Political Analyses in the Press Here are a few recent articles from the current Press that give interesting analyses of society and politics. They are given here as links. Special Topics Globalization Hurricanes Katrina & Rita Network & Dimensional Analysis in Public Affairs   Articles from The Los Angeles Times July 24, 2005. By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, Parties Are Tracking Your Habits. Though both Democrats and Republicans collect personal information, the GOP's mastery of data is changing the very nature of campaigning. COLUMBUS, Ohio — At first glance, Felicia Hill seems to fit the profile of a loyal Democrat: She is African American, married to a General Motors union worker and voted for Dukakis, Clinton and Gore in past presidential elections. But in the weeks before election day 2004, the suburban mother of two was deluged with telephone calls, invitations and specially targeted mailings urging her to support President Bush. The intense Republican courtship of Hill, 39, was no coincidence. A deeper look at her lifestyle and politics reveals a voter who might be persuaded to switch sides. Among the clues: she is a church member uneasy about abortion; she lives in a growing suburb and she sent her children to a private school. ...For the first time, she sees the GOP as a place where black women can be comfortable. "I saw people I could relate to," she said, describing conversations she had with Republican professional women during telephone outreach calls and at party events. ...Hill and millions of other would-be Bush backers in closely contested states were identified by a GOP database that culled information ranging from the political basics, like party registration, to the personal, such as the cars they drive, the drinks they buy, even the features they order on their phone lines. The "micro-targeting" effort was so effective that the party credited it with helping to secure Bush's reelection. November 4, 2004. By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Bush Snags Much More of the Latino Vote, Exit Polls Show. His 7 percentage-point gain in support over 2000 is a strategic political win. But the constituency's support is considered 'volatile.' President Bush increased his support among Latino voters in Tuesday's election, helping to dash Democratic hopes of victory while increasing the potential political leverage of the rapidly growing constituency. Articles from Nature 26 February 2004.  Opinion polling: Taking the voters' pulse. Political strategies and careers are built and broken on the results of opinion polls. But polls' apparently small margins of error can hide large uncertainties. Tony Reichhardt surveys the issues. Articles from The New Republic Post date 09.07.04 | Issue date 09.13.04. by Noam Scheiber, Black Hat Trick: Why Bush Loves Orthodox Jews. A recent poll of Jewish Americans found that 75 percent prefer Kerry, pretty much the same number that favored Gore. ...But even strategists close to the administration concede it's unlikely Bush will perform more than five or ten points better than the poll indicates. "Seventy to seventy-five percent of the Jewish vote is off the table to Bush," admits one. The issue, these strategists claim, is not whether Bush wins 30 percent of the national Jewish vote. It's whether he picks off five or ten percentage points in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania--states where Jews tilted strongly toward Gore and Lieberman in 2000 and where a few thousand votes could mean the difference between a second term and a one-way ticket to Crawford. Post date 06.26.02 | Issue date 07.01.02 Jonathan Chait  Are Swing Voters a Myth?  One day last month Democratic pollster Mark Penn unveiled the new swing voters whose allegiance will shape American politics this November and beyond: "office park dads." Immediately a demographic star was born. "Politically pampered `soccer moms' are being elbowed aside," began a story in USA Today. ... Office park dads are only Penn's latest creation. A mere two years ago he declared the election would be decided by another group: "wired workers." They, too, elicited much media fanfare. ... Eerier still, it turns out both classes of swing voters embrace the very political philosophy Penn was urging Democrats to adopt long before he discovered either group.  Though much imitated, Penn is the unacknowledged master of this particular form of ideological-demographic bait and switch. In contemporary American politics the preferences of swing voters take on great importance, whereas the preferences of reliably partisan groups are often consigned to the sidelines. The trick, therefore, is to find some segment of the electorate whose philosophy jibes with your own, and then define it as the swing vote. Post date 07.26.01; Issue date 08.06.01.  Jason Zengerle.  Whitening Black Districts.  In the last round of redistricting, ten years ago, Southern Republicans allied with black Democrats to create majority-minority districts in several states. The result was twofold: First, several Southern states elected black representatives for the first time in generations. Second, by concentrating black voters in a few areas and diluting their presence everywhere else, the GOP made dramatic congressional gains: By 1995 Republicans had picked up 27 seats in the South, gaining a majority in the region for the first time since Reconstruction. As a result, this time around Democratic redistricting efforts are focusing on "unpacking" some of the majority-minority districts created in 1990--that is, taking just enough minority voters out of these districts to make neighboring Republican ones competitive, while still keeping the "black" districts safe for their incumbents and for future minority candidates. Democrats think such unpacking could help them gain or retain seats in Georgia, Mississippi, and maybe Alabama. But, as the effort to unpack North Carolina's Twelfth District shows, it's no easy task. February 15, 1999.  Peter Beinart, Private Matters.   Why we can thank two unlikely coconspirators-- feminists and the Christian right--for making the personal political. October 19, 1998.  Peter Beinart, Battle for the 'Burbs.  Olathe, Kansas, used to be a small farming town. Now it is a sprawling suburb, a place where the uncertainties of modern life meet the memory of a rural past. The result: the Christian right. Articles from The New Yorker July 5, 2004. By Katherine Boo, The Best Job In Town; The Americanization of Chennai. One Monday this spring, a forty-three-year-old salesclerk at the Home Depot in Plano, Texas, scribbled some updates onto an old resume and took it to his local copy shop. To his education and work history-a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and technology, service in the U.S. Marine Corps-he added a recent moonlighting job as a handyman and a new "career objective." Ten minutes later, in southern India, a middle-aged Hindu man in a cavernous workplace began to type the Home Depot clerk's words. A prevailing fiction in the Indian office was that the dozens of "document specialists" doing American work didn't actually register the content of the resumes, funeral programs, pro-se lawsuits, and erotic manifestos sent to them over broadband from store counters with "While-U-Wait" signs. Rather, the document specialists were to type, format, proofread, and zap things back while maintaining an exquisite blankness of mind. But American resumes, as much as American erotica, caused an inconvenient upwelling of emotion. "To secure a position at a company that would utilize my skills and provide an opportunity for advancement": row upon row of typing Indians recognized the Plano clerk's yearning as their own. Articles from The New York Times March 12, 2006, By Patrick Radden Keefe. Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists? During the last decade, mathematicians, physicists and sociologists have advanced the scientific study of networks, identifying surprising commonalities among the ways airlines route their flights, people interact at cocktail parties and crickets synchronize their chirps. In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are "nodes," and relationships and interactions form the "links" binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. Researchers are applying newly devised algorithms to vast databases — one academic team recently examined the e-mail traffic of 43,000 people at a large university and mapped their social ties. Given the difficulty of identifying elusive terror cells, it was only a matter of time before this new science was discovered by America's spies. November 15, 2005. By Jim Rutenberg, Voter Profiles for Bloomberg Went Beyond Ethnic Labels. Throughout this year's mayoral campaign, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's spending records included something called "voter list development." It looked ominous to Democrats - especially as Mr. Bloomberg poured millions into it. Lists like this usually include voters' personal data - the magazines they buy, the cars they drive, their political affiliations. But as the cost of compiling Mr. Bloomberg's list inched up toward $10 million, not even aides to President Bush, who perfected this sort of voter identification last year, could figure out where the money was going. November 14, 2005. By Ruy Teixiera, The Battle for the Exurbs. For some time now, conservatives have tended to see America's exurbs - those fast-growing counties at the fringes of metropolitan areas populated by legions of young families - as a source of Republican strength that will, over time, turn the Democrats into a permanent minority party. George W. Bush's strong showing in the exurbs in 2004 seemed to validate the thesis. When it comes to understanding exurban voters, Republicans just seemed to "get it." But do they really? In the Virginia governor's race, Jerry Kilgore - a Republican who ran a bruising, culture-war-driven campaign against his Democratic opponent, Timothy Kaine - lost quintessential exurban Loudoun County, one of the fastest growing counties in America, by 51 percent to 46 percent. In contrast, John Kerry lost the county to Mr. Bush in 2004 by 56 percent to 44 percent. And even Mark Warner, Mr. Kaine's Democratic predecessor, lost Loudoun in 2001. October 30, 2005. By Adam Nagourney, Putting It Back Together Again. George W. Bush and Karl Rove came to Washington with the boldest of ambitions: to overhaul the nation's political architecture, establishing Republicans as the indisputable majority party for a generation or more. It was a meticulously conceived plan: broaden the Republican base, strip moderates away from the Democrats, even make incursions with such solidly Democratic constituencies as African-Americans. But a White House that has prided itself in thinking in broad historical strokes found itself struggling to keep afloat through the news cycle, as it confronted the indictment of a senior White House aide and a failed Supreme Court nomination. After "this disastrous year for Republicans," in the words of the G.O.P. consultant Joe Gaylord, some Republicans were suggesting this White House would be lucky to revive the ambitious legislative agenda Mr. Bush presented 10 months ago, much less achieve the permanent Republican governing coalition that many argued began to take shape with the election of Ronald Reagan. April 3, 2005. By Thomas L. Friedman. It's a Flat World, After All. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. December 6, 2004. By Katharine Q. Seelye, How to Sell a Candidate to a Porsche-Driving, Leno-Loving Nascar Fan. After the 2000 presidential campaign, strategists for President Bush came to a startling realization: Democrats watch more television than Republicans. So by buying millions of dollars' worth of television advertising time, Republicans were spending their money on audiences that tended to vote Democratic. What to do? With the luxury of four years until the next election, the Bush team examined voters' television-viewing habits and cross-referenced them with surveys of voters' political and lifestyle preferences. This led to an unusual step for a presidential campaign: it cut the proportion of money that it put into broadcast television and diverted more to niche cable channels and radio, where it could more precisely reach its target audience. November 19, 2004. By Adam Nagourney, Bush Campaign Manager Views the Electoral Divide. After two years of polling, market testing and up-close demographic scrutiny of American voters, the manager of President Bush's re-election campaign, Ken Mehlman, offered another way Thursday to view the divide between the American electorate. "If you drive a Volvo and you do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat," Mr. Mehlman told an assembly of the nation's Republican governors here. "If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for George Bush." ...Rather than dispatching troops to knock on doors in neighborhoods known to be heavily Republican, Mr. Mehlman said, the Bush campaign studied consumer habits in trying to predict whom people would vote for in a presidential election. "We did what Visa did," Mr. Mehlman said. "We acquired a lot of consumer data. What magazine do you subscribe to? Do you own a gun? How often do the folks go to church? Where do you send your kids to school? Are you married? "Based on that, we were able to develop an exact kind of consumer model that corporate America does every day to predict how people vote - not based on where they live but how they live," he said. "That was critically important to our success." November 17, 2004. By David D. Kirkpatrick, Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion. Bested by a Republican campaign emphasizing Christian faith, some Democrats are scrambling to shake off their secular image, stepping up efforts to organize the "religious left" and debating changes to how they approach the cultural flashpoints of same-sex marriage and abortion. ...Many conservative Christians who vote Republican because of their views on abortion and same-sex marriage are working class or middle class, and they often hold liberal views on economics, social welfare and the environment, said John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who conducts polls on religion and politics. But to reach religious voters, Mr. Green said, the Democrats "have their work cut out for them." November 15, 2004. By Robin Toner. Southern Democrats' Decline Is Eroding the Political Center. The once mighty Southern Democrats are an increasingly endangered species on Capitol Hill. ...Their dwindling numbers, analysts say, could intensify the divisions on Capitol Hill. The retirement of senators like John B. Breaux of Louisiana means "you're losing moderate Democrats who could work across the aisle," said Larry Evans, a professor of government and an expert on Congress at the College of William and Mary. "And what you're left with is a more polarized Senate." That could mean "more partisan conflict, more infighting, the minority being more reliant on the filibuster and the hold," Professor Evans said. [see Graphic] November 9, 2004. By Kirk Johnson, Hispanic Voters Declared Their Independence. ...Mr. Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, more than any Republican presidential candidate in at least three decades. That tally, more than 10 percentage points higher than he received in 2000, shattered the Democrats' hopes that a growing Hispanic population would help Mr. Kerry in Colorado or New Mexico, or perhaps even Florida. Few experts say they believe Mr. Bush has achieved a seismic shift of the sort that Ronald Reagan brought about in the early 1980's in winning over blue-collar white voters. A clear majority of Hispanics, after all, still voted for Mr. Kerry. What is unquestionably clear, those experts say, is that like the great Latino wave in pop culture, which has more and more influence in areas like music, food and fashion, this election has taken Hispanic voters a giant leap away from being thought of as separate and different. A reliable Democrat no longer, taken for granted no longer - and more electable than ever in their own right, with the first two Hispanic United States senators in 30 years poised to take office, from Colorado and Florida - a new swing voter may have emerged. [see Chart] November 9, 2004. By David Brooks, Take a Ride to Exurbia. ...On the one hand, people move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality. That's bourgeois. On the other hand, they are taking a daring leap into the unknown, moving to towns that have barely been built, working often in high-tech office parks doing pioneering work in biotech and nanotechnology. These exurbs are conservative but also utopian - Mayberrys with BlackBerrys. The Republicans won in part because Bush and Rove understand this culture. November 7, 2004. By Marjorie Connelly, How Americans Voted: A Political Portrait. A Lot like last time, only more so: That is the picture that emerges of George W. Bush's winning majority in the 2004 presidential election. He held on to the votes of most of the groups that supported him in 2000, while making inroads among a few that did not. Most men, whites, Protestants, regular churchgoers, high earners, conservatives and, naturally, most Republicans voted for Mr. Bush. Women, blacks, Hispanics, young voters, the lower paid, moderates, liberals and, of course, Democrats gave John Kerry a majority of their votes. See Graphic here. November 4, 2004. By Elisabeth Bumiller, Turnout Effort and Kerry, Too, Were G.O.P.'s Keys to Victory. In the closing hours of President Bush's campaign for re-election, Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, was obsessed with turning out Republican votes. Late on Monday night, Mr. Rove stood in the cold at a rally in Albuquerque and pulled scraps of paper from his pocket covered with numbers that reassured him that his ground army was in full assault. October 11, 2004. By Jim Dwyer, Among Black Voters, a Fervor to Make Their Ballots Count. ...Many African-Americans are speaking about the fundamental act of voting this year with rekindled fervor, throwing a high-wattage backlight behind the issues and personalities of the campaign. The disqualified ballots, excluded voters and contentious ending of the 2000 election - when black precincts in Florida had votes rejected at three times the rate of white precincts - have formed a galvanizing memory. October 9, 2004. By Peter Steinfels. Under God, but divisible: Where different categories of Christians stand on social issues. Ever wonder where Bible-believing, church-attending evangelical Protestants stand on taxing the rich to help the poor? Or whether Latino Catholics have grown more or less favorable toward legal abortion over the last 12 years? Or what single religious group has grown more negative toward gay rights during that period? For some time, the go-to guy for answers to such questions has been John C. Green, professor of political science at the University of Akron and director of its Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics. Recently, Professor Green released a report, "The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004." It stemmed from the Fourth Annual National Survey of Religion and Politics. September 28, 2004. By David M. Halbfinger, At Bush Events, Tickets Come With a Catch. Want to see the president when he comes to your town? Get in line - to make phone calls for his campaign. President Bush's campaign aides say they have hit on a novel way to recruit volunteers for his get-out-the-vote army. Anyone wanting to attend one of Mr. Bush's campaign rallies, anywhere in the country, has to get a ticket first. And anyone wanting a ticket, or a coveted spot up front, can improve his chances by putting in a few hours at a phone bank, canvassing Republican homes or putting up lawn signs. Campaign rallies may be as old as politics itself, but in this year of earliests, firsts and most-expensive-evers, the Bush campaign has taken this most basic form of communication to a new state of the art, by pressing audiences to work as foot soldiers, before, during and immediately after Bush events. July 18, 2004. By Jim Rutenberg, Campaigns Use TV Preferences to Find Voters. When deciding where to run his television advertisements, President Bush is much more partial than Senator John Kerry to crime shows like "Cops," "Law & Order" and "JAG." Mr. Kerry leans more to lighter fare, like "Judge Judy," "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "Late Show with David Letterman." Those choices do not reflect either man's taste in television, but critical differences in the advertising strategies of their campaigns, which are spending more money for commercials than any other campaigns in presidential history. Crime shows appeal to the Bush campaign because of its interest in reaching out to Republican men who are attracted to such programming. By contrast, the Kerry campaign is more interested in concentrating on single women, who tend to be drawn to shows with softer themes. April 7, 2004. By Joyce Purnick, Data Churners Try to Pinpoint Voters' Politics. There's this great story making the Washington political rounds about the Conservative Party in Britain. It is that fund-raisers in London found a strong correlation between Conservative Party donors and people who buy garden bulbs by mail. Far-fetched? Maybe not, because people who plant spring bulbs tend to be more suburban and rural than urban, more wealthy than poor and, with time to garden, older. Hence, a likely Conservative, right? April 6, 2004. By Joyce Purnick, Foraging For Votes: One-Doorbell-One-Vote Tactic Re-emerges in Bush-Kerry Race. They call it the ground war. And as anticipated, it is back after a long hiatus, subtly changing politics as we know it. Or trying to. After decades of playing poor relation to television advertising, grass-roots politics has become a campaign star this year, as many political pros predicted it would be in the aftermath of the Bush-Gore face-off of 2000. And today it ranges from old-fashioned shoe leather to Web technology that can make a precinct captain of anyone with a computer. Outsourcing, Offshore Manufacturing, Unemployment, and Politics July 4, 2004, Sunday Magazine. By Ted C. Fishman, The Chinese Century. China is everywhere these days, influencing our lives as consumers, providers, citizens. It has by far the world's most rapidly changing large economy, and our reactions to it shift just as quickly. China is at one moment our greatest threat, the next our friend. It siphons off American jobs; it is essential to our competitive edge. China is the world's factory floor, and it is the world's greatest market opportunity. March 4, 2004. By Thomas L. Friedman, Small and Smaller. I confess: I missed this revolution. I was totally focused on 9/11 and Iraq. But having now spent 10 days in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, I realize that while I was sleeping, the world entered the third great era of globalization. The first era, from the late 1800's to World War I, was driven by falling transportation costs, thanks to the steamship and the railroad. That was Globalization 1.0, and it shrank the world from a size large to a size medium. The second big era, Globalization 2.0, lasted from the 1980's to 2000, was based on falling telecom costs and the PC, and shrank the world from a size medium to a size small. Now we've entered Globalization 3.0, and it is shrinking the world from size small to a size tiny. That's what this outsourcing of white-collar jobs is telling us — and it is going to require some wrenching adjustments for workers and political systems. January 6, 2004. By Dan Hurley. On Crime as Science (a Neighbor at a Time). Dr. Felton Earls and his colleagues argue that the most important influence on a neighborhood's crime rate is neighbors' willingness to act, when needed, for one another's benefit, and particularly for the benefit of one another's children. And they present compelling evidence to back up their argument... In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in the journal Science, and in a subsequent study in The American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most major crimes were linked not to "broken windows" but to two other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what he calls [...] collective efficacy. August 8, 2003. By Lynette Clemetson. Younger Blacks Tell Democrats To Take Notice. Some Democratic strategists fear what may be a growing problem: The party is perilously out of touch with a large swath of black voters - those 18 to 35 years old who grew up after the groundbreaking years of the civil rights movement. It is a group too important and complex to ignore, many strategists caution, when analysts are predicting another close election. Democrats have traditionally counted on more than 90 percent of the black vote. Blacks 18 to 35 make up about 40 percent of the black voting-age population, but turnout among young blacks was so low in the 2000 elections that they made up only 2 percent of the entire vote. November 10, 2002. By David Brooks. Time to Meet the Exurban Voter. These suburban counties are heavily populated with the people [some analysts] argue are the core of the coming Democratic majority: minorities, union members and highly educated, highly affluent doctors, lawyers and members of the media elite. The problem for Ms. [Kathleen Kennedy] Townsend was that these were the only counties she carried. She lost the rural areas and was crushed in the fast-growing exurban counties, beyond the metropolitan areas, like Frederick County, north of Washington, and Harford County, north of Baltimore. [NY Times] October 28, 2002. By Tamar Jacoby. A Voting Bloc Without A Party.  Poll after poll shows Hispanics dividing roughly into thirds when asked if they are liberal, conservative or middle of the road. Most look first to government to solve the problems of their community - a fundamentally liberal inclination. They are more conservative than most Americans when it comes to social issues like abortion and homosexuality, but they invariably place more importance on bread-and-butter issues like education and the economy. And the Pew poll, like others before it, shows that partisan affiliation rarely runs deep. ... The courtship by both parties can only intensify in coming elections. November 3, 2001.  By Alexander Stille.  Suddenly, Americans Trust Uncle Sam.  The titles of the new releases say it all: "The Trouble with Government," "Disaffected Democracies" and "Why People Don't Trust Government." This fall a host of new books with a variety of new theories tried to explain a well-established, generation-long trend: Americans' steadily declining trust in government. Then September's terrorist attacks turned prevailing ideas about people's faith in their political institutions upside down, along with so much else. October 29, 2000.  By David Firestone, Drive Under Way to Raise Turnout of Black Voters.  On black radio stations and in newspapers, from pulpits to mailboxes to answering machines, Democrats and civil rights organizations have begun an effort of unprecedented size to increase the turnout of black voters in next month's presidential election. In several close states, Vice President Al Gore's chances may hinge on the effort's effectiveness. October 22, 2000.  By James Dao, Single-Issue Groups Double Efforts.  With the race too close to call, [single-issue] groups - including the rifle association, evangelical churches, labor unions and environmentalists - are mobilizing their members to make phone calls, knock on doors, distribute leaflets and post yard signs for their chosen candidates. [...] "Grass-roots organizing will be critical this year," said Prof. Donald Green, a political scientist at Yale University who has studied voter mobilization. "There are razor-thin margins in several key states. And any number of these states could be won by just a percentage point or two." September 3, 2000.  By Richard L. Berke, For Last Dance, Candidates Eye The Wallflower.  Of the 148 million registered voters, 103 million are expected to vote. Of those, an estimated 5 million are undecided. But if this pool is further narrowed to include undecided voters in important battleground states, the actual number of voters that both camps -- and to a lesser degree the third-party contenders -- are fighting over may be fewer than one million. That is minuscule, especially when contrasted with a voting-age population of more than 205 million.  "That's the gold," said John Zogby, a pollster who is not affiliated with either party. "Kind of sobering, isn't it? Three-quarters of a million to a million voters in 10 states." August 27, 2000.  By Michael R. Kagay.  The Mystery of Nonvoters and Whether They Matter. What if they gave an election and everyone came?  There would be profound surprise, for one thing. Turnout in the last three American presidential elections has hovered at around half of the nation's voting-age population, which has prompted a good deal of hand-wringing.  It's obvious that if everyone eligible voted this November, the number of ballots cast would roughly double. But would those 100 million or so additional votes change the outcome for the main contenders, George W. Bush and Al Gore?  The answer is: maybe yes, maybe no. March 25, 2000.  By Robin Toner, Presidential Race Could Turn on Bush's Appeal to Women . Behind much of the political debate in recent weeks, on issues from gun control to education, is an intensifying struggle for the hearts of women, particularly suburban mothers.  Strategists in both parties say the presidential race may well hinge on whether Gov. George W. Bush, who has built his campaign around a promise of "compassionate conservatism," succeeds in holding his own among women, who have voted heavily Democratic in two of the last three presidential elections. October 18, 1999.  Frank Bruni, Minority Voters Dot Bush's Campaign Calendar .  Analysts noted that what might at first glance seem like an excessively optimistic bid to chip off some of the Democratic Party's most dependable voting blocs is also a vehicle to another goal, perhaps more attainable and arguably more pivotal in determining who becomes the next president.  Bush's overtures to minorities -- the physical and visual complement to his oratorical slogan of compassionate conservatism -- is his most powerful signal to swing voters that he occupies enough territory near the center of the political spectrum to warrant their allegiance.  [...]  Political strategists said that some of the overlapping groups of voters who may snap to attention -- and could well decide the presidential contest of 2000 -- are women, Roman Catholics and suburban residents. May 4, 1999.  Alison Mitchell, Two Parties Prepare for Biggest Battle Yet in Fight for Suburbs.  Anyone perplexed by the amount of time Vice President Al Gore has recently devoted to traffic jams and suburban sprawl should consider this: Fifty years ago fewer than a quarter of Americans lived in the suburbs; now roughly half do. Every 10 years, another 10 members of Congress represent predominantly suburban districts. Stories from Public Broadcasting System [PBS] October 12, 2004. Gender Politics. Women voters are a major target for President Bush and Senator Kerry's presidential campaigns. Two partisan pollsters discuss the importance of women voters in the presidential election. Articles from The Washington Post November 7, 2004. By Dan Balz and Mike Allen, Four More Years Attributed to Rove's Strategy. Despite Moments of Doubt, Adviser's Planning Paid Off. Admired, disparaged, respected and feared, [Karl] Rove joins an elite cadre of political strategists who can claim two presidential victories. Bush's adviser can now look toward the goal he has pursued since he was an obscure direct-mail specialist in Texas: the creation of a durable Republican majority in Washington and across the country. November 4, 2004. By John F. Harris, Victory Bears Out Emphasis on Values. GOP Tactics Aimed At Cultural Divide. ...The results appeared to validate several of the pet theories of [GOP campaign director Karl] Rove, including his belief that politics is as much science as art. Presidential stops in swing states, and the route of campaign bus trips, rarely included the largest cities. That was because Rove chose them scientifically, using three criteria that he explained to reporters in the waning days of the campaign. Rove said his targets were areas where Bush had underperformed in 2000, whether Republican or Democratic, and where the campaign's target for votes was higher than the number that showed up. Second were fast-growing exurban areas or Republican places where there were a large number of people who ought to register to vote and do not -- what Rove calls "a large gap between participation and potential." Third, he said, he paid attention to areas "that have a significant number of swing voters, and swing wildly from election to election." October 7, 2004. By George F. Will, GOP Power Plan: Why Democrats fear Bush's domestic agenda. If Sept. 11 had never happened -- if debate about domestic policy had not been drowned out by the roar of war -- the potential domestic ramifications of this election would give it unusual nation-shaping power. To understand why is to understand some of the Democratic rage about the specter of a second term for George W. Bush. He has a multifaceted agenda for weakening crucial components of the Democratic Party, factions that depend on cosseting by the federal government. November 10, 2002. In GOP Win, a Lesson in Money, Muscle, Planning. [Karl] Rove, [Rep. Tom] DeLay and others concluded that Republicans had lost the turnout battle in recent elections by focusing too much on paid advertising and too little on the ground war that Democratic allies such as the AFL-CIO do so well: getting potential voters to the polls. Beginning in early 2001, the party registered thousands of new Republican voters, particularly in fast-growing states. It invested heavily in a program, dubbed the "72-hour project," that would later help spur record turnout in key regions. The Republican National Committee spent millions of dollars honing a system to identify voters, down to specific households, and contact them repeatedly with phone calls, mail and visits from party activists. September 28, 2001.  By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, Poll: Americans' Trust in Government Grows.  For the first time in three decades, a majority of Americans now say they trust the federal government to "do what is right" – a stunning but perhaps temporary reversal in the way that citizens view their government, elected leaders and political institutions, according to a new Washington Post survey. August 31, 2000. Robert G. Kaiser. Academics Say It's Elementary: Gore Wins.  For one group of political scientists who study U.S. elections, Campaign 2000 is effectively over. And the winner is . . . Vice President Gore, narrowly but clearly. Or so their mathematical formulas conclude. June 15, 2000.  Richard Morin, On Pins and Needles.  For [Robert] Putnam, the dwindling percentage of Americans who bowl in a league is the perfect metaphor for the sharp decline of civic involvement. Everywhere he looks, America's once vast reservoir of social capital is emptying. Fewer and fewer people bother to vote. Per capita charitable giving has plunged. Proportionally fewer Americans spend a social evening with friends today than they did just a decade or two ago.  If much of this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Putnam is the social scientist whose essay "Bowling Alone" exploded into the public consciousness in 1995. A year later, parts of it exploded in his face. Articles from the Weekly Standard October 11, 2004. by Jeffrey Bell & Frank Cannon, The Rise of the Values Voter. If you had to pick a single reason why the Democratic party is weaker at all levels than at any time in the last 50 years, it is the transformation of moral-values issues into an overwhelming Republican asset. In recent presidential cycles, post-election polling found that social issues like abortion, while invariably a mild plus for Republicans, were cited by a relatively small segment of the electorate as a prime motive for voting one way or the other. Moreover, social conservatism was seen as good in the South and heartland and bad on the coasts, making it dubious as a national theme or as a subject of campaign commercials. Conventional wisdom among GOP political consultants has been to mobilize socially conservative voters by a stealth strategy of quietly "passing the word" to "our people." New polling by Time and MSNBC/Knight-Ridder suggests that all this has changed. The proportion of voters who say they are keying their vote on "moral values issues like gay marriage and abortion" has gone up sharply--to a level of 15 to 18 percent, according to five national polls commissioned by Time and conducted by Schulman, Ronca, and Bucuvalas since July. More important, the profile of such voters is no longer definable in the vocabulary of polarization and divisiveness. The most recent Time poll (taken September 21-23) has George W. Bush winning socially driven voters by a lopsided 70 to 18 percent. If not for these voters, according to the poll, Bush would be trailing John Kerry by 5 points instead of leading by 4. Articles from Yahoo News October 6, 2004. By Ellen Wulfhorst, Catholics Courted in Presidential Election. (Reuters) - Heading into the final weeks of the U.S. presidential race, Republicans are making headway with America's Roman Catholics, who comprise about a quarter of the population and once were considered die-hard Democrats, polls show. That Republican progress stems from an unprecedented effort to court Catholics, which is no easy task as they are not easily pigeon-holed nor vote as a cogent group, experts say.