This morning’s Boston Globe poll showed our “English” measure in Massachusetts still enjoying a very comfortable lead of some 27 points among voters, virtually unchanged from its 28 point lead a month earlier in the same poll.
To date, we have not spent a single dollar on advertising, while our opponents have deluged the airwaves of the ultra-liberal Commonwealth with hundreds of thousands of dollars of commercials. The well-educated electorate of ultra-liberal Massachusetts seems not to be buying what these commercials are welling.
Instead, the voters who elected Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis are strongly leaning in the direction of Globe Columnist Scot Lehigh, whose shrewd observations on the logical implications of Democratic Party rhetoric ran in today’s paper and is attached below.
Meanwhile, our battle for a very similar measure in Colorado remains extremely tight, with tracking polls showing a very narrow lead shifting from day to day.
This remains true despite the near-Bloombergian saturation-bombing media campaign against us, with 99% of the funding derived from an eccentric billionaire heiress named Pat Stryker. Local political analysts had written our campaign’s political obituary weeks ago, and are now wondering whether “all of our political rules go down the toilet this year” as an article attached below from yesterday’s Rocky Mountain News discusses.
But we understand we are faced with the opposition of nearly every elected official in Colorado, the heaviest media bombardment in state history, and a willingness to run ads that local editorial writers have characterized as “setting records for deceit and distortion”—or worse.
For example, today’s Denver Post carried a story, attached below, describing how the No campaign has now publicly admitted that their ads make “a mistake” in claiming that a very similar measure raised taxes by $66 million in Arizona. Nonetheless, they are continuing to blast these ads out hundreds of times each day on radio and television, citing the names of Republican Gov. Bill Owens, the Denver Post, and the Rocky Mountain News in support of their position, which they have freely acknowledged is false.
Under such circumstances, we realize that our struggle remains very much of an uphill fight in Colorado.
Still, as I discussed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece, provided below, regardless of the results in Colorado, the tide of history is running overwhelmingly in our favor.
- Habla Usted Ingles? by Ron Unz
Wall Street Journal, Thursday, October 31, 2002 - Follow the evidence on English immersion by Scot Lehigh
Boston Globe, Friday, November 1, 2002 - Amendment 31 support climbs
Denver Rocky Mountain News, Thursday, October 31, 2002 - Bilingual-ed backers admit ad’s mistake
Denver Post, Friday, November 1, 2002
