GOP Makes 'Historic' Gains With Minority and Female Voters

GOP Makes 'Historic' Gains With Minority and Female Voters

Susan Jones, CNSNews.com
Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004

Reflecting on President Bush's "historic" election victory, the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign is circulating a memo explaining what the Republicans did right in 2004, and who turned out to vote for President Bush.

"On a strategic and tactical level," Matthew Dowd wrote, "Bush-Cheney '04 and the Republican National Committee helped the president turn out a record number of Republicans and make historic gains among swing groups through an unprecedented volunteer grassroots organization and the most sophisticated advertising and voter-contact strategy in campaign history."

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Exit polling revealed that the Republican Party made historic gains with minority voters and women on Tuesday.

Dowd noted that President Bush won:

42 percent of Hispanics (up from 35 percent in 2000).

11 percent of African-Americans (up from 9 percent in 2000).

24 percent of Jewish voters (up from 19 percent in 2000).

47 percent of women (up from 43 percent in 2000).

Just as Republicans predicted, Dowd wrote, undecided and late-deciding voters went to the President Bush by a small margin (51-48 percent), despite media predictions that those voters would back Sen. John Kerry.

And just as Republicans predicted, Tuesday was the first time in modern political history that an equal number of Republicans and Democrats (37 percent) turned out for a presidential election.

Other numbers from Dowd's strategic analysis:

Bush defeated Kerry by more than 3.5 million votes, 58.6 million to 55.1 million (51-48 percent). In doing so, Bush received the most votes of any presidential candidate in history.

He won the Electoral College 286-252.

He is the first presidential candidate to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote since 1988.

In 2004, Bush received 7 million more popular votes than he did in 2000, more than twice the vote increase President Bill Clinton registered between 1992 and 1996.

Dowd said Bush ran just as strongly in the battleground states as he did nationally. In the 14 most competitive states (Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and West Virginia), Bush won 51 percent of the vote to Kerry's 49 percent, Dowd said.

Republicans accomplished this by "combining traditional shoe-leather, grassroots outreach with an unprecedented online effort to build a network of millions of volunteers who spread the President's message and helped turnout the vote on Election Day," Dowd said.

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