Ben Wattenberg, an author, a PBS television commentator and a professed neoconservative who vainly urged his fellow Democrats to court the nation’s centrist voters at a time when the party was moving to the left, died Sunday in Washington. …
In 1970, long before computer-generated models singled out soccer moms and Nascar dads as pivotal groups that national parties needed to target, Mr. Wattenberg and a co-author, Richard M. Scammon, a former Census Bureau director, wrote in “The Real Majority” that the quintessential voter who needed to be won over was a 47-year-old homemaker from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband was a machinist. CONT.
Sam Roberts, New York Times