On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 kjkhoo at softhome.net wrote:
> It was the Protestants and the Catholics, making up some 80%.
And more importantly it was the turnout, specifically the turnout of a subsection of those Protestants, the 40% who are evangelical or born again.
Rove turned out to be entirely correct, and everyone else in the world wrong. It's hard to exaggerate just how shocking this is. He said the Republicans could turn more people out of their base than the Democrats could, even though that had never happened before in history when the Democrats were serious. And even though the Republican had seemingly already tapped deeper and promised more and gotten more out of the conservative evangelical vote in 2000 than anyone had before. And even though the Democrats were more successful in their own GOTV operations this year than they've ever been before in history -- and by a lot -- Rove surged hugely out of nowhere and matched them. He proved his theory about the "missing 3 million" evangelicals in 2000 wasn't delusional. It was right on the money.
He basically proved what he's said since 1988: that if you divided up the nation by religion, you could win it with just the evangelicals, even if you lost every other religious grouping, so long as you didn't lost the others by too much, just through turnout. It didn't make sense on the face of it. But it looks like it's true.
And he added a cherry on top by getting a majority of the Catholic vote, which Bush Senior lost in 1988.
That btw was the election that led to this theory. In 1988, according to Rove, Bush lost every religious grouping except evangelicals. He only narrowly lost Catholics, but it was the first time a Republican had lost them and won the election.
And the man behind George senior's winning of the evangelical vote was George Jr. That was the campaign that made him. He was essential to the win, and this was his proven virtue. He proved he could pull those people even when he was saddled with his Dad, which conservative evangelicals didn't trust father anymore than they trusted John Kerry. Bush Jr., used exactly the same theory in Texas -- but then, there are proportionately more of these people in Texas. Here
(And just to twist the knife, Rove won this Catholic vote against a Catholic candidate, an event that only happens once every 40 years. Partially because the four bishops who spoke out against him got miles of press, and the 160 who didn't -- and the Vatican -- got none.)
Essentially, Rove seems to have shown that the entire previously existing logic of American party politics no longer holds (or at the very least can be and has been temporarily suspended): the idea that heating up your base loses you more votes in the center than you gain on the wing. His argument was that you can use your base issues to split the electorate and then win purely on turnout -- and that it was the Republicans who would have the advantage in such a contest. By all reports I'm seeing now, even he was shocked to find out he was really right. Even he had decided on the eve of election that the Republicans were going to lose because of the turnout issue. His theory turned out to be truer than even he imagined.
Michael