[rcne]

After my post concerning the Brits losing Ohio for Kerry, I thought I'd better check the rumor out.

One county did go Republican, but it appears this effort also influenced the other 87 counties as well.

With the slim margin of victory for Bush in Ohio, and Ohio being the state that cost Kerry the election, this effort from the left swayed Ohio to the right.

For those who marginalize this effect, do the math on how many votes it would have taken to either give Kerry the win, or make the count close enough to bring in the provisionals( which I would assume Kerry would have the majority). Then spread that count across 88 counties in Ohio. This one act alone may have made the difference between Bush or Kerry as president.

USA TODAY

Brits' campaign backfires in Ohio

When the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian launched a campaign last month to allow its readers to correspond with working-class swing voters in Ohio, it hoped to start a friendly dialogue between foreigners interested in the 2004 presidential campaign and U.S. voters who would decide its outcome.
The project began a conversation, but it didn't have the desired effect.
The letters — many of which criticized the war in Iraq, spoke of fear abroad of U.S. foreign policy and implored recipients to vote President Bush out of office — were attacked as an invasion of privacy and intrusion into U.S. sovereignty. House Speaker Dennis Hastert threatened to take away The Guardian's congressional press privileges. Conservative talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity lambasted the project on the air.
"It fired up our side, not just in Clark County, but across the state," said Jason Mauk, spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party. "We got hundreds of calls from people reporting this to us and asking what they could do. We even heard from wavering American Democrats abroad who told us this helped them make a decision to vote for Bush."
The campaign allowed more than 14,000 Guardian readers to send letters to voters in Clark County (population 145,000) who had not declared their party affiliation when they registered. It was canceled less than 24 hours after the first letters arrived in Ohio.
And on Election Day, Clark was the only one of Ohio's 88 counties — and among only 5% of all 3,113 U.S. counties and independent townships — to turn from Democratic blue in 2000 to Republican red this year.
"Their tactic failed miserably, except maybe as a publicity stunt," Mauk said.
Each Guardian reader who signed up was given the name of a different Clark County voter taken from a list purchased from the local board of elections.
…
"I found it quite insulting," said Terry Brown, a retiree in Springfield who received a Guardian letter. "I was under the impression we settled the matter of how we vote and who we vote for in 1776."
Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, called the effort "counterproductive — unusual, at best."
Informed of the Clark County vote totals, Strickland laughed and said: "That's surprising — well, actually, not surprising, but interesting. And, knowing what I know about politics, we can expect to see a concerted effort on the part of political strategists in the next election to pretend to be foreigners writing letters to swing voters in support of the opposing candidate."
State Republican officials reported a surge in call-ins and volunteers in Clark County and across the state in the weeks that followed.
"It wasn't just Clark County," Mauk said. "We noticed a shift in momentum across the other 87 counties."
Ian Katz, the Guardian executive who came up with the idea, said it was "self-aggrandizing" and "silly" to think the project affected the outcome. "But we did get a lot of people talking — in some cases, shouting," he said. Katz wrote in a recent column: "I think I have an idea of how Frankenstein felt. Somewhere along the line, the good-humored spirit of the enterprise got lost in translation."
Philip Gordon, an expert on U.S.-Europe relations at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, said the backlash shouldn't diminish efforts to encourage greater dialogue — "especially with so many international issues to contend with in an age of globalization, where so many things abroad affect us and things we do affect others abroad."
Contributing: Paul Overberg and Bruce Rosenstein