… Three demographic groups turbocharged Obama’s 7-percentage-point victory over John McCain in 2008: young voters ages 18-29, Latinos, and African-Americans. Their influx changed the composition of the electorate that year, making it look quite different from the makeup of voters in 2000 and 2004. Whether the 2012 electorate looks more […] Read more »
Why Campaign Reporters Are Behind the Curve
… Over the last decade, almost entirely out of view, campaigns have modernized their techniques in such a way that nearly every member of the political press now lacks the specialized expertise to interpret what’s going on. Campaign professionals have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding what moves votes. […] Read more »
Persuadable Voters
One in four registered voters may be persuadable in the 2012 presidential election – rich pickings if either Barack Obama or newly minted GOP nominee Mitt Romney can win their support. … This evaluation uses a method of identifying persuadable voters based on a model of anxiety and information-gathering developed […] Read more »
Why (and How) Romney is Playing the Race Card
… First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush […] Read more »
Making The Election About Race
The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor. … The importance to the Romney-Ryan ticket of two overlapping constituencies — whites without college degrees […] Read more »
Secret E-Scores Chart Consumers’ Buying Power
… So here’s a new score to obsess about: the e-score, an online calculation that is assuming an increasingly important, and controversial, role in e-commerce. These digital scores, known broadly as consumer valuation or buying-power scores, measure our potential value as customers. What’s your e-score? You’ll probably never know. That’s […] Read more »