Election frenzy peaking in Pike

By DAVID HULSE

MILFORD, PA — Pike County’s most prominent Democrat concedes that the county will be won by President Bush next Tuesday.

But the question is, by how much.

While Democrat Al Gore won Pennsylvania by 200,000 votes in the 2000 election, President Bush won a comparatively narrow 54-percent victory in Pike County over the combination of Gore and Ralph Nader.

Anticipating another close election, Republicans are hoping to better that figure, but population growth in the county has lessened their registration plurality in this traditional GOP stronghold.

According to Philadelphia’s non-partisan Committee of 70, Pike’s registered Republican voters enjoyed a 40-percent plurality over Democrats as late as 1994, but with Pike’s population growth leading the state at the rate of 4.2 percent, that lead dwindled to 34 percent in 2001.

This year, the margin of difference in Pike County has fallen to about 31 percent, approximately 18,500 Republicans to 12,700 Democrats.

Karl Wagner, Pike’s minority county commissioner, concedes that the Democrats will lose the county vote if people walk the party line, “and a lot of times they do,” he said.

Commissioners’ Chair Harry Forbes is running the Bush campaign in Pike County and he wants a big win. Forbes says he does not believe the race is as close as the polls would indicate.

“My gut is telling me Bush will prevail. His record on the economy, job creation, the war effort…the public will vote him back. He’s the type of individual who deserves to be returned. He’s lived up to his word,” Forbes said.

Forbes said he’s finding people to be either hardcore for or against their candidates, and Forbes is among them. Aside from Kerry’s “lightweight record” in the U.S. Senate, Forbes says as a Vietnam veteran he takes special exception to Kerry’s post-Vietnam record.

Referring to Kerry’s meeting with the communist delegations in Paris in 1970, Forbes declared, “This man was a traitor, and should have been brought up on treason charges. He conspired with the enemy in France. After what he did after the service, I wouldn’t ever trust him with my children or grand children,” Forbes said.

He isn’t alone in taking “hardcore” to the point where political discussion is not something entered into lightly. At the service station in Shohola recently, debate over the Yankees and the Red Sox ran a distant second to the election. “I’ll argue baseball with anybody,” said the attendant, “but you mention Kerry to some of these people and they explode.”

In Matamoras, corporate Wal-Mart is playing it close to the vest in the video department. Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” appeared on the new releases rack next to “George W. Bush: Faith in the White House.”

Moore’s film was sold out. The clerk at the register said she had seen “Fahrenheit 9/11” but found it much like the election campaign, too long. “That doesn’t mean I’m for Bush either. I’m undecided,” she added.

Pike County Democratic Party Chair Maurine Giordano is hoping that those “undecideds” will pull something out of the hat for Kerry in Pike. Like Forbes, she said the Democrats will be using phone banks to get the message out in remaining days before the election, making “a major effort.”

“You have no idea about the number of phone calls I’ve gotten,” she said.

Giordano said the war has been a primary issue. “A lot of people want to see that change,” she said.

“I don’t know anybody else that is as energized as we are,” she said of the Kerry faithful.

But Republican County Chair Kathy Hummel says the same is true with the GOP, to the point where New Yorkers who are feeling left out of the action in a “blue” Democratic state are calling to volunteer their help.

“I’ve never had so many people calling, wanting to help,” Hummel said.

She believes the intense public interest also has played a role in what appears to be the systematic theft and/or destruction of Bush/Cheney signs in and around Pike County.

“On that level, it’s been one of the dirtiest elections I’ve seen around Pike County in a long time,” she said.

Forbes said that theft and destruction has completely drained his supply. “I’ve got eight messages on my desk right now about people wanting signs, and I don’t have any more to give them,” he said.

“There’s none on the ‘three-lane’ (Routes 6 and 209). Some of them have been replaced five times…It’s not penny-ante, it’s getting expensive. Big four-by-eight signs on pipes, pulled right out of the ground…This has to be orchestrated,” he said.

Giordano was not rising to the bait. “Isn’t it sad that you have to go to such levels?” she said of those who destroy opponents’ political signs.

Hummel said that intensity of feeling dragged out over such a long campaign is also to blame.

“It’s been going on now for a year. People burn out. There has to be a better way of campaigning,” she said.

“They get 30 days in England, but maybe that’s a little extreme,” Hummel concluded.