Stop it. Just stop with the pointless post-election obsession over issue polling. When a pollster tries to determine why Bush won by asking voters what the most important issues were, and then lists things like the economy, moral values, the Iraq war, the pollster is incorrectly assuming that voters are making their decisions based on issues. In fact, many (most?) voters don't do that at all. They, especially the last-minute swing voters, choose the president based on nebulous factors like which candidate's personality appeals to them most, which gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, which-no, really-they'd rather have a beer with.
Or as a NASCAR driver told one of the network morning shows the week before the election, "I like Bush because he has a firm handshake. He looks you in the eye and he lives on a farm. Kerry lives in a mansion in Massachusetts." All the issue polling in the world will not capture what's going on inside that man's head.
The only really important polling data were the surveys showing that Bush supporters a) generally have beliefs about the world that are simply untrue, including the idea that Saddam was behind 9/11; and b) generally believe that Bush stands for what they want him to stand for, not what he actually stands for. On issue after issue, more Americans oppose Bush's positions than support them. Yet they voted for him anyway.
So let's be honest here: issues don't matter. Facts don't matter. Real-world success and failure don't matter. What matters is marketing and personality. What matters is image. That's it.
I'll share a little anecdote. Just before and after the election I had a couple of conversations with several Republican family members, and I was simply chilled by the extent to which my stereotype of Republicans was confirmed, that stereotype being mostly how ignorant they are of the most basic outlines of recent history and current events. They all had their conservative talking points down, but when asked, for instance, why pre-9/11 Bush was better at fighting terrorism than pre-9/11 Clinton, they simply had no facts at all to bolster their case. We really are in a post-modern, faith-based political climate.
My conversation with my mother was the most instructive, if only because it was the lengthiest: We spoke for more than three hours over the course of several phone calls. This secular, Rockefeller Republican type graduated from an Ivy League school and gets the vast majority of her information about the world from the New York Times. She rarely watches television.
Yet here's all she knew about Kerry: he's wealthy; he windsurfs and snowboards; he was a buffoon for staging a hunting photo op; his wife is mouthy and absurdly claimed to be an African immigrant; toward the end of the campaign he started dropping his g's in order to appear to be a man of the people.
Now, she's not delusional about Bush. Not only does she know that he screwed up post-invasion Iraq, she even readily admitted that he and his entire administration lied about the war in the lead-up. She knows that Bush is largely responsible for turning a massive surplus into a monstrous deficit. She disagrees with Bush's stands on gays and on Roe.
But she doesn't care. In her words, "Bush is a bad president, but he's better than Kerry." Asked what it is about Kerry that's so bad, what specific positions he holds that she doesn't like, what about his Senate record she disagrees with, my mother admitted that she had no idea what Kerry stands for. She couldn't name a single Kerry policy proposal or initiative.
Now, this is partly a Kerry communications problem. Granted. But it's also largely a problem with the trivialization of our media, especially the NYT, which repeatedly put on its front page snarky, condescending articles about Kerry and his valet, Kerry and his rich relatives, Kerry and his brassy political liability of a wife. After a year of election coverage, that was the stuff that stuck in my mother's brain. I can only assume that the great masses of TV-watching conservatives are even less informed.
About Bush, my mother knew she just liked him. For instance, she liked the way, in his press conference the day after the election, he stood up to those pesky reporters who were picking on him. If this is the way my Ivy League-educated mother goes about making her choice for president, our democracy is not just doomed. It's been dead for a while now and we just haven't noticed.
But maybe that's too despairing a thought to dwell on. Maybe we just need to learn the short-term, practical lesson, the one that Rove obviously knows so well: get yourself a good-looking candidate who has a little charm. Don't worry about the issues. Tell a good story, with plenty of conflict between the enemy (domestic or foreign, preferably both) and your guy, cast as the hero. Spin like mad. Go negative, as early and viciously as you can. Image is everything. The reality behind the image doesn't matter.
If Democrats learn these lessons, maybe they'll begin to win elections again. Maybe.