The election-deniers will insist that all is well, we had a great candidate, and it was all fraud that got Obama elected.
But the truth is that the democrats have approached elections like marketing a product. They found a way to sell things to the mass of people who never vote, and if you can drag 2 million new people to vote, you can win close elections.
They lost existing customers, but were able to market their shiny baubles to new customers who didn’t know any better.
Meanwhile, conservatives and the GOP treated the election like it was an actual election, and the electorate like they were intelligent, involved people who wanted what was best for the country and would understand that Obama wasn’t it.
We lost the election in large part because too many of the voters were nothing like this; they didn’t care about foreign policy, about congress, about running the country. They were people who don’t vote. But these ivy-league marketing pros were able to find different little messages that excited these people to products.
And why not, look at how we can get people to throw away perfectly good phones for the latest craze? And so all those things that we thought were stupid, and childish, like Obamaphone, and free birth control, homosexual marriage, and ObamaSex were all targetted messages, possibly turning off a few independents, but winning a large mass of new voters with each message.
Tell all the little groups what they want to hear, and cobble together a winning coalition.
Heck, you only had to do it twice. Once in 2008, and then after you lost 4 million people who saw you were all talk, get 2 million new replacement suckers.
I saw this first-hand at my daughter’s college. Every time I visited, she was asked to register. They ran events, made it cool to be a voter. They gave support and encouragement, all aimed at doing the “cool thing”, vote for the black guy who supported tolerance and free love, and who wanted people to pay their “fair share”.
While we laughed at OWS, the democrats used it to pull in another million new voters. Sure, they lost 500,000 because of it, but that’s a win.
We need to stop thinking “if you build it, they will come”, and get into the “sell our message and drag people to the polls”.
We can win with conservatism, but we have to make it relevant to the people who don’t vote, so we can turn out the masses. We win in off-year elections and local elections where only the more interested take part, but we need a non-voter strategy if we want to win presidential contests.
Or, we can all stick our heads in the sand, cover our ears, and chant “election fraud”, as if that will make it all better.
All you said is very wise and I have been seeing variations of it here and there but you said it all here.