Roll out the write-ins

Oh, good grief. Shelley’s singing.

At a campaign stop last week, congressional candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs asked a group of women who own businesses to vote for her twice in November: once in a special election to fill the unexpired term of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and again in the general election as the Republican write-in candidate running for the full two-year term.

The women, meeting for breakfast in a hotel banquet room, looked up from their scrambled eggs as Sekula-Gibbs launched into a jingle to drive home the point: “Vote twice for Shelley,” she sang to the tune of “Roll Out the Barrel.” “Special and then write her in.”

The candidate motioned for them to join her in song, and most did, a few clapping in time. “It’s corny, but corny is good,” Sekula-Gibbs said.

My apologies to those of you who now have that tune firmly lodged in your head. I blame the activist judiciary for this.

“Republicans have thrown one seat away out of sheer stupidity with the whole DeLay fiasco,” said Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist.

Only four write-in candidates have won House seats in the last 75 years, Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said. “It’s extraordinarily difficult to organize and carry off. People go into a voting booth with very little information and often vote a straight ticket. For someone to go in and figure out how to do a write-in vote, what are the odds?” he said.

Sabato agreed. “Can you imagine entering that long, hyphenated name on a type pad? It’s going to be a major hassle and people aren’t going to do it,” he said. “This is Lampson’s seat. It is literally the only Republican seat that we are firmly putting in the Democratic column at this point.”

Actually, he’s got TX-22 in the Leans Democratic category in his latest chart, along with PA-06. Perhaps moving it into the Likely D category, where the Republican-held governorship of New York is slotted, would make that point more emphatic.

Misspellings won’t disqualify a vote if election officials can determine voter intent, said David Beirne, a spokesman for the Harris County clerk’s office. Voters who mark a straight Republican ticket will not be voting for Sekula-Gibbs, he said, because her name isn’t on the ballot.

Chris Elam has gotten about as good an answer on this from the Harris County Clerk’s office as I’ve seen so far. Basically, it boils down to “it depends” for whether or not any given permutation of “Shelley Sekula Gibbs” (I’m spotting them the hyphen) will ultimately count. One thing we do know is that “SSG” will not.

“This is a very educated district. People will get it,” Sekula-Gibbs said. She may be the late-starting write-in candidate, but “people know who I am. We’re rapidly making up ground…. We’d better, because it’s a short time frame.

I’ve crunched the numbers on this before, but it’s worth reviewing again. Shelley will need the die hard straight ticket Republican voters, the ones who will be most receptive to her message and most likely to follow the instructions to write her in, to be there for her. But she can’t win on straight ticket voters alone; indeed, by my projections, the straight-ticket R total would be about 55,000 votes, or a smidge less than what Tim Riley got as a Democrat in 2002 against DeLay. She needs the less hardcore Republicans, too. Just reaching all those people to tell them about the new, special, different thing they need to do this year, let alone convincing them that they need to do it for Shelley, is a tall order. And we still don’t know where – or if – she’ll get the money to do that.

Lampson campaign manager Mike Malaise said he was not assuming the election was over. “This is a tough district any way you look at it. We’re not taking any chances. We’re going to use our resources and spend everything necessary to win,” he said.

Since DeLay dropped out of the race, Lampson has won support from business leaders once wary of crossing the powerful congressman, Malaise said. “There have been some people locally that have previously said, ‘I really like you, Nick, but DeLay has threatened me or made it clear there would some sort of retribution for supporting you.’ Now that he’s out of the race, we’ve picked up their support.”

This isn’t a surprise, right? This sort of thing happens to just about every challenger who unseats an incumbent. Had DeLay stayed on the ballot and had Lampson defeated him, these business leaders who are embracing him now would have been embracing him then. It’s the rational thing to do if your Congressional needs are more practical than ideological.

Thanks to Muse, who has more Shelley filk for those who have sturdier constitutions than I. And hey, I really am sorry about the earworm.

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