Reply #14: One question that has been on my mind: [View All]

[Goldmund]

There were 40% of eligible voters who did not vote. That's a huge fucking number of voters. I think in a lot of our "how do we win next time" calculations, we are tacitly assuming that these 40% are somehow genetically predisposed to not vote. As if that's a block of country that did not vote, does not vote, and will not vote -- and we're concentrating on changing the minds of some of the 60% who did.

I believe that an integral part of any future strategy has to be an examination of why these 40% of voters did not vote, what their ideological composition is, and how they break down in terms of the reasons they did not vote. Some of them didn't vote because they just don't know or care what's going on. But others didn't vote because they didn't hear enough from the Kerry (or Bush) campaign that turned them on, some didn't hear enough reasons to vote against Bush, and some thought that Kerry and Bush were too similar to make a difference (and didn't vote for Nader because they didn't feel like taking a trip to the voting booth to vote for a losing candidate -- or, they may not have liked Nader at all). And some others didn't vote because they live in "safe" states.

I'm not saying that this should be the alpha and omega of our strategy, but I do think that a research of the non-voting population is a necessary ingredient of deciding where we go from here.