Why Kerry Wins by Dane Strother

Americans beheaded - $2 gasoline - a million lost jobs - a quagmire in Iraq - being misled into war - 1,066 dead soldiers - a record budget deficit - a record national debt - noticeable arrogance - a refusal to admit mistakes - Bin Laden is still free and we’re not free of fear.

Versus

A guy who rides an $8,000 bike in spandex, wind surfs as a photo op - mishandled by previous managers so outrageously he’s still recovering from them - against the death penalty and supportive of gay unions.

The presidential race is polarizing America unlike any race since Vietnam. Voters on the left are panicked. Voters on the right fear they are fighting a cultural war for the nation’s soul. Both sides eye the other with disdain and scorn. And the two sides are split almost evenly. It’s no surprise that Bush is the polarizing figure - incumbents tend to be.

Indeed the majority of people who are voting for Kerry are actually voting against Bush. But some 88 percent of Bush supporters are voting for him rather than against Kerry. Ideological fervor should help Bush. But fear isa great motivator and voters who oppose Bush fear him - desperately.

This political fight is one for the ages. We read recently in the Washington Post that there has been 14,000 gross rating points in Toledo, Ohio in the presidential race. That means the average voter has seen a presidential spot 140 times. The same is happening at some absurd level in hundreds of hamlets across America. But the truth is paid media is least effective in the presidential campaign than any other race.

The free press does such an incredible job of covering the big race that voters get information from dozens and dozens of places and paid media is just one of them.

Yet there is far more money being spent on this presidential race than even the experts could have predicted. It’s fair to say close to a billion dollars will be spent trying to persuade six percent of the electorate that aren’t solidly behind a candidate. Both parties have researched America down to every individual address. They know what magazines you read, your voting history and the voting history of your neighborhood. All of this information is used to determine if you are a friend or foe, or could you be realigned.

But America is dug in. One of the great minds of the Democratic Party - Stan Greenberg - conducted a study a few months ago where he tried to move voters off of Bush or Kerry with unbelievably strident charges. He hit Bush with everything possible and then did the same to Kerry and the outcome was startling - no one changed. No one was willing to switch.

We’ve decided on our candidate so the question becomes - who votes. There are many problems with polling in this information age. Five percent of people only use cell phones so they can not be polled. We have caller ID and caller block so another segment of the population can’t be polled. We’re over polled as a society so we have people becoming professional respondents rather than thoughtful participants. And the biggest problem with using polls to determine the outcome of a very close race is what model do you use? All polls are dependent on a model that calculates who votes and where. And when there are anomalies in turnout then polls are skewed. And with the record voter registration and palpable panic across this country, no one can accurately predict who is going to vote and where they are.

For example, at Appalachia State University in Boone, N.C., the Young Democrats ran a week long registration drive and registered 1,200 people on one day. If a pollster called any of those 1,200 they would be disconnected because there was no history of voting. We can guess at the proper turnout numbers, and do, but with so many states split down the middle it only takes one or two bad guesses and you can throw the polls out the window.

Where polls are still exceedingly effective is helping us determine how voters perceive the candidates. Who shares your values? Who is strong enough to lead? Who cares about people like you?

We call these the internals of the poll and quite honestly President Bush is showing more promise with these character questions than Kerry. The Bush team did a good job of painting Kerry as a flip-flopper with no moral core. The truth is America is more aligned with Republicans on the moral issues of our day. Domestic partnerships and late-term abortions makes America’s knees shake. But for many reasons national Democrats must support it. Republicans know this and use them as exceedingly effective diversions.

As always the race breaks down into the coasts and the middle of the country. The battleground states are getting the attention. Kerry’s problem is he’s having to fight for states like Minnesota that he should have sewn up. But Bush is having to fight in the Southwest unlike in the past - Arizona and New Mexico are up for grabs. But so is Oregon, New Hampshire and the mother of all states - Ohio and Florida.
 
Republicans have never won the White House without carrying Ohio. Both camps seem smug in their ability to carry the state - we’ll see. And Florida - oh Florida. Who knows who will vote - whose vote will be counted and how many shenanigans occur.

Political wonks like to study each state, trade polls and crunch numbers. But ultimately people vote with their guts and not their heads.

A lot of voters are forced to weigh the consequences of returning an outfit to the White House that sent us into a war we can’t afford and shouldn’t have undertaken at the risk of replacing them with a team who is more liberal socially.

In the end Kerry wins.

So how does Kerry win? Re-read paragraph one.