NASCAR campaigning

I should admit that my underlying analysis of U.S. electoral politics is not much more than a cheap knock-off of Ruy Teixera's. Like a $20 "Ronex" watch, it might fool the unsuspecting, but not for long.

I think this post of Ruy's is not only thoroughly persuasive as usual, but I suspect it may be the story of the 2004 election. History books of the future, given two sentences to explain this election might say that Bush, having polarized the electorate, staked his reelection on energizing and maximizing turnout among his strongest supporters, using social issues as well as beating the drums of war, but that strategy was doomed to failure for obvious demographic reasons.

As James Carville says in the Washington Post story on which Ruy bases his analysis, "It's a new way to run for president...usually you quietly shore up your base and aggressively court the swing voter, Bush is aggressively shoring up his base and quietly courting the swing voter."

Running for president the old way almost always depended on how smoothly you can execute a difficult maneuver: cut as far to the right or the left as you need to to win the nomination and secure the base -- but no further -- then accelerate out of the turn and get back as deftly as possible to the center. It helps to have a single theme that can serve both parts of the maneuver, like "compassionate conservatism" for Bush 2000, because it makes the move look smoother. Often, the fundamental analysis of presidential races comes down to who made that transition more smoothly. In 1980, for example, Reagan cut beautifully from his announcement in Philadelphia, Mississippi (apparently at the specific encouragement of Trent Lott, who knew the signal it would send to his constituency), to a tamer, optimistic and acceptable conservatism a few months later. Al Gore executed the maneuver a little too obviously as he careened from pledging in the primaries never to touch Medicaid to a few weeks later, nomination secured, pledging to run a budget surplus "every single year" and picking Lieberman as his running mate, then back to a modified populism by the end, which was the right note.

Bush is still stuck in the first turn, while Kerry has long ago come through it. That just should not be. Bush doesn't need to appease the right to win the nomination, as his father did. He can certainly take their votes, though not necessarily turnout, for granted in the general election. This seems to be a tactic not borne of necessity, but of choice, like the Iraq war. And it is a strange and inexplicable tactic, one that, like the war, we take seriously only because they do, and which almost certainly cannot succeed. As Ruy demonstrates, to make up for a failure to reach independents and swing voters this year, the Republicans would have to find an unbelievable number of non-voting conservative whites. It is a tactic that worked once: in Georgia in 2002, where the descriptions I've heard of the GOP's "72-hour plan" really begin to sound like a "Deliverance" version of an old urban machine, rousting the forgotten born-agains in their tiny hamlets and packing them in cars to the polls. It will probably work in Georgia again. But I don't see Georgia on any list of swing states.

In a presidential election, where turnout is automatically 10-20 percentage points higher than in an off-year like 2002, there is much less upside potential for this tactic, that is, fewer Bush-base white non-voters available. And if it requires divisive social conservatism to motivate that limited base, that tactic will almost almost certainly infuriate and motivate the larger Democratic base, particularly younger voters who are the most underrepresented group in the electorate. The religious vote is close to reaching its maximum potential; the 18-25 year old vote, the Latino vote, the unmarried women vote, etc. are all just beginning. The 2004 election will be decided on turnout, but for the Republicans, it cannot be won on turnout alone.

A colleague said to me last week while watching the Senate defeat the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, "Karl Rove is a genius. He knows what he's doing." I think that perception is the best asset Bush has. But I'm not seeing it. If the current tactic of pandering to the right is born of necessity, then something is very wrong in the Bush coalition that we don't really know about. If it's a choice, it's a crazy one.

(As for the title of this post: I retained it from an earlier draft, when I was going to totally overtax my race-car driving metaphor. I was going to say something like, running for President is Formula 1 racing, not NASCAR, where you only turn in one direction, and the Bush campaign is running like its NASCAR, in reverse, always turning right. If I could get that metaphor to work, it could go places -- for example, Kerry=French=Formula 1, etc. -- but it was not to be. I couldn't think of a better title, though.)