Who Lost Ohio?

New York Times Magazine ^ | November 21, 2004 | MATT BAI

[tgiles]

The next Democrat who wins will be the one who changes enough minds.

This one sentence says it all. Kerry tried to win on hatred of Bush, and it failed miserably. The Democrats prayed that turnout alone would carry them, but they failed to recognize that without a meaningful rallying cry, they wouldn't attract any voters from the other side. Their failure was a joint failure of policies and message.

The bad news is, this guy Rosenthal gets it, Carville gets it, and they'll be back with a more clever strategy in four years. Hopefully it won't be a facade to disguise the same old same-old.

[DennisR]

"The rude awakening here is that I always thought there were more of us out there. And this time there were more of them."

Steve: Get ready for some major falling-out-of-bed trauma. You breed is a dying breed. My condolences.

[IndyTiger]

A couple of these ACT canvassers were in my neighborhood in the Cleveland suburbs a few months ago. I was asked, "Do you know anyone that has lost their job in the past year?" No, I responded.

"Well, do you know who you're going to vote for in the Presidental race?" BUSH, I said in a loud voice. The guy mumbled thanks and walked away, punching in some numbers in his palm pilot.

[Don Corleone]

Who Lost Ohio?

Nobody! Its still there right between Pa. and Indiana.

[finnman69]

Another thing, this ACT guy in his won words destroys the LW moonbat theory regarding the exit polls. He shows the shift in exit polls as the rural voting results catches up to the quicker urban results during the day.

[dvwjr]

I think you're right. I wondered what that warm feeling in my pants was...

It was the hot TheraFlu that I spit up on my lap from reading your post...

"Amusingly erotic", indeed...

:-)


dvwjr

[Vigilanteman]

They were allowed to tell a voter that, say, a lot of jobs had disappeared from Ohio in the last four years, but they weren't able to explain what Kerry intended to do about it.

Kerry couldn't explain what he intended to do about it in a credible way either.

[speekinout]

The bad news is, this guy Rosenthal gets it, Carville gets it, and they'll be back with a more clever strategy in four years.

Their strategy won't matter unless they can come up with a good candidate. hillary isn't it. But if she decides to run, she won't lose in the primaries.

These guys really need to find a candidate that they can start grooming now. Part of the problem with kerry is that none of them knew much about him before he was nominated.

[Dark Wing]

I spent three years of high school in Lima, a small town in Central Ohio north of Dayton. When I was going to college in the mid-1980s my father was a Federal official in Cleveland. I worked in the Downtown Cleveland federal building's Veteran's Administration office as a summer hire filing two summers while I was in college.

I recently visited the O'Gara Hess & Eisenhart plant in the exurbs north of Cincinnati in July. It rebuilds normal HMMWV's into the armored car variants you see in Iraq. O'Gara also builds build a version of a military truck cab for a artillery rocket launcher chassis we make and I was there for quality related problems in the cabs.

I saw mile after mile of prosperous new communites, heavily over stressed rural roads and those God-awful eye-sore metal system buildings that are a hallmark of rapid industrial developments and large warehouse operations. I knew then that there was no way in hell that the Democrats were going to win Ohio. The old tight urban/rural demography of the late 1970's-to-mid 1980's Ohio I knew was gone.

I have the distinct impression from the article that in Ohio and maybe a lot of other places, time and demographics have passed the Democratic Party by.

[bella1]

"they just make more Republicans"

The natural cause and effect of not aborting ones offspring!

[gop_gene]

''Folks, the reason we changed the channel is because NBC is the only network that called it!'' one of the frustrated volunteers shouted.

No, FOX and MSNBC also called it as well. The only holdouts were ABC, CBS and CNN.

[FreedomNotSafety]

"Democrats, traditionally the masters of field organizing, had dismissed the Republican effort as an exercise in self-delusion, insisting that volunteers could never build a turnout model to compete with professional organizers."

Arrogance. Us pubs (small biz owners, entrepreneurial, educated, religious, hardworking) could not out perform a bunch of dimocratic organizers? Of course our private charity efforts are not as good as the pros in government either. Capitalism cant feed people. Guns dont lower crime...yada yada yada. ARROGANCE.

[Darkwolf377]

I wonder if the Dems will see the ironies in their defeat. The party that claims to be for the little guy HIRED their help, while the "little guys" volunteered for the Republican GOTV drive. So as the article points out, the ACT crews were Volvo Dems, and what was the result?

The same as what's happened all over in the post-FDR decades--people don't feel they have to DO anything, that's someone else's job, they're getting paid for it, afterall.

So how much you wanna bet they go do the exact same thing next time?

[Darkwolf377]

"Why do you do this to me?'' He stared at Lindenfeld. ''Why do you hate freedom?'' ''This is the end of the United States of America,'' I heard one man declare as he left the room."

Does it ever occur to these people that this attitude is, uh, screwy?

A Democrat friend of mine was grumbling about moving to Europe, and I couldn't help but say to him, "You Democrats have the nerve to wonder why people don't think you're terribly patriotic? An election goes wrong for you and you're all ready to abandon the country you claim you support?"

[HoustonCurmudgeon]

You need to read this and see how closely it tracks what I told you before the election.