Republican
Organization, Strategy, and Tactics
Commentary by Greg Lewis / OpinionEditorials.com
November 11, 2004
While what went wrong and what went right in the 2004
Presidential election will be discussed publicly for weeks to come on
talk and news shows and on the internet, and while it will continue to
be dissected in political strategy sessions for years, at just over a
week's remove one thing stands out regarding what happened and why President
Bush scored, if not quite a landslide, at least a resounding victory,
one which swept several Republican Senators and Representatives into Congress
in its wake and which gave President Bush something of a mandate.
Notwithstanding that, however, the Democrats argued vigorously
that Republicans should "reach across the aisle" and seek to
heal a nation which, as Kerry apparently had the temerity to lecture the
President in his concession phone call to the White House on November
3, was riven by divisiveness. Well, in the wake of such self-serving lib
balderdash, I'd like to take a look at the most decisive of the high-profile
influences on the 2004 election.
Potentially juiced exit polls and other as-yet undiscovered
election chicanery notwithstanding, what really won the election for President
Bush was the fact that the Republican National Committee and the Republicans'
chief political strategist, Karl Rove, simply out-politicked the Democrats.
In a post-election speech, RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie cited several factors
which his party identified and exploited to trump the Democrats at their
own game: generating high voter turnout.
In particular, Gillespie enumerated several of the Republicans'
strategic assumptions regarding the Bush campaign in this election, nor
did he hesitate to compare them with what Republicans knew to be Democrat
assumptions. Among the most important of these was that Repuboicans took
it as a matter of faith that potential voters would be most likely to
respond favorably to people they knew, people from their own communities,
who exhorted them to get out and vote. Gillespie compared this to the
Democrats' tactics, which overwhelmingly relied on "mercenaries";
that is, people who were paid to go out into particular communities and
register voters, even though the people they attempted to register and
to convince to vote Democratic were strangers to them.
Republicans, by contrast, effected a massive volunteer
campaign at a very local, grass-roots level, enlisting literally millions
of volunteers to go out into their own communities, among people they
knew, to register Republican voters and convince their neighbors to vote
for George W. Bush. On election day, these same volunteers made millions
of phone calls to people to whom they were known in their communities
for the purpose of insuring a high Republican voter turnout.
In addition, the Republican strategy involved a concentrated
effort to increase voter turnout in areas that had already been identified
as Republican strongholds. Rather than attempt to change voters' minds,
Republicans focused on increasing their majorities in local areas where
they knew their message was already well-received. In retrospect, because
Democrats relied heavily on paid workers, there was simply lacking, on
the Democrat side, the power of conviction, the commitment to a set of
principles, that was inherent in the Republican get-out-the-vote effort.
This component (and it is but one of many, I would
emphasize) of the Republican victory reflects, in my view, an inability
of Democrats to acknowledge and address the true nature of the American
electorate and, indeed, of the election process itself. It manifested
in the Democrats' being unable (or unwilling) to motivate large numbers
of volunteers to register new voters and to spread the word about their
candidate and their positions, effectively sealing their fate in the election
of 2004.
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