On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Michael Perelman wrote:
> I am not sure that I agree with Michael Po. here. Would Kerry be
> delusional if he were to aim at his base rather than to make nice with
> the Repugs. & independents?
Yep. Kerry is doing exactly the right thing: letting outsiders (the 527s) fire up the base while he directs all his pitches to the center and right.
Normally candidates have to direct pleas to both their base and the center. Kerry is in a unique position because his base won't defect under any circumstances. If he's serious about winning, it makes zero sense for him to direct any pleas in their direction. He would alienate center voters to no end at all since the base isn't going anywhere. And that's even more true when he's got surrogates to fire up said base for him. The base turnout will be bigger than ever this year without him saying a thing.
There is an iron law in two party politics that pushes parties toward the center and produces the dictum that, if there is a difference between the two, the most moderate-seeming party wins.
You start from the following assumptions:
1. Your core vote is around 25%. All the rest are people who might stay home -- and those who might vote for the other side -- the center.
2. You need to expand your core until you've got 51%
3. Every play you make for the middle will alienate the wing, and every play you make for the wing will alienate the middle. And yet you need to direct pleas to both directions.
So far, so good: campaigning largely consists of adjusting your selection, wording, and emphasis of planks so as to gain more voters than you alienate.
But when push comes to shove, logic dictates that the centrist voter will always be chosen over the wing voter -- or always should -- for four reasons:
1. She's easier to alienate. By definition, she's got a real choice; a wing voter doesn't. Also by definition, she doesn't really care if the other side wins; a wing voter does.
2. Her vote counts double. A wing voter who stays home costs you one vote; a voter who switches costs you two.
3. There are more of them. (At least according to the models used by all professional political consultants.)
4. There are proportionately more of them in battle ground states, which are the only states that count.
Measured by this traditional framework, Kerry's sitution is beyond ideal. Not only is his base inalienable, it can be fired up beyond any previous measure. Normally there are strict upper limits on how much you can fire up your base because the wing of the party is basically defined as everyone who thinks your party is a sell-out. If you fire them up too much they realize how much they hate you and bolt. This year that limit doesn't seem to apply for either side. (I'm one of those who assume Nader's vote will collapse to under 1% come election day exactly like Buchanan's did in 2000. He was at 5% at this stage too.)
Secondly, in this election, the Democratic base has become an instrument for increasing the vote in the center. It backed centrist candidates in the primary (i.e, Dean over Kucinich) from the beginning, and is now manning phone backs and get out the vote efforts for a candidate with a completely mainstream pitch. That's unprecedented. Previously people who got fired up for RFK or Gene McCarthy dropped tools when their candidate lost.
And lastly but not leastly, internet networking is allowing this electoral cadre to funnel its energy into battleground states.
So Kerry's getting the best of both worlds. There's nothing wrong with his strategy. It's ideal. What's wrong is that he's got no charisma or public speaking skills. He literally makes Gore look charismatic.
But I don't think that's going to matter in the end. Bush's constitutive poll numbers are so bad that IMHO the close horse race is like that part in a roadrunner cartoon where the coyote has gone off the cliff but hasn't looked down yet. For people in the center, switching parties or deciding to vote when they haven't is a bit of a gestalt leap. It builds and then it happens. It'll happen.
If Kerry had charisma it'd happen sooner. But Democratic primary voters didn't pick him for his charisma. They picked him because he was bulletproof to attack. And so far they've been proven entirely right.
At this point my biggest fear is events and electronic voting. And I'm growing less and less afraid of events. I'm not even sure that unveiling Osama at the last minute wouldn't backfire on Bush at this point. I think most undecideds might think it was staged as the ultimate act of cynicism and would be outraged.
Michael