Daily Kos Tries to Protect Yarmuth's, Chandler's Flanks by Promoting Hit Pieces

The Daily Kos, godfather of the Nut Roots and Demo-blogs, has launched a project to protect 98 of the most vulnerable Democratic members of the House. John Yarmuth and Ben Chandler both make the cut.

Kos is urging its readers to engage in a "grassroots-based search engine organization campaign," SEO for short. The upshot is that Democratic activists would search for (or create) unfavorable stories about Todd Lally and Andy Barr, opponents of Yarmuth and Chandler, respectively. Likewise for opponents of other vulnerable Democrats. Readers should then forward those stories to Kos, which would promote them to increase the Google ratings of the hit pieces.

According to Kos, "The goal of Grassroots SEO is to get as many undecided voters as possible to read the most damaging news article about the Republican candidate for Congress in their district."

In one respect, Kos's SEO project gets it backwards with respect to Kentucky; they rely on five political lists that rank Chandler as more vulnerable than Yarmuth. Chandler pretends to be a moderate now and then, whereas Yarmuth makes no attempt to hide the fact that he is to the left of Obama. Given that Kentucky is a center-right state, therefore, Yarmuth would seem to be in a more precarious position than Chandler for reelection.