The Rove Election Game Plan -- Evengelicals For Bush

Newsweek -- The primary demographic objective of BC04 is more obvious: to increase turnout among families that consider themselves evangelical Christians. The GOP defines them as voters who say they are "born again" and who attend church regularly, at least four times a week. Rove and his team--led by campaign manager Ken Mehlman and regional director Ralph Reed--have carefully scrutinized exit-polling data in recent elections, and the Bushies frankly admire the success labor unions have had in recent years in turning out not only their members, but their members' extended families. One reason the GOP did well in last year's midterm elections, strategists say, is that it was able to best the labor unions at their own turnout game. In 2002, evangelicals composed 21 percent of the electorate, according to the polls. The Bush-Cheney aim this time is 24 percent.

Growth in the West and South, and declines in the East and Midwest, mean that a rerun of the 2000 race would raise Bush's victory margin in the Electoral College from four votes to 18. Bush-Cheney has identified 17 states on which to focus in '04: ones Bush either narrowly won or lost, or where demographic changes are viewed as especially favorable.

With little fanfare or national press coverage, President Bush and his political minions have been traveling these states in recent months, laying the groundwork. The Republican National Committee will have perhaps $200 million to spend--much of it on a laser-targeted, precinct-by-precinct turnout operation that will spring to life in the last 72 hours of the campaign next year. By e-mail and snail mail, door to door and word of mouth, Republicans are planning to narrowcast discrete appeals--on everything from taxes to gun control--on a voter-by-voter basis. Rove made his money in direct mail, and it's still the way he tends to work.


Polltaker Dowd is a leading advocate of outreach to Hispanics. A symbol of that effort is the backdrop campaign officials cart to press conferences coast to coast: it intersperses the words BUSH-CHENEY with VIVA! More substantively, GOP strategists insist that Bush's tough foreign policy, pro-business tax cuts and cultural traditionalism will earn him perhaps 40 percent of the Latino vote. "They used to be a Democratic constituency," said Dowd, "but now they are up for grabs." The same goes for Jewish voters, Bush strategists believe, at least for those who evaluate candidates based on the strength of their support for Israel. Pro-Israel activists think that the president, unrivaled in modern times for his down-the-line backing of the Jewish State, could win a third of the Jewish vote.


Bush's advisers see him as the ultimate "get out the vote" device, a president whose popularity at the GOP grass roots meets or exceeds that of Ronald Reagan. Evangelicals see him as one of their own. His policies--from a Manichaean definition of the war on terrorism to support for faith-based programs--are designed to make sure "the base" continues to view him in that worshipful way. Rove & Co. will market their man (who, in fact, loves the granular detail of political gamesmanship) as a beacon of principle, unwilling to bend on the war abroad or on fiscal and tax policy at home.

It's a risky strategy. The war in Iraq, a dicey proposition at best, could turn catastrophic with one truck bomb. The mounting deficit could sink the dollar or the recovery, or both. It's also dangerous to turn the struggle between Red and Blue states into a moral clash of black and white. If you argue, as Bush does, that we are fighting evil, then, by extension, anyone who opposes you (including the Democrats) is in league with evil. The notion could scare as many voters as it attracts, not to mention dividing the country even more bitterly. The president won't say as much, of course, but some of his more enthusiastic and unscrupulous supporters (and maybe a cabinet member or two) surely will.