bloggers, Paul Hackett Is Still Going To Lose

01 Aug, 2005 by John Hawkins

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There’s a special congressional election in Ohio that is getting all the lefty bloggers hyped up. In this election, Republican Jean Schmidt is going toe-to-toe with loud mouthed Iraqi war vet, Paul Hackett. Hackett has called Bush a “chickenhawk,” has said that W. is the biggest threat facing the United States and has generally made a…well, made a donkey of himself. Of course, lefty bloggers are all excited about Hackett because they love brash and obnoxious candidates, so they just can’t shut up about this race.

In fact, Chris Bowers over at the liberal blog MyDD has actually tabulated the number of posts about this election on the left and right side of the blogosphere and is crowing about the publicity the lib bloggers are showering on Hackett:

“In the midst of a full-out progressive blogswarm on Paul Hackett’s behalf, conservative blogs, who love to boast of their ability to swarm, have done nothing to help out Schmidt in OH-02. In fact, they aren’t even writing about it.

…Even when the news aggregators are removed, progressives blogs have written roughly ten times as much about this election as conservative blogs. What’s more, since Blogopshere Day, the advantage in liberal blog posts has been around 20-1. Even further, the vast majority of conservative blog posts on Hackett over the past two weeks have been from a fairly unknown website, Weapons of Mass Discussion, which averages a whopping 130 page views per day (less than 1,000 per week). By contrast, I believe that literally every single blog in the Liberal Advertising Network, all of which have vastly more traffic than Weapons of Mass Discussion, has discussed Hackett.

Those action-oriented conservative bloggers have completely ignored this race, while us divisive liberals have engaged in an all-out blogswarm that has gone a long way toward making this campaign close. While the MSM cannot help but fawn over the media scalps most often associated with conservative blog influence, the fact is that outside of a select (and admittedly very capable) few, such as Red State, Captain’s Quarters and Patrick Ruffini, conservative bloggers are straight up ineffective when it comes to actually influencing electoral politics. How many elections have gone by now where conservative bloggers offered almost nothing in the way of resource support to conservative candidates? If they had jumped into the OH-02 race (or SD-AL and KY-06 special elections for that matter) with the same force as the progressive blogosphere, Hackett would probably still be way, way behind.

They haven’t however, and Paul Hackett is now close. However, the same cannot be said of the current capabilities of the progressive and conservative blogospheres.”

Boy, he’s all jazzed up about what a great job the left side of the blogosphere’s doing “influencing electoral politics,” isn’t he?

Well, let’s put the left side of the blogosphere’s influence to the test, shall we? The special election is Tuesday and I, John Hawkins, here at Right Wing News, say that the great, big bad left-wing blogswarm is going to amount to diddly squat and Jean Schmidt is going to beat Paul Hackett.

I base that on the fact that Bush took 64% of the vote in that district last November and on this statement from Larry Sabato:

“It’s a totally safe district,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “The only question you ever have is that special elections can be squirrelly in terms of turnout.”

So by late Tuesday, we should see who got it right: blogs like this one, that didn’t waste a lot of time on the race because it’s in a heavily Republican district, or the lefty bloggers who think they’re accomplishing something by incessantly talking up a guy who’s almost guaranteed to lose.

The smart money? It’s not on the side of the left-wing blogger who’s writing a triumphant post about what a huge impact liberal bloggers have had on an election that hasn’t even happened yet…