John LeBoutillier
Monday, Aug. 16, 2004

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  And is this something new?

Well, not quite.

What makes this election close is the increase in the base Republican Party vote. Under the Clinton Administration, the GOP grew and the Democratic Party lost voters so that today the two parties each can lay claim to about 41-43 percent of likely voters.

By the way, this is one of the never-talked-about phenomena of the Clinton Years: when Bill and Hillary took office, their party controlled both houses of Congress, a majority of Governorships and state legislatures.

Then came Hillary’s health care fiasco and the Republicans swept the House and Senate in 1994. Soon the major State Houses began falling into GOP hands as well: New York, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and on and on. Then came the crucial - for Congressional re-districting - state legislatures.

By the end of their tenure, the Clintons - for all their hype and self-congratulations - led the diminution of their own party. Of course, the so-called mainstream media has never reported this accurately.

The result is that by 2000 the Republican Party had grown to majority status in terms of public offices held; and in registration the GOP grew, too, into a party at least equal to the Democrat Party.

So this so-called ‘polarization’ is simply the fact that we now have two parties with approximately equal size and strength. (In the past - Ronald Reagan in 1980 for example - a GOP campaign had to take voters away from the other party in order to win because there were simply more Democrats than Republicans.)

That leads to the key to elections under these circumstance: passion to vote. The party which gets more of its voters to actually vote on November 2 is going to win.

All polling shows about the same thing: President Bush is getting about 86-90 percent of GOP voters and John Kerry has recently - thanks to his convention and more voters becoming aware of him - achieved about the same percentages of Democrat voters.

Yes, there are a handful of ‘undecided’ voters and both campaigns will fight furiously over them. But the key will be getting all of your supporters to vote. And this is where Team Bush has worries. They keep these concerns private but it is known that they are finding in the polling less exuberance for Bush among some of his previous supporters than in 2000; and, correspondingly Team Kerry is discovering that they are riding a white hot tiger of determined Democrat voters who want to remove Bush at all costs.

Tis anti-Bush passion is already manifesting itself in unprecedented fund raising and voter registration. The Bush Campaign has taken note of this and is desperately trying to match Democratic intensity but so far there is a decided lack of corresponding pro-Bush passion among GOP and conservative ranks.

This explains why the President’s campaign continues to spend advertising money on the Fox News Network even though a high percentage of those viewers are already pro-Bush. It is their intensity that worries the Bush campaign. There is an ennui or lack of passion among some of them due to rising gas prices, the stagnant stock market and the war in Iraq.

If just one or two percent of previous Bush voters simply stay home on November 2, Bush will lose. And if one or two percent more Democrats vote - out of their passionate hatred of Bush - then Kerry could actually win a fairly substantial victory.

So we are, as always, a two-party country. The difference is the two parties are about the same size.

It will all come down to the ‘passion differential’ on November 2.