2004 Presidential Election
The Real Reasons Bush Won The Election
And
Why the Democrats Will Continue to Lose
to the Elect Hobie
Webpage
W
should have been the perfect candidate for the Democrats:
inarticulate,
isolated, and with a radical right, extreme pro-business record on the economy, environment,
foreign relations, and of course Iraq.... Simply put, if the
Democrats
can't win against W, they can’t win against any Republican... unless
they change their tactics and strategies....
The Bottom Line
is Bush didn't win in 2004, but rather
Kerry lost... and not
because he was a bad candidate... after all he beat Bush in all of the debates... but rather
Kerry lost because while the
Republicans focused on issues,
the Democratic gurus focused all their efforts on their party...
As Grover
Norquist noted, the Republicans focused on three issues: guns, faith and taxes, and while the percent
of voters who agreed with
the Republicans on all three issues was very small, 60% of the voters agreed with at
least
one of the issues... and as a result the Bush and Rove actively pursued voters who were pro-life even if they
were
also anti-gun, while the Democrats focused on their party faithful who believe
someone who was pro-environment but also pro-school vouchers wasn't just
misguided or even stupid, but was indeed a "bad person"... Of
course it helps that
the Republican issues were so emotional that they could trump facts... indeed it seems
the Republicans have been waving the family values and gun rights issues in these voters faces while they
picked their pockets with tax cuts
that greatly favor inherited wealth and the most wealthy... And finally
Kerry's political experts, like so many
others before them, severely underestimated George W. Bush, and were in fact
so arrogant they believed they
could beat W without any support from "recovering Republicans."
And thus while Bush repeatedly reached out to Democrats and
Independents, Kerry and the Democrats never did. Late in the campaign they finally added a "Republicans for
Kerry" page
on their website, but even that small effort seemed to embarrass them and it was pretty hidden away...
and
rather than support and highlight a pro-Kerry Republican at their convention as the Republicans did with Zell Miller,
several prominent Republicans were even forced to
pay for their own pro-Kerry ads...
The
key fact was the
Democratic gurus not only failed to realize how weak W’s support was
among moderate Republicans, and how easily and effectively this weakness could be
exploited... but also how much a difference it could make since:
(1) every
Republican who didn't vote was worth one new Democrat who did, and
every Republican who voted for
Kerry was worth 2
new Democratic votes, and
(2)
in the privacy of
the
voting booth it was
easier to get these disillusioned Republicans to just "forget" to pull the lever for W... or even to get to pull the lever
for
Kerry... than it was to get many of the newly registered Democratic voters out to vote...
One example: on election day a
disillusioned Republican volunteered at a Central Ohio Move-On office (completely
manned by out
of town political experts) and
was given a list of 100 names of newly registered Democrats to call and
a
script to to get them out to vote...after 30 calls
to mostly wrong and
disconnected numbers, this caller got one live person, and when they
asked to speak to "Mr. Smith" they
were told that he couldn't come to the phone because he was in
jail! By contrast, the voting results clearly
show that the disillusioned
Republicans made a huge difference especially in the better educated and wealthier suburbs.
And the Democrats are still
clueless: for example, Republicans who contributed to Kerry
continue to receive tons of mail from the Democratic party assuming they are now Democrats,
while most still hope the Republican party can be saved... and if not that a third
centrist, common sense party will emerge...
Page
prepared 10/12/05, revised 03/03/06; Original material only copyright
2005; other material
copyright by holders;
see
the Elect
Hobie Homepage; Distribution encouraged with attribution.