Pollsters getting an early start on 2006 campaign

A pair of back-to- back press releases forced a quick check of the calendar last week, to make sure that 2005 hadn’t slipped away, Rip van Winkel-like.

“2006 no walk in the park for Cantwell” the state Republicans announced in releasing a new poll.

“WA poll: Cantwell strong,” countered Democrats less than two hours later.

GOP pollsters said they asked 500 people if the state’s junior senator should be re-elected, and only 41 percent said yes; another 36 percent agreed with the statement it was “time to give a new person a chance.” Bad news for Maria, they concluded.

Democratic pollsters said they asked 901 people – presumably not the ones queried by Republicans – if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Cantwell, and 57 percent said favorable. Good news for Maria, they believe, because that’s just under recently re-elected Sen. Patty Murray’s fave rating of 60 percent, and ahead of George Bush’s 49 percent fave.

The results aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re by reputable companies and are probably accurate, as polls go. They involve a race nearly 20 months away, so the details probably don’t matter to anyone except the hard-core campaign cognoscenti.

But they do mean something for the average voter: It’s going to be a really long slog to November 2006.

Now that’s an election dispute

Anyone growing weary of the legal sparring over the state’s gubernatorial election should take heart. It could be worse.

More than a century ago in Arkansas, they had themselves a real contested election. And in those good old days, candidates didn’t have armies of attorneys. They had armies of … armies.

Or more accurately, their own personal militias.

The election of 1872 featured accusations of fraud and vote tampering and ballot counts so lopsided as to be laughable. The history on the state Capitol’s Web site says Elisha Baxter was eventually declared the winner over Joseph Brooks by about 8,000 votes. There was fraud on both sides with some ballots burned, and others cast for dead voters while legitimate voters were kept away from polling places at gunpoint; but historian Richard Owens said that Brooks probably did have more votes.

Brooks lost his challenge before the state Supreme Court, but later convinced a judge in a lower court who was a political foe of Baxter to declare him governor. He showed up in the state capital with about 25 armed men and tossed Baxter out of office. Physically tossed him out.

Within weeks, each had an army of several hundred armed men, most of them veterans of one side or the other in the Civil War, marching around town and crouching behind barricades in the capital.

There was talk of going back to the Supreme Court, but Baxter kidnapped two justices to keep it from hearing the case. For a month the two militias battled sporadically, including a pitched battle on the day the Legislature was to meet to decide the dispute. (Enough legislators stayed away that the Lege didn’t manage a quorum that day.)

At that point federal troops moved in, the militias withdrew, the Legislature mustered a quorum and declared Baxter the rightful governor. The state attorney general told Brooks to surrender the Capitol, and Baxter, accompanied by his militia and cavalry, returned to his office.

The dispute prompted Arkansas to rewrite its constitution, so some good came of all this. Neither Baxter nor Brooks was ever re-elected to anything.

Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges, who is handling the Washington revote case, mentioned the Arkansas contest 10 days ago in his opening remarks to attorneys for the state, the counties and the two major political parties who gathered in Wenatchee.

“We think that is not what should go on in our system,” he said, in measured understatement. “Not that I would not like to be kidnapped so I would not have to make this decision.”

This week’s question

Here’s an interesting conundrum from the Republicans’ challenge to votes of felons who may have affected the Gregoire-Rossi election tally:

These voters – if they can be found as Republicans and their allies contend – are by their nature not very trustworthy because they are felons. If they cast a vote without having their voting rights restored, they’ve committed another felony, making them arguably even less trustworthy.

So if you can get them to admit to committing that felony, does it make sense to take their word for it when they tell you for whom they voted? Or should you assume the opposite of their answer is true?