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Friday, August 06, 2004
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SUPPRESSING DEMOCRACY: HOW ELECTIONS REALLY WORK
At this point, I'm pretty sure that everybody has heard about the Swiftboat Veterans For Truth and the little book and ad campaign that they have coming out. At first, I thought the whole story was complete bullshit. The lack of a comprehensive denial from Kerry/Edwards '04 is starting to shake my confidence in this a little bit.
And before everybody gets their knickers in a fucking knot about the swiftboat boys, remember, they are a 527. This is not the White House talking by any stretch of the imagination. If it were, they would be in violation of federal law. Being in violation of federal law is generally considered to be poor form when you are president of the United States. It is, however, a given when you are Prime Minister of Canada.
527's are a nasty little business. They entirely side-step all of the campaign finance regulations that have been passed since Watergate. "527" refers to a specific section of the Internal Revenue Code, that allows for private organizations to use private money to run ugly ads. This is where MoveOn.org and the Soros Media Fund (set up by gazillionaire, George Soros, who vowed that he would spend up to a billion dollars of his own money to defeat George Bush in November.) Democrats pissed and moaned to no end when 527's escaped the sweep of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform a couple of years ago. Then they realized that they themselves came to understand that they could use this to their benefit. That is to say, they got smart.
And they got REALLY smart. Four days before the California Recall, MoveOn ran an ad that essentially accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of being a rapist. Then they ran an ad on their website comparing the president (presumably unfavourably) to Adolf Hitler. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 could be described by reasonable people as a 527 dressed up as a documentary. Moore himself has described the film as having political ends, those being: removing Bush from office. Just like a 527 ad does.
Is the president's handling of 9/11 a valid issue in a presidential campaign? Yess'um. But, to be fair, Senator Kerry has based his entire campaign on, "Hey, when was the last time I mentioned that I was in Vietnam?" It then seems fitting that the Senator's war record is a matter of scrunity. It is a little known fact that Democratic operatives attempted to do the same with the president's father in 1988 and, to a lesser extent, 1992 and Bush 41 almost never even mentioned World War II. If Kerry thinks he can ride the casket of Ho Chi Mihn to the White House without question, he's worse than insane. He's an idiot!
But in watching the Democrats in the last three days, I learned a valuable lesson. They can dish it out, but they can't take when their boy takes it in the ass (no pun intended, for those who know what the book actually says.)
What I'm ultimately getting at, is that the rightness or wrongness of 527's really isn't at issue here. 527's are a valuable political tool. And not for the reasons you would think. Most people think that 527's are designed to sway people to vote one way or another. They're not.
Wanna hear what they're designed to do?
Okay, I'll tell you. But first, I need to get into some background.
In most elections, there is an estimated undecided vote of anywhere between 10-30%. Undecideds are people who don't actually think about the future of their country until the last week of the campaign. These people are commonly described as "lazy" or "stupid." Undecideds almost never pay attention to a campaign until Labor day. They're really not all that interested in much besides baseball, reality shows and beating their wives....or husbands, as it were.
This is, by every poll out there, an extraordinarily close election. There is the bare minimum of undecideds ever polled out there. Most polls have the undecided vote at less than 10%. Both parties understand one important fact of life. Undecideds are...well, unpredictable. They do whacky shit. Most of the time, as the media loves reminding us, they break for the challenger. I would, however, invite you to lay a wreath on the grave of President Thomas Dewey and tell him that. Undecideds almost entirely went to Truman in 1948, when the spread was so wide for Dewey that news outlets stopped polling a month before the election. Guess who was elected in 1948? Need another guess?
While undecideds usually go for the challenger, they don't always do so. The Democrats know that just as well as I do. And I'm sure the Republicans learned the lesson of '48.
There's one thing that political professionals hate in campaigns, unpredictability. As I've already repeatedly noted, undecideds can be famously unpredictable. So how do you deal with them? I'm getting to that. Be patient. This isn't like writing about my cock, which I can do in one paragraph. One very short paragraph.
Study after study has shown that if there's one thing that voters hate, it's negative ads. But why are they still used? Because they work. They work, not just because they most people lie their asses off to pollsters, they work because undecideds particularly hate them.
Remember how I said that undecideds, particularly this late in the game, are stupid? Here's why. Undecideds tend to, more than any other segment of the voting public, to bail entirely on an election at the first whiff of a negative one. It really doesn't matter who goes negative first, Just so long as somebody does.
So why did the "Bush" people wait so long? After all, Kerry was a sure thing as nominee back in February. Because Democratic 527's were doing quite nicely suppressing the the undecided vote all winter. MoveOn did it's side of the deal. The Republican 527's were smart though. They waited until people started paying attention. Let's say that 5% of the decideds are swayed by the Swiftboat boys. But not quite swayed enough to either stay home or vote for Bush. Where are they going to go? If you guessed Nader, you win my hand in marriage. A vote for Nader is generally accepted to be a vote for Bush. I haven't yet seen a map of the media buy for the Swiftboat boys, but I'll bet it's focused on very close states. Very close states where Nader either is, or expected to be, on the ballot.
See where I'm going with this? No? Okay, I'll continue.
You teenagers have probably seen all manner of "national" polls this year. Let me tell you that they don't mean shit. There is no such thing as a "national" presidential election. There are 50 separate state elections. This is how the electoral collage is designed, and why people who say, "Al Gore is actually the president are fucking morons." It's the state polls that people should look at. Sure, there might be 10% undecided nationally, but one shouldn't assume that because 10% of the country lives in California that 1% of the undecideds live there. California has been safely decided already.
The undecideds only really matter in the 14 battleground states that I mentioned two weeks ago. Perhaps for the first time in American history, one vote in West Virginia (the closet state), Ohio or Michigan is worth 10 or 20 votes in New York or California.
Of course, this means that the Democrats want the undecideds to stay the fuck home and the Republicans, if the can't keep the undecideds home, want them voting for Nader. Pretty simple, huh?
Sure, some of you might doubt me. But, discounting CNN, FOX or MSNBC (or any other national cable broadcaster that doesn't take local advertising), how many of my readers from a state like Wyoming or Vermont, or any other "safe" state has even seen any of these ads? I would think, not many.
Which is sort of the point.
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