GOP "micro targeting" voters for mid term

Donald Lambro:

The Republican grass-roots army of campaign volunteers who engineered the party's successful 2004 voter-turnout drive is being redeployed in battleground states for this year's midterm House and Senate elections, say senior party strategists.
Only this time, the voter-identification, registration and Election Day turnout effort, which the Republican National Committee (RNC) reactivated quietly last year, is using state-of-the-art "micro-targeting" technology to thwart the Democrats' offensive to win control of Congress.
The operation comes at a time when most polls show voters giving President Bush and congressional Republicans poor job-approval scores and election analysts predicting that Democrats will make gains this fall in Congress and the governorships.
The grass-roots effort reactivates a well-trained ground force of political volunteers -- that eventually will number in the millions -- who have been sending in weekly reports on the number of new Republican voters identified and registered in key races through a vast e-mail network linking Republican Party organizations.
"Every single week our volunteers make tens of thousands of contacts with targeted voters," said a senior Republican official who detailed the operation for The Washington Times but did not want to be identified.

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The big question is whether than can overcome the efforts of the Democrats and their media allies to suppress Republican turnout because of theri negativity. They have done an amazing job of talking down a roaring economy and making people stupid about it. The media has distorted events in IRaq by inept and misleading reporting. Overcoming this bad reporting is the biggest job the GOP has this year.