From Why We’re Polarized (Ezra Klein, 2020) pp171-2
Before he worked for George W. Bush, first as Bush’s director of polling and planning in 2000 and then as Bush’s chief campaign strategist in 2004, Matthew Dowd had been a Democratic campaign consultant. He was that rarest of creatures: a persuadable voter. Perhaps that’s why he was able to recognize, poring through the results of the 2000 election, that he was going extinct.
“One of the first things I looked at after 2000 was what was the real Republican vote and what was the real Democratic vote,” he recalled in an extensive interview to PBS’s Frontline, “not just who said they were Republicans and Democrats, but independents, how they really voted, whether or not they voted straight ticket or not. And I took a look at that in 2000, and then I took a look at what it was over the last five elections or six elections.”
What Dowd found was that the share of true independents-the number of people who were actually undecided and could vote for either party-had plummeted in recent elections, going from, in his calculations, about 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent. The implications of this were “fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, ‘Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters?”
Dowd realized, looking at his chart, that presidential campaigns were conceptualizing elections all wrong. They had imagined the bulk of the electorate as open to persuasion and had been “putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation.” In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for-indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.
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