Why conservatives fear stolen elections

Conservatives are terrified these days that America’s election system is being corrupted by groups like ACORN and big public employee unions.

In his fundraising letter, Lake Placid Conservative Doug Hoffman said…

“Recent developments leave me to wonder who is scheming behind closed doors, twisting arms and stealing elections from the voters of NY-23.”

A poll out this week by Public Policy Polling found that a huge swath of Republicans are also convinced that the 2008 presidential election was “stolen.”

Losing NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman became the latest in an increasingly long line of conservative politicians to blame his problems on ACORN yesterday despite the complete lack of evidence the organization played any role in his defeat.

The Republican base is with him though.

PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.

First, let me be clear about my position on this.

I’ve looked closely at allegations of vote-stealing for years. (Similar claims were made about John Kerry’s defeat in 2004.)

They are, by and large, bunk. No credible analyst has found any evidence that presidential elections have been “stolen” at any time in recent American history.

The notion that ACORN stole the election from John McCain is ludicrous.

The 2000 presidential outcome, Bush v. Gore, is a singular case; in that election, the outcome was decided openly by the US Supreme Court.

The result may be questionable — but it wasn’t a secretive process.

Now let me return to the question that frames this post: Why do so many conservatives think American elections are being stolen?

I think the answer is pretty simple: They can’t swallow the idea that average American voters would choose a different path.

Beginning in the late 1930s, Republicans like Robert Taft were convinced that New Deal style policies created by Franklin Roosevelt were a temporary and unacceptable aberration.

They saw it as the GOP’s job to roll back “big government” ideas, many of them borrowed or adopted from Europe.

But to Taft’s dismay, Republicans chose liberals and moderates to run for the White House in 1948 and 1952. (President Dwight Eisenhower openly called himself “a liberal.”)

In 1968, Barry Goldwater again took up the conservative banner, arguing that Americans were hungry for a return to pre-Roosevelt principles.

He lost by a landslide.

Still, conservatives coined the phrase “silent majority” (and “Moral Majority”) to suggest that somehow there was an underrepresented pool of right-of-center voters waiting to be tapped.

This rhetoric has shifted a little in recent years, with conservative politicians suggesting that there is a “real America” or “pro-America areas of this great nation” (both phrases used by Sarah Palin) that are being disenfranchised.

Frankly, it’s a troubling development.

When conservatives move deliberately from being empowered participants in the national debate to being self-described victims, it’s hard to know how to continue the discussion.

And I worry that over time more and more conservatives will adopt the notion that elections are irrelevant deceptions.

This kind of cynicism and disenchantment may have deflated Doug Hoffman’s turnout last month.

(I have no evidence to support this suggestion, other than my own surprise that his grassroots support was so lackluster.)

The bottom line is that America is a largely centrist country, as is this region of northern New York.

Moderate politicians with practical, relatively non-ideological agendas tend to do well, a fact that frustrates true believers on both ends of the political spectrum.

For many conservatives, that reality is unacceptable. In the end, they would much rather blame ACORN.