Kerry Haters and Who killed the swing voter
by Kombiz Lavasany, Mon Mar 14, 2005 at 08:14:07 AM EST
Frank Luntz's Playbook :Introduction: Learning from 2004... Winning in 2006
So how does a President with a national job approval rating hovering at 50%, an economy that lost more than a million jobs over his four years in office, a war that has cost more than a thousand American lives and counting, $50 a barrel for oil, and a national mood that is downright sour still secure more than enough votes to win re-election?
When the newspaper comes in the morning everyone has a section of the paper
they instinctively turn to first. Over the last year and a half every time I
looked at a poll I instinctively looked towards the approve/disapprove numbers
to get a glimpse of what was going on with the presidential race and the general
mood of the electorate. In July I received a call from a close friend who can
best be referred to as a doomsday Democrat who for the first time in our long
friendship exclaimed he thought Bush was toast, but he was still certain that
Kerry would "blow it". During the time I was working in a red area in a deep
red state, but state polling I saw showed Bush with a high disapproval, and
dismal re-elects. In places like South Carolina, North Carolina, Indiana, Arkansas,
etc, Bush was under that magical 50 points incumbents are supposed to be above
to cruise to re-election.
During the late summer and early fall I kept being dumbfounded when I read polls
that showed Kerry's negatives were higher than Bush's, that the net difference
between positive and negative views of Kerry was lower than that of Bush. It
was contradictory from the real situation coming out Iraq, the economy, and
how people viewed the direction of the country. Before my eyes purple areas
in deep red states started to show their original colors. (I promise that this
isn't a David Brooks rendition)
I was deeply bothered by the polarization, and since I saw the attacks (their
veracity and tone and in some cases the anti-McCain like focus on appealing
to hate) as nothing more than a last gasp by a desperate incumbent to shore
up his base. I assumed to a point that what I was seeing, both below the surface
and on the airwaves, would be picked up by the larger media even if it were
not responded to in kind. Besides some early articles about the Bush campaign
setting out to define Kerry, and how much more negative the Republicans were
this narrative quickly died down.
This post has gone through a series of incarnations from my first attempt to
put it together, from righteous indignation to just a series of graphs and numbers.
It's not a case or a tirade against negative television, radio or newspaper
ads, those are components of a campaign and while they may be viewed generally
as things people don't like to see they are an effective tool for electioneering.
It's more an attempt to lay a foundation that I can return to in helping to
explain what's happening or what happened and maybe just creating the cultural
distinction that applies to the ways Republicans, Rove and others down the line,
ran and run their campaigns. A web of actions that attempt to re-split the electorate
while creating a series of myths that they can quickly cling to when they have
no other hope of survival. To be honest I don't think the swing voter is dead,
below the presidential race the electorate starts to act in a completely different
manner splitting tickets for Democratic Senators, Congressmen, State Legislatures,
etc. It's that when we talk about the Right Wing Noise Machine (RWNM) here it's
usually in regards to a policy that the Right is currently pushing, when I think
that the real effectiveness of the RWNM is in raising the negatives of anything
that threatens them. I see the USANext anti-AARP ads as an act of desperation
by Republicans who see that their base regards the AARP highly, and is indifferent
or opposed to privatization. Marking the AARP as an extreme left organization
that supports gay marriage and gun control is aimed directly at the Republican
base rather than any moderate group in America. Without the campaign, which
seems to be quickly falling apart, they have no effect on the electorate in
'06 when they try to protect their incumbents.
Frank Luntz, above, nails part of the narrative for the last election though
what he purposefully gets wrong is that in order to make those numbers and issues
irrelevant, Republicans in conjunction with the RWNM throughout the country
geared up their campaigns to raise Kerry's negatives as high as possible to
regain the political map from 2000. In large part because most of the country
looks exactly the same way 4 years later they succeeded.
So if I could suggest a component to the elevator pitch, or a general meme about
how Republicans operate it would come out of the charts below. Something akin
to Republicans will divide the electorate in an attempt to raise the negatives
of their Democratic opponents or say and do anything to gain and hold power.
Someone else can word the phrase better, but I think that covers one portion
of the Republican pitch. So getting to those charts.First
this is the general mood of the electorate going into and after Election Day.
The wrong track numbers hovered around 60% for most of they year, while the
right track number hovers around 40%. It's pulled from 95 polls from various
polling organizations throughout the country. The numbers are dismal for any
sitting incumbent, but especially for a sitting president who is running for
re-election.
For a view of Kerry's and Bush's positives and negatives I pulled together 190
polls from the last year, most of them falling after that magic period where
Kerry spoke at the DNC. I extracted the favorable unfavorable ratings from the
polls. For the favorable/unfavorable numbers, different polling organizations
ask the question in different ways, and some provide different responses besides
favorable, unfavorable and no opinion. Kerry's Favorable / UnfavorableBush's Favorable / UnfavorableThe key to viewing these numbers is to pull the difference between each candidates
positives and negatives from each poll. I think Chris was right in his writing
about the incumbent rule before the election, though one of the benefits for
Republicans of raising Kerry's negatives is that as the final graph shows they
were able to mitigate the swing effect of the electorate. By election day the difference between those who had a postive view of Kerry subtracted by those who have a negative view of Kerry is miniscule compared to Bush though they were both around 50% in favorables. Here's that graph:I've been agnostic to the effect that the swift boat vet's had on Bush, but
either way you slice it with the outcome of the election being as close as it
was, they certainly would have had some effect by at least giving Bush breathing
room after the Democratic Convention and by helping Bush absurdly make the issue
Kerry rather than his own performance in office. At best they laid the groundwork
for the ensuing sludge that poured out of the RNC during and after the convention.
It's an indictment of the up is down world of George W. Bush that at the end
of the day they were able to raise Kerry's negatives so high that they could
escape any accountability. If one can escape for a second from the hyper politicized
world we blog readers and writers live in and step out and look at the re-election
of a president who's own performance in office is distrusted by almost 60% of
the electorate but whom through a series of a series of underhanded and sleazy
attacks is able to re-split the country to narrowly re-elect him we'd at best
be shocked. The gall of a campaign that perfected racist literature drops and
push polling to send an email out right before the election warning of dastardly
Democratic phone banking, with the ominous subject, "Turn
on your answering machine," while sending out a lit piece with Kerry's
face next the burning towers
on 9/11 would be amusing if it wasn't so sick. (via The
Carpetbagger and the indispensable Raw
Story.) In conclusion, I don't mean for this to be an indictment against
Kerry in any means. The skeleton of the campaign to raise the negatives of the
Democratic nominee was set out well beforehand and if one was paying attention
during the primaries you could see some of the signs that part of the same narrative
would be used against Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, Clark and even Lieberman. I think this is somethng that we need to incorporate into the way we talk about
Republicans. I will be coming back to the theme in the future, and the blowback
from the USA Next ads shows that maybe a little sunshine is all that's needed
to send the cockroaches scurrying.
Tags: Republicans (all tags)
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