At the end of the day, 62,040,610 Americans cast a vote to reelect George W. Bush President of the United States in November of 2004.
Controversies aside, this was the first time since 1988 that any President had won the electoral college and a majority of the popular vote, and the largest number of votes won by any President ever.
Let's talk about this for one second...
One of the things that I think we've failed in our discussions of the 2004 elections was that nobody much talked about all these people who voted for George W. Bush.
Let's not blame anyone for that situation, let's just admit something basic: 62 million people casting their vote for George Bush is a pretty big deal. It's worth talking about.
I was traveling this week and sitting in the Orlando, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina airports watching thousands of likely Bush voters go about their days made me reflect on these 62 million Americans. Who were they? What were they thinking when they pulled the lever? What are they thinking now? How will the answers to those questions impact the 2008 elections?
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Who were the Bush voters?
For all that we debated the "exit polls" in 2004, maybe we should have paid some attention to what those exit polls actually told us about the 2004 election. Here are two surprising bits of information:
Families with Children
28% of the respondents to the CNN 2004 Presidential exit poll were married with children. Of that 28%...fully 59% voted for George W. Bush and only 40% voted for John Kerry.
That was the 2004 election right there. John Kerry actually won 51% of the rest of the 72% of the nation and still lost the election by over 3 million votes!
There are a great many of the characteristics of Bush voters that leap out at one from the exit polls. Gun ownership, relative wealth, conservative values, religious fundamentalism, but this characteristic strikes me as absolutely key because it's not something one would assume to be true: families with kids voted for GWB by an overwhelming margin. This number is astonishing since we can assume that Kerry's strength with lower income voters, African American and Latino voters and Union households gave him a large base of families with children from the outset, nevertheless John Kerry lost this demographic hands down.
What does that mean?
It means that John Kerry was extraordinarily weak with middle-income, white voters who were parents of families with children. It also means that if you want to form a picture of the prototypical Bush voter, that's the image you need to form in your mind. Both parents in the vast majority of these households pulled the lever for George Bush in 2004.
I don't think the Democratic party has even begun to come to terms with that. The Democratic Party could not close the deal with families with children in 2004 and we paid a heavy, heavy price for that.
Families with children deal with every aspect of our society and the law: they purchase homes, they send their children to schools, they have aging parents, they use our transportation system and they pay taxes and worry about their retirement. If your arguments aren't persuading these folks, your arguments aren't working.
Have we Democrats even begun to talk about this? Do progressives have a persuasive argument for this important demographic? To be honest, I don't think so. We should. There's one other aspect of the exit polls I don't think has received enough attention.
Bush Gains in Cities
If you scroll to the bottom of the CNN poll you'll see something astonishing. Bush improved his performance in big cities by 10% over the 2000 election. Some of you may remember me writing about Moshing the vote; well, in retrospect it's important to realize that a much larger number of big city and urban voters in 2004 pulled the lever for George W. Bush than in 2000. With the exception of Minneapolis and San Francisco, this was true of almost every major city in the United States. Now, big city election boards are monitored and overseen by Democrats; there's no hanky panky here. We "Moshed" the vote alright, but the outcome, while favoring Kerry, was not as overwhelming as we thought it would be. Why was that?
Could it be that the massive non-partisan voter registration drives in our big cities actually unintentionally benefited George W. Bush? Could it be that when we went out and registered hundreds of thousands of new voters, we helped deliver urban voters in key states to George W. Bush? I think so. I asked this question in 2004 and nobody much wanted to touch his hot potato; but I think it's relevant today.
There were massive numbers of new Bush voters in urban areas in the United States in 2004 despite everything that Bush had done in the previous four years. Without those voters, George Bush really might not have won in key states. John Kerry improved on Al Gore's relative performance in rural areas (where Democrats are still quite weak), but lost ground versus 2000 in the suburbs and, in city after city, in urban areas. All it would take is a consistent overestimation of the yield for Democrats among new voters in urban areas for the projections made by the Kerry campaign in states like Ohio and Nevada to go awry.
Ask yourself that question. How many of the newly registered voters in big cities did you mentally count for Kerry in 2004? 80%? 75%? 70%? If the numbers were actually closer to 60% you can see how that might pose an enormous problem for estimations on election day. What if the Kerry campaign made the same optimistic projections about these new voters? (I know that one week before the election someone in the Kerry office in Ohio told us that "Ohio was in the bag"...were optimistic projections about the cities the reason why?)
Bush did better in cities in 2004 by winning new voters that improved his urban performance by 10% nation wide. I don't think that was only Karl Rove's effort or 9/11. We should finally talk about that potential and address that going forward in 2008.
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If you are one of the 62 million Bush voters are you now happy with our President? Opinion polls would seem to indicate otherwise. But, significantly, that might not mean you're unhappy with your vote. (Many people like to remember voting for the winner whether they did or not.)
And that gets at another tough question. People don't like to think they got something wrong. (Just like we can't imagine that urban voters we registered in 2004 voted for George Bush, Bush voters don't like to think they made a mistake in voting for our President.) So how do we bring this up with our nation in 2008? How do we take the debate to the 62 million and hold every last one of our voters from last time around?
I think that's worth debating and discussing and pondering.
Personally, I think that the 2004 election plumbed the limits of outrage and outright partisanship in this nation. If sheer incompetence and stubborn defiance were sufficient to persuade our fellow Americans for Democrats, then we would have won not simply the presidency in 2004 but the Congress as well. But that's simply not the case.
The Democratic Party has won the votes of majorities of both Democrats and independents two elections running and, in 2006, we won back Congress over corruption and discontent with Bush policy on the war and Katrina. That's nothing to sneeze at. We need to understand the importance of that and ask ourselves...how do we peel away strategic millions of those 62 million Bush voters in 2008 and bring them to our side without losing our present advantage?
We do this by taking nothing for granted and seeking to understand exactly why the Republicans are so strong with middle class families with children. (So strong that many of these families vote against their own economic interests when they vote GOP.) We do this by engaging critical Bush voters in ways that meet them half way. We do this by standing together and providing not simply a critique but a unifying vision that allows us to forge a successful governing majority.
Like many of you, I think we also do this by understanding that the Democratic Party needs to find a way to stand for ideas and ideals that can unite enough of us to overcome the GOP power in DC and the corporate media that blocks real reform. That will mean winning over millions of former Bush voters in this media climate. That will mean finding a message that unites a kossack like me with enough of the Bush voters I saw strolling in those airports in North Carolina and Florida this week that we can deliver a political victory that works for both of us.
That victory won't be perfect, but it will be sweet. I'm convinced it can happen, but our first step must be to look the election of 2004 square on (must read) and with no lingering sour grapes.
There's a percentage of those 62 million voters we can peel away without losing a single one of our own. But to do that we must stand strong and unified. To do that we must all of us find common ground.
How can we do that together?