Who Can Really Say?

Kerry Lost Because of Michael Moore

I haven't been writing much here post-election. Some of it is blogging exhaustion (and I know I hardly have much excuse for that), and part of it was due to a college reunion of sorts with the "gang", Glenn, Ed, and Steve -- missing were Jon, Bob, and Dan this year.

I could have been posting about why Bush won but I'll summarize it this way -- he got more electoral votes. I'm keen on functional analysis if nothing else.

I could have been posting on why he got more electoral votes too, or for that matter, more popular votes, and was going to do that tonight but the wheels fell off that when my brother called and we caught up on a few months of this and that. I would have said, though, that the reason Bush got the votes is because Kerry wasn't a credible foreign policy opponent. Sure, Bush creamed Kerry on the "moral values" question in the exit polls. But Kerry creamed Bush back on the combined exit poll issues of taxes, education, economy/jobs and health, and by a far wider margin than Bush beat Kerry on moral values. Based upon numbers I took off CNN and exit poll percentage breakouts I found on Poliblog, Kerry beat Bush 31.4 million to 10.8 million on those issues. Bush beat Kerry 20.3 million to 4.5 million on moral values. (Assuming we know what that means, which isn't as easy as it sounds). Kerry's got an almost 5 million vote lead looking only at these issues.

Bush made up the difference and moreso with foreign policy. If you combine the percentage of exit poll results with the split between the candidates on these issues, Bush won 23.6 million votes for Iraq/Terrorism while Kerry only pulled 15.7 million. Special caveat -- the exit polls only divulge the most important reason for a vote among 93% of the total vote. So I suppose there's wiggle room.

But the reason why I think Kerry lost on foreign policy is that of all these issues, it's the one where folks were most likely to have their minds changed by the campaign. I think it's where the middle of the electorate, those 10+ pct. who might vote one way or the other, decided how to vote. Iraq and terrorism were the gorilla in the corner of the room in this election and that's why Kerry structured his convention around it. Sure, Bush maximized his moral values vote and Kerry maximized his "anyone but Bush" vote which crossed all of these issues. But to maximize my metaphors, the war was the whole Magilla. And John Kerry was the wrong candidate for the wrong party at the wrong time to win on this issue.

There are many reasons why Kerry can be faulted as a candidate but the biggest reason, I think, is that he was the Democrat, period. Both parties have extremist bases and each party struggles to motivate the base without aggravating the middle. If you aggravate the middle too much it will vote for the other side. And if you lean too far to the middle the base, it is said, will not vote.

The Democratic base was agitated, it wanted to vote, and it showed itself in the primaries when the strongest war candidates were quickly marginalized (Lieberman and Gephart). For the Democrats, this election was never about what their base would do -- it was about how they'd play to the middle. And they played poorly.

If this is true, though, the question remains why didn't Bush aggravate the middle by how he handled his base, which also turned out in droves. Or to put it another way, why did the middle like Bush more than Kerry? Keep in mind here, the middle is 50% of the difference in votes between the candidates plus 1, which works out to something like 1.76 million voters. The only answer I can come up with is that the Democrats lost because their extremists were worse than the Republicans extremists, and Kerry played right into that hand as he had to, thus losing the middle.

Which begs the question -- was the war the gorilla, or Michael Moore and his ilk?

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.] Posted by Peter at November 9, 2004 09:39 PM