>http://www.thenewrepublic.com/112000/lizza112000.html
>The New Republic
>NEWARK DISPATCH
>Knock and Drag
>How to get out the black vote
Yep, not always pretty but for a few decades progressives like Frances Fox Piven and Jesse Jackson have argued that Democrats spent too much time and money on media campaigns appealing to swing voters and not enough on ground operations to increase turnout among the party's base supporters who were not voting.
As the article notes in New Jersey, gubernatorial candidate Florio ran a standard media campaign in 1993 and lost badly to Whitman. Four years later, a little known Democrat shockingly came within a few thousand votes in 1997 of unseating Whitman, largely because of a massive turnout operation targetting black voters.
Like the union turnout lesson from California in 1998, these lessons convinced Dem party leaders that mobilizing the base was as key to victory as appealing to swing voters.
The bottom line is that the larger the percentage of the Dem vote made up of african americans, union households, latinos and other base voters, the more the Dems have to pay attention to those voters for fear of their "defection", not defection to a third party but to not voting at all.
When people look back at this election, Nader's campaign will be interesting, but most analysts I suspect will see the massive rise in black and union turnout as far more significant in effecting the Democratic Party and politics in general for the future.
-- Nathan Newman