Actually, I find these Bush Vs. X/Y/Z polls extremely interesting. Well, that aint saying much cause I find
all poll results extremely interesting - even if its about whether the Dutch are going to win their next soccer game. But still - these specific ones have shown a curious turn of developments lately - I commented a bit on that already.
You see, the consensus seemed for a long time that Dean was somehow unelectable, because he's a liberal, far-left, north-eastern, elite, out of touch, etc. Much has been made out of that by both his moderate primary competitors and by the Republicans.
And polls for a long time showed them right. Even while Dean was edging towards the top of the pack, he did disastrously, in comparison to Kerry, Lieberman and later Clark, too, when pitted against Bush in the polls. In July, a Fox poll showed Dean trailing Bush by 28%, while Kerry trailed by 19%. Even in mid-September, the Newsweek polls had Dean trailing by 14-16%, while Clark polled only 4% less than Bush.
Timber, Scrat, georgeob1 e.a. are still making much of this: Dean as McGovern II, so laughably leftfield in relation to American society that conservatives should feel gleeful at his every succes. E.g.:
timberlandko wrote:Yup, Dean is lining up for his position among other Democrat Greats ... McGovern, Hart, Dukakis, Gore ... I support his Candicacy Campaign wholeheartedly.
georgeob1 wrote:I wish Dean every success in the Democrat primaries. I believe of the serious contingent among the ten dwarves he will be the easiest for Bush to beat.
But recent polls seem to have totally turned around on that. There is no longer an unelectability gap among the Democratic candidates. Not just is the margin with Bush getting smaller - it is also getting increasingly the same for each candidate.
In the latest Newsweek poll, Dean trails Bush by 4% - just like both Lieberman and Kerry. Gephardt trails by 5%, Clark by 3%. Apparently The Mainstream Electorate no longer sees Dean as a scary leftwinger - centrists and independents are as open to his message as to Wesley's or Joe's. It was the same two weeks ago, too.
Now Dean, of all Democratic candidates, shouldnt be an unknown person anymore to Americans who intend to vote. They've
seen the latte-drinking DINKies and young punk kids gather for the Sleepless in Seattle tour. They've heard the commentators do their Dean-the-liberal thing - but somehow, it doesnt seem to deter them anymore.
Now I dont know whether Dean can win. The new union support might help him in the midwest, but I really dont see him winning many of those white Southern poor. But then the cultural vs economic affinity line cuts both ways. Dean might lose low-income Democrats in the South, but win over middle-class Independents in the suburbs. Bush is again polling particularly badly among women (like in 2000), who traditionally respond less to the macho rhetorics of victory and war that Bush will have to rely upon to sell the continuously violent endeavour in Iraq with. I dont know whether it'll be enough, but it seems by now that Dean at least stands as good a chance as any Democrat.
Thats a bit of a relief. I cant take part in any case, but until now I was kinda torn as an observer - I kinda liked Dean, but was afraid he couldnt win - but the alternatives (Kerry, who seems to run on his autobiography, and Clark, who seems vain and shifty) didnt instill much trust. But if the unelectable issue is out of the way, the choice is much simpler.
Consider this. Until now Dean has focused on rallying the troops, mobilising "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" with angry rhetorics. He can only move to the center from here,
yet already he is polling as good as any candidate, and only 4% behind Bush. The inevitable move to the center that will ensue can only narrow that margin. And with the radical / moderate thing out of the way, other things start to count.
First, Bush is a bit of a radical himself - or leads a radical team, in any case - but he's got unprecedently deep pockets. To have even a fighting chance, you need a Dem who can come even close in matching his funding drive. The only candidate who's been able to do that so far: Dean.
Second, I dont know if you noticed, but I read alarming news in the TNR about the spectacularly increased campaign efficiency of the Republicans, since 2000. Lemme summarize what I read. For example,
HOW THE GOP LEARNED VOTER TURNOUT:
Quote:Greg and the rest of this flushing team are the bottom rungs of a grand Republican plan--an operation the party has spent two years building--to match Democrats on Election Day in turning out their most loyal voters. After decisively losing the turnout battle in 2000, the GOP has spent the last election cycle studying what went wrong and how to fix it. In state after state in 2000, media polls had shown George W. Bush with a much larger share of the electorate than he actually received. In New Hampshire, polls suggested a 10-point lead, yet Bush won by only a single point. In Washington, he was up by 1 point but lost by 5 points, and, in Delaware, he was leading by 4 points on election eve but lost by a whopping 13. On the left, union members and African Americans overperformed, turning out in higher percentages than their share of the population; on the right, social conservatives underperformed.
So Karl Rove and the White House political shop ordered the party to revitalize its grassroots operations. Their solution: the "72-hour task force," a program the party used in more than 30 states this year to boost turnout in the final days. [..] This time, it was Republicans across the country who exceeded expectations and outperformed at the polls. In race after race, the Republican margin of victory was larger than what the final polls predicted. In Colorado, the last public poll showed Wayne Allard at 44 percent, yet he won with 51 percent of the vote. In Georgia, where Republicans had one of their best GOTV operations, Saxby Chambliss was at 44 percent in the last two polls but received 53 percent. There were similar surges in the Senate races in North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Texas.
The woman who oversaw this effort is Blaise Hazelwood, the relatively unknown political director of the RNC. She has become the party's evangelist for returning to grassroots organizing, which emphasizes person-to-person contact rather than lavish spending on increasingly ineffective TV ads. Talking in a conference room at Republican headquarters in Washington, she spoke about the effort in revolutionary terms, saying that Rove asked her to do nothing less than "change the culture of the party."
The figures are impressive - the new strategies of grassroots mobilisation seem to be making just the difference one needs in order to win. The DNC, in comparison, seems clueless (from
&c):
Quote:[..] as bad as McAuliffe's efforts to bring discipline to the nominating season have been, his electoral record is even worse. Between the disastrous midterm elections and yesterday's dismal off-year elections, the DNC chairman has had few Election Day successes. And on McAuliffe's watch, it appears, the Democrats' once fearsome turnout operation has withered on the vine.
In the two election cycles before Bill Clinton's victory over George H.W. Bush in 1992, then-DNC Chairman Ron Brown was busy building an impressive turnout machine known as the "coordinated campaign." Brown's innovations helped Democrats notch a string of victories in 1989, 1990, and 1991, which presaged Clinton's eventual win in '92. But these days all the innovation is on the GOP side. Republicans [..] transform[ed] their party into a powerful voter mobilization tool on the back of strategies like their 72-Hour Task force. [..] "This is not an optional program. It is the direction that the party is going, and has been unanimously agreed to by party leaders at every level [..] we are conducting training seminars all over the country."
If there's a similarly aggressive program on the Democratic side, McAuliffe has kept it a secret.
So, is Clark or Kerry going to succeed against the ever motivated christian/conservative troops on the ground, now so much better organised than in 2000, if you look at the McAuliffe record on central campaign coordination? If not, who
can compete in terms of grassroots effort, using his own resources on the ground? Only Dean. Dean and Trippi. Read the fascinating article:
JOE TRIPPI REINVENTS CAMPAIGNING :
Quote:[E]ven though campaigns are organizing supporters more efficiently than ever before, they're still using the same basic techniques they've been using for 35--and in many cases 150--years. Donna Brazile [..] recalls that her single most important concern at this point in 1999 was the campaign's Iowa hard count--i.e., the number of people who have committed to supporting your candidate in the upcoming election. "It's a standard recipe," Brazile explains: [..] The people who say they're definitely supporting your candidate are assigned a "one." The people who say they're leaning your way get a "two." And the people who say they're for the other guy get a "three." Your job is to convert all your twos to ones and to keep your ones from sliding. The number of ones you have at any given time is your hard count. Let it fall too low, and you can kiss the election goodbye. [..]
It's helpful to think about these developments in terms of what you might call "cost per body"--that is, the total amount you end up spending to bring a single supporter to the polls. If resources were unlimited, no one would care about the cost per body. [..] But resources are limited. Which means that, among candidates with similarly appealing platforms and equal amounts of money, the one with the lowest cost per body wins. [..]
Meetup figured perfectly into Trippi's grand campaign strategy. He reasoned that Dean's antiwar, anti-Bush message would resonate at the grassroots, meaning Dean could raise impressive amounts of money from a large base of small donors. [..] The hope was that each person who attended a Dean Meetup or who wrote regularly on the Dean blog would turn around and involve several more people--siblings, parents, friends, business associates--all of whom could be put to work for the campaign. [..]
[A]t th[at] time the campaign has a measly 8,000 people signed up on its website. To say, as Trippi does, that Dean is going to have 150,000 people signed up by June and 450,000 by September, and that it's going to lap the field in fund-raising--well, the average Democratic suit just has no idea what to do with that. [..] Come early July, the suits [..] want another look at [Trippi's] PowerPoint presentation. [..] "They were just going like, 'Oh ****.'" Suddenly, it's dawning on the suits that, if you can go from $2.6 to $7.6 million in ten days, and if you can go from 22,000 to 159,000 people in three months, then those 450,000 people Trippi promised by the end of September just might materialize. And, if those 450,000 people Trippi promised materialized, who knew how much money they might bring with them?
But, in truth, the suits are only grasping the tip of the iceberg. Because the money is incidental--a by-product, really. Far more important is that Trippi is racking up a hard count most campaign operatives could only dream of--and without having to make a single phone call, knock on a single door, or send a single piece of direct mail. [..] Like all those fanatical Wave Systems investors, the Dean supporters are doing the hard work of organizing for him, which means the cost per body is falling like mad. Come to think of it, the campaign is even making money in the process. [..]
Trippi waves me around to his side of the table and directs me to a portion of the Dean website called "Deanlink," which tracks the number of additional supporters each current Dean-backer is bringing in. "Here's Jonathan Kreiss Tompkins," Trippi says, pointing to a picture on the screen of his laptop. Jonathan Kreiss Tompkins lives in Alaska and, it turns out, has single- handedly signed up 463 other Dean supporters--their names go on for screen after screen down the left side of Jonathan's Deanlink page. "What I'm trying to say is ... all these people have linked themselves to this guy--and it keeps going, dude." Trippi pauses and looks up. "Now here's the really cool thing: Jonathan Kreiss Tompkins is fourteen years old." [..]
[W]hen you're raising money from people in small increments, and when those same people think they're being listened to, then those people start to feel like they own the campaign. And, once they start to feel they own the campaign, it's almost impossible to pry them away. In the language of political organizing, you never have to worry about your ones backsliding into twos.
Trippi gets a perfect test of this proposition in late June [..]. Dean goes on NBC's "Meet the Press" and, according to just about every pundit in Washington, falls flat on his face. But the average Dean supporter doesn't quite see it that way. [H]e's annoyed at how dismissive the media is when it comes to a campaign that, after all, he partly owns. Pretty soon, he's writing e-mails and ponying up more cash, trying to send a message to the people who would tread on his investment. [..]
Dean is widely expected to receive the endorsement of the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union this week. Between Dean's Internet operation and the manpower of big labor and various women's and civil rights groups, a nominee Dean might even surpass the turnout operation that put Gore over the top in several states--Delaware, Washington, Wisconsin, Michigan- -where he was running even with Bush or trailing in the final days of the 2000 campaign. [..]
If Dean becomes the Democratic nominee, his Internet fund-raising ability will once again be a crucial factor in his chances of success. "This is like in January, and we're sitting there, and we finally realize it's going to take two million Americans each giving us one hundred dollars online" to raise as much money as Bush, Trippi says. "There's only one medium ... that can change things enough that, if two million people tomorrow morning just woke up and thought, here's your one hundred dollars, it could happen in a day."
I was very careful not to say that because you have shown an unbelievable tendency to delienate between inference and a direct statement on one hand and fail to do so on the other.
