Rove: Conservatives - Not Moderates - Hold Key to Election

[JPZenger]

www.phillynews.com/inquirer - look under "Front Page"
August 31, 2004
"For GOP strategist, conservatives - not moderates - hold key to election"

"...Rove's plan is to forgo the traditional emphasis on wooing moderate swing voters (despite all the Republican convention speakers who mainly appeal to moderate swing voters). Instead, Rove's chief aim is to bring millions of new conservatives to the polls - to outmobilize the Democrats, who are working overtime to sign up their own new people.

"We did an interesting study," Rove said ..."If you look at the old settled suburbs around Philadelphia, you may have as many as 88 percent of eligible Bush supporters, and likely Republicans already registered to vote. But in the exurbs, that number is no more than 81 percent."...

The potential bonus, for Rove, is that a hefty share of exurbanites are Christian conservatives...The challenge this year "is to get them motivated to participate, to get them literally physically registered. And then getting them out to vote." Rove, who thinks there are five million untapped Christian conservatives in the voting pool, is trying to ensure that the campaign has contacts in each new church in each important exurb (critics accuse Rove of practicing politics in religious settings), for the purposes of signing people up. And that's one reason, under Rove's guidance, the administration has stressed social conservatism."

[9119495]

1. So are there really less than 5 million disaffected

student/ vets/ lefties/single parents, etc.? Does Rove think NO NEW DEMS will go to the polls?

[Gman]

2. This has been very obvious for the last month or so

since it became obvious that, aside from the convetion, the GOP was showing no desire to moderate its message to attract moderates and undecideds. If anything, their message has gotten even more radical right wing. The only thing that one could deduce from the radical message and positions is they are trying to drag every single nutcase right winger they can possible find to the polls in November. Rove just confirmed that effort here.

Rove also knows that this election is so close that whichever side does the best job of get out the vote will win. Rove has already written off the undecideds as historically the undecideds break for the challenger by as much as 85 - 15. So dragging finding and dragging the secluded nutcase freaks to the polls is the only way they can win.

[ps1074]

3. BULLSHIT

If it was true why aren't DeLay and all the other 'conservateives' speaking at the convention? Instead they have pro-choice, pro-gay, anti-gun people like Arnold, Guliani and McCain?

Sure coservatives are key as far as they need them to turn out on election day but they are not THE key. The key are moderates and that is why it is so important for Kerry to edge Bush among moderate voters.

[JPZenger]

4. Disingeneous

I am suspicious that Rove would not really reveal his true election strategy to newspaper reporters. He may be saying the opposite of his true strategy.

Whatever you do, don't look into Rove's eyes.

[Fovea]

5. Where are the new Republicans

to replace the millions of chronically unemployed who no way in hell will vote to send * back to DC. Many of them are in Red states, and for them the war on terrah is not as important as the war on employment.

The only trick -- GOTV.