We can expect Randy Kuhl and whoever the Republican nominees are in NY-25 and NY-26 to pull out every trick in the books this fall. One trick we’ve been hearing a lot about in special elections is the idea of making Obama into a bogeyman that will scare voters who might otherwise vote Democrat into supporting the Republican candidate. There’s a piece today in the Times about the dangers of such a strategy for Republicans: attacks on Obama drove African-American turn-out through the roof in the special election in MS-1:

With the strong support of black voters, a conservative white Democrat, Travis W. Childers, scored an upset victory in that race, in a district held by Republicans since 1995. Kelvin Buck, a black state representative who helped the Childers campaign, said he saw a “level of enthusiasm and energy” that he had not seen before from black voters — significantly motivated, he said, by a recent Republican anti-Obama campaign.

The numbers appear to bear that out. In one black precinct in the town of Amory, Miss., the number of voters nearly doubled, to 413, from the Congressional election in 2006, and this for a special election with nothing else on the ballot. Meanwhile, in a nearby white precinct, the number of voters dropped by nearly half.

[...]

Between an initial vote on April 22, when Mr. Childers fell just shy of getting the 50 percent he needed to win, and Tuesday’s runoff election, when he won with a decisive 54 percent, the Republican campaign to link Mr. Childers with Mr. Obama intensified, with a barrage of advertisements specifically on that theme. Perhaps not coincidentally, vote totals in counties with large black populations went up sharply between those two dates. In Marshall County, which is 48.8 percent black, the votes nearly doubled, to 5,083. In Clay County, 56.8 black, nearly 1,500 more people voted, pushing the total to 3,898.

The attacks on Mr. Obama clearly had a galvanizing effect, local officials said. “The people I talked to said, ‘Man, I don’t like that they’re trying to use Obama against him,’ ” said Eric Powell, a black state senator who helped in voter turnout efforts. “It actually helped Travis.”

Now, the proportion of African-American voters isn’t nearly as high in local districts (aside from NY-28) as it is in MS-1. But neither is race as big an issue with white voters. All in all, it seems very unlikely that tying Massa, Maffei, and Powers to Obama will help Republicans at all. It will be interesting to see if Kuhl et al. attempt this ploy.