(This post is considerably longer than usual. Sorry; I had a lot to say.)
On Air Force One this morning, Bush compared himself to bicyclist Lance Armstrong and insisted both would come through in the end.
“He’s going to win and I’m going to win,” Bush said en route to Florida and West Virginia — two critical states in his re-election campaign. “There’s no need to worry about either race any more,” Bush said with a wave of his hands and a grin.
While I don’t know anything about the Tour de France, I saw two key pieces of news yesterday lead me to believe Bush very much has to worry about his own race. In fact, I think Bush has adopted a tack that will ruin his chances for victory.
Four years ago, I found Bush’s electoral strategy highly dubious. In the campaign’s closing days, when the polls showed the race very close, Karl Rove and other Bush aides thought it’d be a good idea to have the candidate spend most of his time in California, where Bush was convinced he’d win, instead of campaigning in competitive states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The approach should have cost Bush the election.
This year, Rove, Mehlman, and others have yet another new and untested strategy that Bush appears to be betting on — ignore independent voters and appeal exclusively to conservatives.
It started in earnest in January with the State of the Union, in which Bush was intent on giving the far-right a lot to be happy about: federally funded abstinence programs, drug testing in public schools, tort reform, criticism of “activist judges,” aid for “faith-based” groups, and of course, a strangely-worded endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The New York Times noted that the White House was so excited about all the right-wing red meat in the speech that Karl Rove “telephoned social conservative groups on Tuesday to make sure they would be watching the speech.”
This was obviously part of a broader, year-long plan. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and Mike Allen explained in an excellent article yesterday, the Bush gang is deliberately ignoring swing voters and fortifying the GOP’s conservative base.
For a variety of reasons, I think Bush will lose if this is his plan for the next four months.
Therein lies an important key to understanding Bush’s reelection strategy. Although age-old campaign rules dictate that the general-election candidate must emphasize moderate “swing” voters and political independents, Bush strategists are predicting that this election, more than previous ones, will be determined by the turnout of each side’s partisans. Although not discounting swing voters, Bush is placing unusual emphasis so far on rallying the faithful.
[…]
Some Bush allies say it is more efficient to boost turnout among partisans than to sway the fence-sitters, who the campaign believes may be 10 percent of the electorate or less. “How much time and energy do you give to picking up the 10 percent, who are disengaged from politics, and how do you communicate with them even if you want to?” asked Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “You can go to the 45 percent [who already support Bush] and ask them to bring a brother or a sister or a friend to the polls.”
I’m fairly certain Norquist wasn’t kidding. It’s hard to say how happy I am Bush is embracing such ridiculously bad advice.
One of the amusing elements of this strategy is the fact that it’s necessary at all. Bush has been the most conservative president in generations and yet he is still working to shore up his far-right base. As The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber explained yesterday, it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Rove’s grand plan was to spend the first three years of Bush’s term stroking conservatives’ erogenous zones — lots of tax cuts, conservative judges, regulatory rollbacks, and religiously hued social policy (the administration’s marriage initiative, its efforts to restrict access to abortion, its retrograde stem cell research policies, etc.). The idea behind this stuff was that it would give Bush the political capital to tack leftward during his re-election campaign. But a funny thing happened on the way to the center: Rove discovered that conservatives don’t just want to win on some issues, they want to win on every issue.
The right is finicky that way. Now, after four years of governing almost exclusively to the right, Bush is still working to convince conservatives to get excited about his campaign. Those votes were supposed to be in the bag by now. They’re not.
The other amusing thing about Bush’s strategy is how much it resembles the approach of another candidate. His name was Howard Dean.
Dean’s idea was that a candidate could succeed by focusing almost exclusively on the party’s hard-core supporters. He could, as some called it, “grow the pie” and have liberal voters bring new people into the fold. This obviously didn’t work during the primaries and stood an even weaker chance of working in the general election. And yet, Bush seems to believe Dean was on to something.
If you’ll allow me a gross oversimplification, there are three kinds of voters — Dems, Republicans, and independents. Bush seems to believe he can win with just the Republicans, so long as the party can effectively boost turnout in all the key states.
Yesterday, Ruy Teixeira explained the folly of such an idea
Consider this analysis. The article asserts that Republicans have been supporting Bush at about the 90 percent level in this campaign. Averaging the last four Gallup polls, that’s about true. But it’s also true that, averaging the last four Gallup polls, that Democratic support for Kerry has been running near that level and that the margins of support each candidate enjoys among their partisans are pretty close. Therefore, it appears unlikely that Bush will have as much of an advantage as he did in 2000 from a wider margin among Republicans than his opponent had among Democrats.
If that’s true, then Bush is toast unless he erases the Democrats’ traditional turnout advantage in Presidential election years (Democrats generally run 3-4 points higher as a proportion of voters), since that advantage won’t be offset much by the Republicans’ superior margin among their partisans. (That could be part of the reasoning behind their base mobilization strategy.)
Which leads me to our independent friends, the ones the Bush campaign believes it doesn’t need. Republican pollsters at Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates have looked closely at independent, undecided voters in Battleground states and have concluded that they’re largely abandoning Bush. According to the research, these voters disapprove of his job performance, believe the country is on the wrong track, feel like they’re worse off than they were four years ago, and prefer a Democratic model of government. The report notes:
“Clearly, if these undecided voters were leaning any harder against the door of the Kerry camp, they would crash right through it.”
Mysteriously, the Bush campaign seems to consider this news and think, “Good; we don’t need them anyway.” The GOP pollsters seem to agree, advising Bush to give up on the undecided voters because they’ll probably end up with Kerry.
It’s not a surprise, therefore, that independents are doing exactly what the Bush campaign expects them to do. In the latest Newsweek poll, Kerry led Bush among independents by a wide margin — 53% to 34%. Kerry enjoys similar leads among independents in several key states.
And yet, Bush expects to win as the champion of Republican voters — and no one else. Any time this has been tried in presidential politics, it’s failed. Don’t believe me? Take a look at how close the McGovern and Goldwater races were.
The candidate who wins the biggest percentage of the middle wins the election. Bush will capture the GOP vote, while Kerry takes the Dems and the independents Bush intentionally ignored. I like our chances.