|
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."
|