By Ezra
Nick's post below on Bush's declining support among white men with a high school education or less is important stuff. This is the demographic that kicked John Kerry in the teeth. In 2000, Gore won the non-high school educated by 20%, Kerry took them by 1%. In 2000, Gore lost the high-school educated by 1%, Kerry lost them by 5%. The only place Kerry made gains, in fact, was among the post-doc crowd, taking Gore's 8% advantage and turning it into a 10% lead. We traded beer bellies for egg heads and found out, just as Adlai Stevenson did decades ago, that electoral arithmetic is the one sort of math that the working class figures better than the knowledge class.
But we know we need to win whites, the question is, why did we lose the,? Here you've got a few things going on. First and foremost, there's a respect for authority, particularly in times of national duress. This is the don't-change-horses-midstream crowd, and so they saddled up with Gore in 2000 but galloped off with Bush in 2004. But more to the point, this is the heuristics crowd. Less likely to be educated, less likely to be politically informed, less likely to pay close attention to news stories, etc. That's no criticism, it's just the numbers. And so this group's decisions are made off impressions, body language, character, appearance, composure, bearing, background, and all the other human data that we unconsciously download during every interaction, conversation and sighting.
And Bush kicked our ass on that.
The reason Bush is their boy is because Bush seems like their boys. And so, even if their support for his policies are dropping, I guarantee you he'd horsewhip Kerry among this group again if we were to call a do-over. Pols do a lot of polling to find out what people want to hear, but, at least among Democrats, very little thought is given to what voters want to see. That's a nasty oversight. Because elections, contra Clinton, aren't like a job interview. They're more of a first date. And on a first date, you can tell your date all the sweet nothings he always wanted to hear; if he doesn't want to be seen with you, the end of the night will find you separate. Worse, you can say everything wrong and fling more food than an angry monkey, but if you've got the right look, your date can still be a success.
Shallow, yes. But we know it's true. The real question is why we ever thought politics would be different.
