Like football, the 2012 election is a game of inches. Heading into
the fall, the presidential election remains close nationally. Every vote
will count.
Enter Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab, which posits that GOTV, or getting out the vote, is where elections are won or lost. According to Issenberg, “microtargeting” is now the byword of successful campaigns. He also observes that American politics is riven by ideological conflict, that policy preferences do matter (particularly among better-educated voters), and that it was not always that way. But The Victory Lab’s subtitle overstates: none of these things are very secret.
For example, the last presidential election won by a landslide was three decades ago, when Ronald Reagan was re-elected with just under 59 percent of the vote. Since then, candidates have struggled to take an actual majority of the popular vote and to win by a margin that does not look like an accident. No candidate since Reagan has enjoyed a winning margin of 10 percent or more.
Putting things into perspective, Barack Obama was the first successful candidate since George H. W. Bush in 1988 to win an absolute majority of the popular vote and a comfortable cushion. Obama beat John McCain by 7.3 points. George H.W. Bush had bested Mike Dukakis 53.3 to 45.6.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obamas-nerds/
Enter Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab, which posits that GOTV, or getting out the vote, is where elections are won or lost. According to Issenberg, “microtargeting” is now the byword of successful campaigns. He also observes that American politics is riven by ideological conflict, that policy preferences do matter (particularly among better-educated voters), and that it was not always that way. But The Victory Lab’s subtitle overstates: none of these things are very secret.
For example, the last presidential election won by a landslide was three decades ago, when Ronald Reagan was re-elected with just under 59 percent of the vote. Since then, candidates have struggled to take an actual majority of the popular vote and to win by a margin that does not look like an accident. No candidate since Reagan has enjoyed a winning margin of 10 percent or more.
Putting things into perspective, Barack Obama was the first successful candidate since George H. W. Bush in 1988 to win an absolute majority of the popular vote and a comfortable cushion. Obama beat John McCain by 7.3 points. George H.W. Bush had bested Mike Dukakis 53.3 to 45.6.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obamas-nerds/
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