Two questions on the 2004 Presidential election:
1. Why didn't John Kerry just apologize for the things he said to the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1971? It would not have taken much. Any kind of decent apology would have likely eliminated the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ("SBVT") as a factor in the election, and with them gone, the result might have been different.
2. The electoral vote did not change much from 2000 to 2004. Only three states switched, New Hampshire went from Bush to Kerry while Iowa and New Mexico went from Gore to Bush. So why did the popular vote change so much?
1.
In 1971, John Kerry, then 27 years old, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and accused American soldiers in Vietnam of routinely committing war crimes. ("we had an investigation at which over 150 ... veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia"; "they told stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, ... randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan"; "we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions") Thirty years later, when John Kerry decided to run for President in 2004 and to make his service in Vietnam an important part of his campaign, he had to know somebody would try to use that testimony against him. Why did not he do something, before the campaign started or even in May of 2004 when the SBVT held their first press conference, to defuse the issue? While the SBVT raised several different issues against Kerry, if you listened to them, it was this testimony that really seemed to drive them. Their questions about Kerry's service in Vietnam or what he did with his medals after he got home, paled in comparison with his Senate testimony. To them, Kerry was, in that testimony, attacking their honor and the honor of their fellow soldiers. If Kerry could have dealt with the testimony issue, the questions of how he got his medals and what he did or did not do with them once he got home would have gone away. So why didn't Kerry try to do something?
The conventional wisdom is that Kerry thought that he could ignore the SBVT because the mainstream media ("MSM") would ignore them. It had happened that way before, in Kerry's races for other offices. And the MSM tried to do it again. When the SBVT first raised their questions in May, before the Democratic convention, the MSM ignored them. But 2004 was different from Kerry's earlier races in at least two ways. This time he was running for President, for Commander-in-Chief. This was just too much for the men who formed SBVT. When the MSM ignored them, they did not give up. They wrote Unfit for Command and produced their own commercials to tell their story.
Also, 2004 was different because the MSM no longer controlled the agenda. There was talk radio and FOX and even the blogs. These parts of the media did talk about the SBVT. It was not the MSM, but it was more than in the past.
Finally, the SBVT started to gain traction. Then, when Kerry attacked them in a press conference on August 19 and tried to get local TV stations to not carry their ads, the MSM could ignore them no longer. While most of the coverage in the MSM was negative, accusing SBVT of lying and inaccuracies and being a pawn for the Bush campaign, at least they were finally getting talked about.
But it is entirely possible that none of this would have happened if Kerry had just apologized early on. It should not have been that hard, and it might have worked, except for one thing: John Kerry could not do it.
It was those hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 that first "made" John Kerry. Reading the exchanges between Kerry and the senators, one can see how it would be hard for him to disavow that. He was a celebrity at 27, a leader of his generation. There was no way John Kerry could apologize for that.
The problem this caused for Kerry was that the country changed between 1971 and 2004. Kerry was caught in a culture shift not unlike, in some ways, the one which engulfed Richard Nixon. What Nixon and/or his people did in that thing called "Watergate" was not all that different from what at least some of Nixon's predecessors had done. But by 1973, times had changed. What had previously been ignored and/or condoned was now an impeachable offense.
The same thing happened to John Kerry. In 1971 it was "hate the war, hate the soldier." If you were against the war, then you were against the soldiers, too. While there may not have been any soldiers who were literally spat on when they returned from Vietnam, many of them felt they were figuratively spat on by things such as John Kerry's Senate testimony. At some point, however, the country's mode changed. It may have been in 1984 when Ronald Reagan went to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day, and people starting talking about the Greatest Generation and the bands of brothers. No longer was it acceptable to "hate the war, hate the soldier." Now, even if you opposed the war, it was "hate the war, love the soldier." And Kerry, who could not apologize, was caught in that culture shift.
Kerry could not disavow his Senate testimony. The SBVT would not go away, and the MSM could no longer decide the election agenda. The result was a huge, maybe decisive, blow to the Kerry campaign.
2.
The second question is how could the popular vote change so much in 2004 when there was such a small change in the Electoral College vote? The electoral vote in 2004 was almost as close as in 2000. As in 2000, the election came down to one state, this time Ohio, and Ohio was closer in 2004 than it was in 2000. However, the change in the popular vote was huge. Instead of losing by 500,000, Bush won by over 3,500,000. It was, in fact, this margin that made the election seem not so close.
Conventional wisdom says that the deepening divide between the red states and the blue states meant there were fewer close states, so there was never going to be much of a swing in the Electoral College. But I do not think that is the whole answer.
What is interesting about the 2004 election is that, while Bush’s margins in the so-called battleground states increased over 2000, in most cases they did not increase by that much. As Ruy Teixeira noted in "Why Bush Won" in Rolling Stone shortly after the election, "[o]nly a fifth of the increase in Bush's margin came from the battleground states, and about half of that increase came just from Florida." Where Bush really increased his vote was in the non-battleground states. But it was not just in the states he won. He also increased his vote in the states he lost. The Washington Times of August 21, 2005, quoted Michael Barone as saying, "The 2004 results showed the red states getting redder and the blue states getting less blue." Consider a few of the solid states: Alabama went from 56-42 for Bush in 2000 to 62-37 for Bush in 2004. Indiana went from 57-41 for Bush in 2000 to 60-39 four years later. Connecticut went from 56-38 Gore in 2000 to 54-44 Kerry in 2004. Similarly, New York went from 60-35 for Gore to 58-40 for Kerry.
The reason for this swing in the popular vote was, I believe, in how the two campaigns organized their get-out-the-vote efforts. As Michael Barone said (The Washington Times, August 21, 2005), the Democrats used "paid workers [paid either by the Kerry campaign itself or by "527" groups] persuading strangers to get out and vote." Because these people were being paid and because money was not unlimited (even for the "527" groups supporting Kerry), the Kerry campaign and its allies focused their efforts on the battleground states. They ignored the states Kerry was going to lose and the states he was going to win.
The Republican get-out-the-vote effort was different. Ken Mehlman set up a get-out-the-vote effort that relied on the Internet and volunteers. Mehlman used the Internet to identify, organize and motivate volunteers for the Bush get-out-the-vote effort.
While the Bush campaign obviously focused on the battleground states, once the Internet-based program was in place, it could be used everywhere. In effect, the Bush campaign was leveraging its get-out-the-vote effort by using the economies of scale of computer software; i.e., once the program is developed and the system is in place, extra users are basically free. In other words, once the get-out-the-vote program was set up for the battleground states, it could be expanded to, and used in, the non-battleground states at virtually no extra cost.
This meant that Bush had a volunteer effort in not just the battleground states but also in the red states and even the blue states. While Bush picked up more votes in the red states, extra votes in even the solid blue states gave Bush a bigger national margin in the popular vote. An article by David Von Drehle in The Washington Post of January 16, 2005, noted what this meant in the red states: "Bush was helped enormously ... by the fact that he ran virtually unopposed. Kerry spent nothing on advertising [or paid workers] in the Red Sea states; the unions and other groups that supported him put little or no effort in to spreading his message here." But, through his Internet-based, volunteer-driven get-out-the-vote effort, Ken Mehlman was able to get Bush’s message out in those states, and in doing so, Bush picked up the extra popular votes that wound up giving him a 3,500,000 margin. These extra votes in the red states and in the blue states did not matter in the Electoral College, but they were crucial in giving Bush a convincing win. At a program sponsored by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on November 17, 2004, E. J. Dionne said that his friends called him "because they know I never accepted that Bush won the last election, but even I have trouble overcoming a 3-million-vote margin this time."
When your main method of getting-out-the-vote is paid workers, you cannot do it nationally. However, when you are using volunteers, encouraged and coordinated by an Internet-based computer program, to get out the vote, you can do it everywhere. It may not make a difference in the states where your opponent is concentrating, but it will pick up popular votes in states where he is not doing anything and that can make your victory more convincing.
While it is doubtful that Kerry could have overcome Bush’s popular vote margin even if he had run a nationwide get-out-the-vote effort, he might cut Bush's margins in the solid states and made Bush’s victory seem much smaller. As it was, Ken Mehlman’s new style get-out-the-vote effort was a key to the size and convincing nature of President Bush’s reelection victory.
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