Republicans Announce Midterm Strategy of Walking Every Voter to the Polls Personally, Starting With Texas
Faced with a tight House majority and a national mood sour over the war and gas prices, the GOP has launched an unprecedented door-to-door escort operation for every registered Republican in the country.
The Republican National Committee has begun escorting every registered party member to a polling station in person, in an operation the party calls the Walking Majority. Volunteers in matching navy jackets are assigned to individual voters across all 435 House districts, and no voter is permitted to reach a ballot box without a designated escort at their elbow.
The effort was launched after the party's House majority of 218 to 214 was judged too thin to leave to chance. Party strategists have divided the country into 1,900 walking corridors, each supervised by a regional coordinator who files a timetable every morning with the committee in Washington. In Michigan, escorts have already been assigned to dairy farmers, bus drivers and retired machinists, who are walked to the polls at a pace of roughly two blocks per hour.
Local officials in Maine say the escorts have changed the character of their towns. Shops on Congress Street now open at dawn to serve coffee to escorts waiting outside the library, and the county has added an extra bus route to carry the escorted voters back home afterwards. A spokesman for the committee described the arrangement as "the simplest way to make sure every Republican remembers what they came to do, and where they parked the car."
Democrats responded by ordering their own escorts, and by Monday afternoon the two parties' volunteers were queueing against each other outside a Houston high school, each waiting for the other to finish. Election officials have requested a single shared sidewalk. The committee has promised to hold a retreat next week to decide whether the escorts should now accompany voters on the return journey as well.
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