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I shall wake up election morning and drive to the little one-room schoolhouse where the voting is done in Cocolalla, Idaho. They'll have the wood stove burning under a big American flag and the place will smell great and the plates with the Palmer method cursive letters will wrap around the room over the blackboards, and the ghosts of the children long past who died for my privilege to do it will watch me jam the paper ballot into the box and the silent cheers will echo over the lake far, far away.

I know who you're talking about. To hell with them.

I shall wake up election morning and drive to the little one-room schoolhouse where the voting is done in Cocolalla, Idaho.

You reminded about one fact that shows the Republican Party always has more significant success in turnout. If you look at the 2000 and the 2004 maps of counties won by Bush vs. Gore/Kerry you of course see an image overwhelmingly colored red. You'll also notice that the more rural the redder. The more rural the further one tends to have to travel to excercise one's vote. No subway or buses or, in some cases, even taxis. You either got yourself there or asked someone to help. That takes preparation, dedication, a spirit of civic duty. No great union pick-up vehicles that can canvass a square mile of apartment buildings with more eligible voters than some small towns where people have to travel three, five, seven miles to excercise their franchise.

Granted absentee voting is changing some voting habits and the idea of "heading to the polls" but for the most part those rural voters are traveling further and voting Republican.

In regards to those conservatives that expect ideological perfection and can't vote for RINOS, most of those RINOS are from majority Democrat states and more often than not they are the best we can hope to get in most cases. Hugh Hewitt is right in saying that even a Lincoln Chaffee's 35% of votes along party lines (I have no clue - that's just a rough guess) is still better than a 20% or 15% Democrat. It's a reality of two-party politics with the large coalitions of various interests neccessary for victory that RINOS (and DINOS) will exist until a truly viable third party was to emerge.

So hold your nose if you must but remember the infinitely worse stench that would be created by a Democrat majority.

I will wake up election morning, drag my sorry self to another day at work in the salt mines.
When I get out of work at 5:00, I will drive to my polling place (an elementary school around the corner from my house).
Since this is the Detroit area I will fight my way through the crowd of unionists and fringe democrats who will try to shove campaign literature at me while I tell them "You're wasting your time - I'm voting Republican." I will then block my ears to all the screams and cries of "They'll starve the children and elderly and pollute the air and give all our tax money to the rich".
I will then enter the gymnasium and stand in line for an hour and listen to my neighbors trash George Bush and blame every little ill in the world on the Republicans.
I will get my ballot, mark it, feed it into the scanner and rack up the only Republican vote that my precinct will see.