Candidates taking a page from the Gipper

An article on the Daily Beast website detailed how some Republican candidates, such as the U.S. senator-elects Cory Gardner of Colorado and Joni Ernst of Iowa, have learned to navigate the divide between the hard right and more traditional conservatives.

The key: Stake out positions that retain far-right voters while also appealing to a broader electorate.

Presentation is important too. Smile. Be likable.

This isn’t an entirely new idea. The candidates are taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook.

Locally, no one does it better than Sen. Ernie Lopez, the District 6 Republican who was re-elected last Tuesday by defeating Democratic challenger Claire Snyder-Hall.

Consider how Lopez answered a question about same-day voter registration at the recent candidates night. (A bill allowing for same-day voter registration passed the House this past session. It did not make it to the floor of the Senate.)

Same-day registration is anathema to the far right and to Republicans in general. They say it would lead to widespread voter fraud. That was the rationale four Republican candidates offered at a September meeting of the Sussex County Republican Women’s Club.

There’s nothing to back it up though. Study after study has shown otherwise. (Go ahead and Google.) Republicans’ real fear is that it encourages voters who are more likely to vote Democratic.

Still, Lopez might be expected to take a similar line, given its popularity with most Republicans.

At October’s event, Snyder-Hall, not surprisingly, strongly supported same-day registration.

Lopez did not, but he took a more nuanced approach. Saying he didn’t “quite buy the claims” of some that same-day registration would lead to fraud, Lopez emphasized the stresses that would be placed on the election process.

He said he had been told by poll workers, especially in Eastern Sussex, that “we can’t have this at this time. It’s going to be too overwhelming, and too much for us as we go about trying to be sure that every vote counts.”

He said he would have supported a compromise that would have allowed registration 15 days or perhaps even seven days before an election. He finished by saying, “The more people that vote the better.” Not a sentiment I hear from many Republicans.

Lopez skillfully split the difference. He didn’t support same-day registration, which would have bothered his conservative base, but he came across as much more reasonable than the candidates who keep crying fraud the way the little boy cried wolf. (The difference, of course, is that many people continue believing Republicans who cry fraud.) He didn’t scare away independents and Democrats willing to split the ticket.

Lopez’s approach worked. He trounced Snyder-Hall nearly 2-1. And she began running hard more than a year ago.

But of course this was a very big Republican year. Or was it? It might be more accurate to say that it was a very small Democratic year.

The great Ambrose Bierce once defined a coward as someone “who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.”

Democrats are in danger of being defined as voters who during an election think with their rear end. They’re unwilling to get off their behinds and vote.

If I could have magically told you before the election that Marie Mayor’s 2012 vote count would eclipse Steve Smyk’s 2014 total you might think that sounded like good news for Democrats.

It wasn’t.

In 2012, Mayor tallied 5,689 votes. In 2014, Smyk received just 5,473.

Now look at the percentages. In 2012, Mayor lost to Smyk in a relatively close race, 53 percent to 47 percent. No wonder she thought it was worth trying again.

But this year Mayor lost by a near landslide, 58 percent to 40 percent. The other two percent went to Don Ayotte, who most likely took votes from Smyk.

(As the 2012 Republican candidate, Ayotte ran a credible race for Sussex County Council’s District 3 seat against Joan Deaver, but this year, running on the Independent Party ticket, he wasn’t able to duplicate those results.)

Smyk won by a much larger percentage in 2014 despite receiving about 1,000 fewer votes than in 2012.

How is that even possible? Because Mayor received nearly 2,000 fewer votes.

This despite an energetic campaign that focused on issues and included an avalanche of mailers.

People watching the wave of red last Tuesday might be excused for thinking that Sussex Democrats trail their Republican opponents in county registration rolls.

Nope. Sussex Democrats enjoy an advantage in seven of eight representative districts, all except for the blood red District 38, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 8,344 to 6,323.

This is not to diminish the size of the Republican victory. They won big, locally and nationally.

The point is that I have the impression some Democrats may be complacent. Perhaps they’ve been reading too many stories suggesting the country’s changing demographics will result in future electoral dominance.

But demographics don’t mean squat if Democrats don’t vote.