On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, snit snat wrote:
> I wondered if Michael Pollak has been following stories about the
> Replicants' strategy. They don't care about indies and marginal votes
> b/c they want to get those 4 million Evangelicals Rove thought they
> should have gotten in 2000.
Of course. I posted one. It doesn't add up 8 ways to Sunday.
1. At the most basic level, as reported by the WSJ, Rove, like 99% of all pollsters seems to believe two mutually contradictory propositions about non-voters:
A) They vote just like voters; and B) They vote according to their demographics
which can't both be true, because non-voters have a distinctly different demographic profile than voters. So one of these propositions has to be wrong. Which one? Is sure would be nice to know before you bet the bank on them.
2. On top of that Rove is asking us to believe something that's makes no sense. He's saying that conservative protestants, the most mobilized part of their coalition that has always been their focus is *relatively* the most underrepresented part of their coalition. That smacks of terminal self-delusion. They should be over-represented -- they should be voting in greater numbers than their proportion of the population.
3. The efforts described in most of these articles in such glowing terms are voter *registration* efforts. (And sometimes just handing out the cards, as in churches.) In the world of GOTV, that gets you squat. Real get out the vote efforts come down to day of the vote phone banks, but above all to knock and drag -- knocking on people's doors and dragging them to the polls. The Republicans have always been at a disadvantage on that playing field because the champions are unions. And this year, with ACT-UP and MoveOn getting so much funding, that goes 10 fold. There is absolutely no reason to think the Repugs are going to get more of their guys out than the Dems do. Even their description of where their prospective voters are located militates against it: low density edge cities are the most expensive, more labor intensive place to harvest large numbers of voters.
4. This brings us to the inherent problem with a heat up the base strategy: all the things that fire up your base also fire up the other base. Getting extra voters from your base to the polls only helps you if the other side dosn't do the same. But that's just about impossible to do if you're the one firing up the other side.
So, bottom line:
1) Standard models indicate that a big turnout would help the Dems
2) When it comes to getting extra people from the base that didn't come
last time, the Dems seem to be way ahead in the field
3) If all demographic sectors voted the same way they did last time, Bush
would be 3 million votes short. So Rove's strategy could only win if
he got all his missing 4 million and the Democrats did nothing to
increase their turnout. Which is beyond implausable. Even leaving out
that they are presently behind 2000 in several demographic groups (like
conservative muslims) and, afaict, ahead in none.
I can't find one proposition in this strategy that makes sense. Maybe there's something else going on that hasn't been reported yet, like vast churches that have suddenly attained knock and drag savvy that they never had before. Or maybe something everyone believes is wrong. But as it's been reported so far, it doesn't add up at all.
Michael