'It's voter registration, stupid' -- The fight moves South

[struggle4progress]

RUPERT CORNWELL

... Not for a century before that has Danville been the center of such political attention -- to be precise, since a traumatic week in April 1865 when the town was the last, brief, home of the Confederate government. As fleeing Union troops closing in on his capital, Richmond, Jefferson Davis briefly moved into the gorgeous Italianate mansion of Danville's leading citizen, the pioneering tobacco baron William Sutherlin, from where he issued his last presidential proclamation ...

Democrats have not carried the state since Lyndon Johnson's landslide win over Barry Goldwater. But in 2000 and 2004, Al Gore and John Kerry kept George W Bush's victory margin to 8 percent, while Democrats have won the last three statewide elections (two for governor and one for the U.S. Senate), largely thanks to the fast-growing Washington suburbs in northeastern Virginia. If Obama can consolidate these gains and hold down the Republican margin of victory in the rural and southern part of the state, he can win.

Thus it was that last month, not a defeated rebel president but an aspiring president paid an unheard-of visit to Danville. Obama was in town not for a week but for barely half an hour, dropping in at Short Sugar's Bar-B-Q (All You Can Eat Ribs $10.99, Friday and Saturday) on busy Route 58 on the northern edge of town. The diner is still recovering from the excitement.

Far more important, however, the Obama campaign has opened the first local office by a Democratic candidate in decades ...

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/379171_voterregonline16.html

[x-g.o.p.er]

1. Registration is one thing, but

getting them to the polls is another. It's registration and turnout, I would argue.

[RoccoR5955]

2. Absolutely correct...

Registration is step one. Turnout is step two. You can register a billion voters, if none of them vote, nothing matters.