Among Republicans… only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.

Again, I’m not surprised. When I covered the run-up to the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington, I encountered multiple conservative activists who said ACORN–then in the news for the James O’Keefe/Hannah Giles sting videos–had stolen the election. From my story:

“Clinton only got elected in 1992 because Ross Perot got back in the race,” said Miller. He attributed Perot’s decision to pressure from the “Dixie mafia, Jimmy Carter’s organization — they ran half the South.” And according to Miller, Barack Obama had only won the 2008 election because of fraud by the community organizing group ACORN.

“You can assume 10 percent of Obama’s votes were fraudulent votes,” said Bench.

I’ve heard this all over the country, and there’s no basis for it whatsoever. Back in May, former Nevada GOP chairwoman Sue Lowden–now a candidate against Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)–told me that ACORN did not have an effect in her state, one of several where Republicans filed pre-election lawsuits against the group.

On Election Day, recalled Nevada Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Lowden, the GOP watched the issue closely, alerted state officials to bogus registrations, and dispatched “trained people” to the polls to look for voters showing up to cast ballots under assumed names at fake addresses. None showed up. “Would it have made a difference?” asked Lowden. “No, none of our races were that close.”

I’d credit that to Hoffman’s greenness as a candidate if he wasn’t being advised by professional politicos like Rob Ryan, a veteran of George Pataki’s 1994 gubernatorial campaign, and Mike Long, chairman of the state Conservative Party. Throughout the campaign, Ryan tried to make the case that Democratic allies like ACORN and the Working Families Party were all set to commit vote fraud. It always seemed like a base-motivating gimmick — indeed, it worked so well that Hoffman backers I met saw an African-American GOP strategist walk by and started assuming, out loud, that he was an ACORN plant.

Why did Hoffman concede in the first place? That I’d credit to the campaign’s overconfidence. They went into election day planning for a clear victory. Hoffman bragged to me, and to other reporters, that he hadn’t even talked to Dede Scozzafava, the ousted GOP candidate, because he’d “win without her.” When votes started coming in far, far below their expectations, they lost hope very quickly. Hoffman himself was so devastated during his election night speech that he temporarily forgot to mention that he was conceding the election — Mike Long ran onstage with a note reminding him to — and he left the election party making no more statements to the press.

Simply put, I think Hoffman panicked on election night and is now honestly, frantically trying to undo a mistake. I don’t know if he or his team realize the long-term political damage of this.

Hoffman’s getting some brushback from local Republicans. George Williams, chairman of the Oswego County Republicans, says Hoffman’s wrong and says the party is “not going to take the blame because he didn’t hold his concession speech.” I was in the district in the run-up to the election, when Hoffman accused Democrats or ACORN of slashing a campaign worker’s tires; when that charge turned out to be baseless, ACORN spokesmen informed me that they had no volunteers in the district. While ACORN’s credibility has been challenged left and right lately, its very public implosion would seem to back that up.

This isn’t the sort of behavior that wins over a skeptical electorate looking at a possible rematch between Hoffman and Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.).

A quick update: Here’s the letter Hoffman is circulating, available at http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/stolenelection.html.

Dear Fellow Conservative,

As evidence surfaces, we find out that reported results from election night were far from accurate. ACORN and the unions did their best to try and sway the results to Obamacare supporter Bill Owens.

I was forced to concede after receiving two pieces of grim news – - down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night – and barely won my stronghold in Oswego County. On Election Night, the information we received was far different from what we received this week!

Rest assured, they will not succeed, and I am therefore revoking my statement of concession.

That is why I am writing you today. Recent developments leave me to wonder who is scheming behind closed doors, twisting arms and stealing elections from the voters of NY-23.

I’m sure you are as dismayed as I am to learn of the mischief that took place in Oswego and neighboring counties. We know this would not be the first time for the ACORN faithful to tamper with democracy.

Now it’s time to actually count every legal ballot and I need your help to ensure the people of NY-23 get the Congressman THEY ELECTED. Please donate now to help me ensure every vote is counted!

A recanvassing in the 11-county district shows Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026. In Oswego County, I was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, but inspectors found I actually won by 1,748 votes

Let’s force them keep this recanvassing active! Let’s give this election a chance to end differently!
Oswego County elections officials blame the mistakes on “chaos“ in their call-in center that included a phone system foul-up, and on inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results. This sounds like a tactic right from the ACORN playbook.

The district’s second biggest voter turnout was in Jefferson County, where I had also benefited from a turnaround since election night, gaining another 700 votes. Owens led by 300 votes on the final election night tally, but after recanvassing, I’m now leading by 424 votes.

Jerry Eaton, the Republican elections commissioner for Jefferson County, said inspectors found a problem in four districts where my vote total was mistakenly entered as zero.

The new vote totals mean the race will be decided by absentee ballots, of which the state Board of Elections distributed about 10,200.

The people of NY-23 deserve to have their ballots counted properly, but we can’t let ACORN or the unions keep that from happening. They have more lawyers and more experience tampering with democracy.

State Board of Elections Communications Director John Conklin said the state sent a letter to the House Clerk last week explaining that no winner had been determined in the 23rd District.

Now it’s time to actually count every legal ballot and I need your help to ensure the people of NY-23 get the Congressman THEY ELECTED. Please donate now to help me ensure every vote is counted!

We need to make sure that fair elections are a reality in NY-23, just like our Founding Fathers envisioned So long as we remain the “land of the free,” we MUST ensure every vote is counted.

Help us today so we may be the first of many conservative victories during the Obama Regime.

Yours in Freedom,

Doug Hoffman

President George W. Bush with judicial nominees Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and Carolyn Kuhl in 2003 (whitehouse.gov archives)

On Tuesday, a few hours before the Senate would break an eight-month filibuster on the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) reflected on how his party had decided to delay that vote.

“Before [President George W.] Bush left office,” DeMint told TWI, “I went to a reception at the White House for all the nominees, judicial and otherwise, who had not had votes. Many had not even had hearings. I met members of their families, whose lives had been on hold for years. Republicans had made the argument, for years, that we shouldn’t filibuster judicial nominees.” DeMint smiled. “We lost that argument.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“The president has shown us, with his nominees and his czars, [that he's] not looking for mainstream America with these nominees,” said DeMint.

When Hamilton’s nomination began to flag, it called into question the strategy of trying to navigate the Senate with low-key nominees. Holds and filibusters have put 38 Obama nominees–some for the bench, most for administration jobs–in limbo. It’s in that context that the White House and Senate Democrats are reported to be looking at a strategy shift–coming up with a massive list of judicial nominees to “flood the pipeline” and complicate Republican filibusters.

It’s a strategy that conservative activists understand very well. In conversations with TWI, some of the key conservatives who helped get Bush’s nominees through the Senate expressed surprise at how often President Obama’s nominees–judicial and otherwise–have been dragged down by Senate holds and filibusters.

“When you have a popular president and 60 seats in the Senate, you should be able to do whatever you want,” said one Bush administration veteran who worked on pushing through judicial nominations, speaking anonymously so as not to offend friends still in Washington. “Insofar as they can’t get what they want, it’s entirely up to them. Why the hell can’t Dawn Johnsen [the nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice] get a vote? They’ve decided not to use the political capital to get her confirmed.”

Rachel Brand, a former associate counsel in the Bush White House, said that the Republican administration had more success in filling the bench and getting nominees confirmed because it proposed so many nominees, and because much of their attention was put to the effort. “If they had been pulling out all the stops and working as hard as possible to get as many nominations as fast possible,” said Brand, “they might have done the same as us.”

Many of the conservative activists who are working to bolster–and provide cover for–Republican filibusters of Obama nominees played the opposite role in the Bush years. Curt Levey, who left the Department of Justice in to campaign for the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees John Roberts and Samuel Alito, currently leads the Committee for Justice. There, he’s produced sharp-edged critiques of Obama nominees, some of them finding their way into the arguments Republicans made for filibusters. “On the surface,” wrote Levey in a Tuesday memo to conservatives about David Hamilton, “Judge Hamilton’s ruling has nothing to do with Nidal Hasan’s violent rampage. But neither could have taken place without a religious double standard borne of political correctness.”

If Democrats are having problems responding to this, Levey told TWI, a major reason is Obama’s unwillingness to make public pushes for his own nominees. “Whether it’s the Afghanistan decision or health care, he likes to remain above the fray,” said Levey. “When it’s really a problem for the White House, they’re driving the strategy–they’re trying to communicate it to senators and outside groups. Obama’s not doing either of those things.”

A look at Bush’s approach to stalled nominations reveals a stark difference with Obama’s approach. Starting in 2001 and ending in 2003, Democrats–who controlled first 51, then 49 Senate seats–filibustered Miguel Estrada, a nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On February 11, the president opened a press conference on welfare by talking about the Estrada nomination; he followed up that day with a statement asking for an “up-or-down vote.” February 22, 2003, he devoted the weekly presidential radio address to the Estrada nomination, and accused Democrats of “partisan politics” that were “unfaithful to the Senate’s own obligations.” On February 26, talk about Estrada dominated Bush’s speech to the Latino Coalition. On March 6, Bush released a statement calling the Democratic filibuster of Estrada “a disgrace.” On March 11 Bush sent a letter, the content of which was released to the public, asking then-Senate leaders Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Tom Daschle (R-S.D.) to break the filibuster. On March 13, Bush spoke about the filibuster yet again. All of this occurred while the White House was preparing–and making the public case–for the invasion of Iraq on March 20.

Those statements were backed up by a drumbeat of criticism from conservative groups that did not end even after Estrada withdrew his nomination in late 2003. While Estrada never made it to the bench, conservatives spot a difference between Bush’s doggedness and Obama’s benign neglect. Bush pushed hard for the judicial nominees that ended up getting confirmed in the 2005 “Gang of 14″ deal. By way of comparison, there is no record of Obama speaking about the stalled Hamilton nomination after March 17, when the nomination was announced at the White House. One veteran of Bush’s battles suggested that the “souring” of the process–which, he argued, started with Democrats–was largely to blame. In 2003, while working as an aide to Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Manny Miranda leaked Democratic memos about the Estrada filibuster to the conservative media. Since then, he’s worked outside the Senate encouraging conservatives to make ideological arguments about the nominees they’re blocking.

“As a working White House,” Miranda told TWI, “it really is stark how few nominations they’ve made. And in the past 10 years, this has all been racheted up.” Despite it all, said Miranda, Republicans in the Bush years were able to push through more nominees with more luck than the Democrats have had so far. But “in the Bush White House, at the end, they were having real trouble finding people to nominate because of this soured process.”

Over the weekend, Miranda criticized fellow conservatives who demanded a filibuster of Hamilton. Instead, he suggested a “real” filibuster that would have forced a debate on Hamilton, a chance for conservatives to explain why, exactly, they considered him so out of bounds. “The issue for conservatives,” he told TWI, “and really for Republican senators, is: Are they going to be consistent? Are they going to be principled? The Senate deserves to have the Senate respond to his nominations.”

Republicans have been content so far to explain the lack of “consistency” the way that DeMint did–Democrats wanted to raise the bar on confirmation votes, and the bar got raised. According to DeMint, Miranda’s argument about the effect of the filibusters–that it leads to delay but not debate–is valid, but hard to overcome. And the key reason is lack of media coverage when Republicans make their stands.

“We’re not being allowed the time,” said DeMint, “because when we allow them to come to the floor, we’re not getting time agreements. We need to expose them, and we’ve put out releases about them. But for the most part there’s not much interest in covering these nominees.”

Bob Bauer has a public record of defending Barack Obama’s relationship with ACORN. Bauer’s hiring appears to be a tactical maneuver to strategically defend the White House exactly one week after Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell raided ACORN’s national headquarters in New Orleans and seized paper records and computer hard drives that may lead to the White House.

The actual story, as Tony Romm points out, is that Bauer, in his service as the general counsel for the Obama-Biden campaign, criticized Republicans for the last-minute lawsuits against ACORN in swing states. As the story roiled–and it’s entirely possible the negative attention helped win Missouri for the McCain-Palin ticket–he asked the attorney general to investigate any involvement between the Bush Justice Department and the GOP’s campaign. Read the letter–he doesn’t really defend ACORN at all. King’s attack here is almost surprisingly irresponsible. Almost.

Obama really buttered them up in Cairo. He thanked them for everything from algebra to the pen, though he curiously failed to mention that they often throw people in prison for using it.

Sept. 14, on the ACORN scandal, in a column titled “Lefty Crooks Laugh at You”:

No wonder Charlie Rangel and so many people considered for jobs in the Obama administration didn’t pay their taxes — they know better.

Oct. 9, on the Nobel peace prize:

The committee clearly has cast itself into the dustbin of irrelevancy by making this move. People will joke about this for years.

Nov. 4, on the elections:

Obama and his political team are watching the results very carefully to see just how much power they have squandered in 12 short months. And they are considering just how imperiled their political agenda is now that skittish House Democrats have learned that Obama has no coattails unless he is in the race.

Nov. 9, on the health care vote:

[L]ike Gettysburg and the Confederacy, the vote will mark the beginning of the end for Pelosi and her doomed crew.

There are two echoes here of the just-concluded elections. The first: Republicans out-and-out claimed that ACORN was on the ground in NY-23, and though the group’s credibility has been seriously challenged in recent months, they deny having had any boots on the ground up there. The second: Many Democrats believe that failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds blundered in not making an issue out of Republican-led delays in unemployment benefit money, and Governor-elect Bob McDonnell’s role in this. Here are two examples of Democrats really ceding the narrative to aggressive and strategic conservatives.

The idea roused the interest of Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who continued the improvised sketch before the empty chamber.

“I think it’s been a full two weeks since we’ve had an ACORN amendment on the floor,” Durbin said. “So clearly it’s time for us to move to one of the highest priorities many Republicans see in the nation. I wonder if we ought to consider more ACORN amendments in hopes of moving legislation.”

To be fair to Republicans, they insisted on an ACORN amendment as part of the unemployment bill for only a few weeks, dropping that demand more recently in favor of provisions to end the Wall Street bailout and fund the unemployment insurance extension using unspent stimulus money.

A cloture vote on the extension bill is scheduled for 12:15 p.m. today.

“There are reports that they’re bringing in the troops and they’re bringing in ACORN,” said Hoffman. “I think the Democrats are doing anything they possibly can to steal this election away from the 23rd district.”

The campaign gave reporters the name and phone number of Jeremy Kain, the volunteer who claimed to have his tires slashed, but asked to confirm whether he was accusing the Democrats of supressing the vote, Hoffman started to backtrack: ‘We’ve called in the police and the police will be investigating.”

The campaign is pushing this story hard after a wave of morning reports that Hoffman’s grassroots supporters were misbehaving. Attacks on ACORN, and allegations that Democrats are trying to steal this election, have been striking components Hoffman’s hard-edged late-game messaging.

Update: Anton Troianovski of the Wall Street Journal followed up with the Plattsburgh police on this, and was told that the volunteer actually damaged his tire on a broken bottle. I asked Hoffman campaign manager Dan Tripp about this–he said he had no comment because the campaign had not heard this yet.

It’s not unheard of for a candidate to make an accusation like this without having all the facts, but it’s a strange sideshow in the final hours.