[Common Tator]

It's not the third parties which historically have been the problem. We've only seen a couple of major party realignments in 200 years.

A third party only achieves success in replacing a major party when both major parties fail to adopt a view held by nearly 50 percent of the voters. Anti Slavery is an example of an issue that made the Republican Party.

You don't worry until you see a substantial change in your solid base voters. Then you'd better find out why.

Both parties have had this in recent years, largely the result of their run-to-the-center general election strategie

BULL CRAP!!!! There is zero evidence to back up that y statement.

Strom Thruman tried to pull the Southern Conservative base from liberal Harry Truman in 1948. Dewey and the Media were certain that would cost Truman the Presidency. The base was there for Truman. In case you didn't notice Trumans hard turn to the left on civil rights did not cost Harry the election. He held enough of the South to win the election. Dewey played to his base... by not going to the center at all, It cost Dewey the election in 1948. It took Richard Nixon nearly 20 years and a defeat by JFK to figure that out.

Everert Dirkson stood at the Republican convention podium in 1952 telling the delegates if they abandoned conservative Taft for the liberal Ike, the base would abandon the Republican party and stay at home. Everett as usual was full of CRAP. Centrist Ike easily beat a vert liberal Stevenson. Ike had the Republican base in both 52 and 57. It did not matter that Ike was a centrist what mattered was that Stevenson was a flaming liberal.

There was a lot of talk that the catholic JFK could not hold the protestent Southern Democratic base.. but if you look at 1960 Results JFK won... The small amount of lost base did not matter. JFK got more of the Democrat base than did the much more liberal Stevenson. Nixon got the base... Nixon lost too much of the CENTER. He vowed to go for the center if he ever got the nomination again.. He ran to the center in 68 and won.

If you look at 1964 you will find the Republican candidate that the Republican base loved. The base loveing Goldwater did not do as well as the "baseless" Nixon did in 1960. To Goldwater the base was not worth a warm pitcher of spit although they tried their best to elect him. The center is the game. It always is the game. It always has been.

The Democrat base loved McGovern in 1972 ....That was disaster city when he ran against Richard Nixon. The center didn't go for McGovern and he lost. The republican base turned out for Nixon in both 68 and 72. The center did too.

Neither Jerry Ford or Carter appealed to their bases much but Carter won in 1976. There is no evidence that the base did not turn out for Jerry or Jimmy. It was the center that did not turn out for Jerry. They turned out for Carter instead.

Reagan spent the entire campaign of 1980 running away from the base and running to the center. The major themes of the Reagan campaign were right out of the Democrat play book. YOu can make a good case Reagan ran to the LEFT. a: Reagan constantly reminded voters he was a former UNION PRESIDENT. Imaging how much the Republican base loves Union Presidents. b: Reagan reminded voters he was a huge fan of FDR and a former Democrat. In the debate with Jimmy Carter he mentioned it. Reagan said he still held the same positions he did when he was a Democrat. His exact words were, "My Views have not changed!" Imagine how the base loved that. c: Reagan constantly reminded voters his economic plan was identical to the JFK plan of 1961. In case you never noticed JFK was a Democrat. It may surprise you to note that JFK bore an amazing resembliance to Teddy Kennedy.. Some say they may have been brothers.

Bush Sr. Ran hard to the base...Remember... "READ MY LIPS.. NO NEW TAXES..." Dumb move. Dukakis was the quintessencial base man. He got fewer numbers of the center in 88 than Bush 41. Buth the center deserted Bush 41 in 1992 for some guy who called himself a NEW Democrat. It was Clinton who ran to the center in 92 as the centrist NEW DEMOCRAT.

Clinton never ran to the base. HE RAN AS A NEW CENTRIST DEMOCRAT. Gore did not run to the center, Nader scared Gore into running to his base. It cost Gore the Presidency.

Bush has been running to the center since the day he got the nomination. Gore in trying to win the NADER votes ran to the base and got beat.

You post intuitive feelings that the base may not turn out unless they get what they want, but that is only a danger when the other parties candidate is on to your side of the center. As long as the Democrats run well to the left of center, there is zero danger in a Republican running to the center.

There are are no cases in modern history where pandering to the base does anything except insure defeat.

AS far as tracking the party data basses they just do not show what you pretend to say they show. The most important state for presidential elections is OHIO. No one wins the presidency with out winning OHIO.

The correlation you are trying to make is the exact opposite of the truth in OHIO. The more the Democrat candidate runs to the center, the smaller the Republican base turn out. A centrist Democrat does not scare the more leftist registered Republican (Clinton), as much as a left wing (Dukakis).

GET A CLUE! It is a non threatening DEMOCRAT candidate that reduces the Republican base turn out.

The secret to getting the Republican base out is painting the Democrat candidate as a real liberal. If the Republican base is scared of the Democrat candidate they will come out to vote. If the Democrat is a NEW DEMOCRAT from the more conservative South, he does not scare some of the more left Republican base and they don't turn out.

Knowing the data is worthless, if you don't know how to analyse it .

[Texasforever]

Whew! Preach it brother. I have been saying for weeks that "base" candidates never go beyond the "base" in an election. The GOP has been moving away from the old "Reagan base" ever since it was shown from 1992 to today that that "base" had already abandoned the party and it would be political suicide to continue to pander to it just to bring them back which has been shown to be a futile exercise. Bush, as it stands now, owns the center right and more than 50% of the so-called independents from the center portion of that sector.

[George W. Bush]

Well, I don't think your data supports all that you say, relying as it does on election results from the time when there were not significant numbers of non-aligned voters. The list somehow reminds me of all those proofs the Dims and libmedia had in '88 about how no sitting vice president had won election since Polk (?), something like 150 years. Somehow, all that math didn't stop Bush I from winning. And in '92, Clinton ran on the issue of nationalizing health care which seemed pretty far Left to me. I'm not sure how you can cast that as being more centrist than Bush. I suppose the conventional explanation for the failure of the run-to-the-center routine was the Arousal Factor. Or you can rehash the Perot-robbed-us routine.

But, let's read your points as taken for the sake of argument.

Your underlying assertion is that the base is completely irrelevant once the nominee has secured the nomination. Anything he does to win election or re-election after that has nothing to do with his base or whether he fulfills anything he's every campaigned for in a primary.

Obviously, threads like this one would be inevitably irrelevant in your view because you (attempt to) demonstrate that the base is worthless to the nominee and will vote for him if he tells them to go straight to hell.

There is, IMO, a fatal flaw in your analysis. The electorate, the two bases and the swing voters, are not as statistically predictable as you imply. There is a dynamism in politics and in elections that is not so easily placed into these kinds of analysis.

You offer the conventional wisdom on running to the center. I just don't believe the evidence for it is that strong.

At any rate, you can rest easy. Bush can safely ignore the base entirely. So FReepers don't need to bother to discuss it. But it seems to me that ignoring the base is exactly what his daddy did in '92.

Actually, either your view or mine probably is irrelevant to Bush's re-election in '04. Barring an economic downturn or serious losses in Iraq or a major terrorist incident on U.S. soil or foreign interests, Bush will win it as easily as Clinton did in '96. The greater impact of running-to-center or appealing-to-base in '04 is probably the outcome for downstream candidates on the national, state and local tickets.

We'll see.

[x]

That is an interesting theory. But the just what the base is changes. McGovern carried what we now think of as the liberal base of the Democratic party in 1972. He lost a lot of the Catholics and Southerners who had historically been his party's base. You can see something of the same phenomenon, though much less pronounced, in Stevenson's two campaigns.

In 1964 Goldwater carried what we now think of as the conservative base of the Republican party. He swept conservatives off their feet and inspired them. He worked on Phyllis Schafly's theory that there were millions of disgruntled conservatives out there who could win an election if they could be brought to the polls, and made little effort to win over moderates in the Eastern states, or even in the big Middle Western states. But seen in the context of what came before, Goldwater lost his party's historical base: small town Yankees, farmers and shopkeepers on the plains, and rich "Main Line" suburbanites in the east.

Just how relevant this is to 2004, I don't know. But if a candidate Dean lost the Black and Hispanic vote and swept liberal suburbanites would he have carried the base? And if free market libertarians deserted President Bush and evangelicals flocked to him, would that mean he won or lost the base? What I think I'm trying to say is that just what the "base" is changes over time.

Maybe the base shouldn't be thought of in strictly ideological terms. The "sociological base" of a party may be different from its "ideological base." Each party's base has at least two parts: there are social conservatives and free marketeers in the GOP and social liberals and lunch-pail "yellow dogs" in the Democrat party. Carrying or losing the base can be a complicated thing.

Or maybe "base" and "center" are affected by the same dynamics. In 1988 GHW Bush had to make great efforts to win votes in both the base and the center. Looking back, it's a bit of surprise that he was able to make things like gun control and the pledge of allegiance his issue and still do well in what we now think of as "blue states." In 1992 his uninspired campaign lost the center, but may have left many in the base sitting on their hands.

When a candidacy hemorrhages it has losses in the ideological and sociological base as well as in the center. You can see this with Bush in 1992, Carter in 1980, and for that matter, Hoover in 1932. Johnson was headed that way in 1968, before Humphrey stepped in to save much of the sociological base of the party. When a candidate seems headed for victory he picks up in all three groups.

Each party seems to have a solid base of about 38% (as defined by the losing campaigns with the lowest percentage of votes: Goldwater in 1964, McGovern in 1972, Bush in 1992, and probably Hoover and Landon in 1932 and 1936). But maybe that's illusory. The "base" that Ronald Reagan left to GHW Bush was probably bigger than that. It was pretty solid for Reagan, but soft and crumbly for Bush.