Reply #31: I agree that it's worth checking

[ohioan]

But, on its face, it's not all that crazy. Bush has governed like a crazy man, instilling fear, hatred and distrust in voters, ginning up his base and making people think that only he can save them. It's been a sinister strategy, but it worked.

On Sunday night, Bush held a rally for about 30,000 people in Cincinnati. As the rally ended, Kerry people stood on street corners waving signs, etc. The Bush people driving from the event were so hopped up, angry, mean and hateful. They were pumped and ready to get out the vote for Bush - he had gotten them so riled up, it was scary. Interestingly, Bush's margin of victory in that area was about 24,000 votes - just about the number of people he had in that stadium that night. The Bush campaign knows how to get out the vote and they did it.

In the past, Republicans have been terrible at GOTV, but this time, they took full advantage of incumbency, certainty, time and money. They've known for the past 4 years who their nominee was going to be, so they were able to start their GOTV effort years ago. For the past three years, they've been sending in their operatives, setting up shop and running their GOTV like a business in their key states. They even used multi-level marketing like Amway to generate volunteers and coordinate interaction with their potential voters.

In past Republican campaigns, state and county organizations were free to assemble their local efforts any way they liked, the assumption being that they knew more about their own communities than someone in Washington. But now the Bush campaign was sending an altogether different message; word had come down from the national headquarters that Ohio's 88 county chairmen were to form full steering committees in each county by February, and then they needed to show proof that they were busy recruiting a statewide total of 51,000 volunteers, including captains for each of the state's 12,000 voting precincts.
. . .

Traditionally, it was the Democrats who went door-to-door, registering voters while the G.O.P., pressing its significant financial advantage, relied on 30-second ads and paid mailings. But Rove came away from the 2000 election convinced that Bush would have won by a comfortable margin had it not been for Democratic ground forces. (Although Bush won Ohio, his commanding lead in the polls -- 10 points on the final weekend -- drained away to a margin of fewer than 4 points on Election Day, when Democrats turned out in force.) During the midterm elections of 2002, Republicans successfully tested their own turnout strategy, which they called the 72-Hour Project. For 2004, Rove's team has devised the most ambitious grass-roots model in the party's history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/magazine/25GROUNDWAR.html

The Kerry campaign just couldn't match this.

They didn't steal the vote in Ohio - they pounded it out of their base.