Dems Court the Wrong Voters...Again

Peter Brown writes at RealClearPolitics about the Dems failure to connect with white middle class voters, and their insistence on courting the wrong groups election after election:

In the last 40 years, Republicans have won seven of the past 10 presidential elections. They have held control of Congress for most of the past decade.

Every four years, it seems, the Democratic establishment finds another way to explain why they have lost without conceding the obvious.

They are unable to win enough votes from the largest demographic group -- white, mostly middle-class, voters to get over the top.

John Kerry won about 41 percent of white votes in 2004, broke even among voters with family incomes of $30,000-$50,000 and got just 44 percent of those with incomes of $50,000-$100,000.

This is a 40-year pattern, which has led Democrats to seek a way around, rather than to confront, their problem with Middle America.

In the 1970's, the Democrats courted the counter-culture.

In the 1980s the push was among African-Americans. Jesse Jackson's two runs for the White House, Democrats hoped, would spur an outpouring of black voters.

In the 1990s, the gender gap was the rage, and in fact Bill Clinton's presidencies were fueled disproportionately by women voters.

In 2004, their focus was on young voters who would be so put off by the Iraq war they would turn out in droves to throw W out of office.

It didn't happen.

Bush was re-elected, even though more young people voted. But the Democratic turnout effort created a climate in which the Republicans energized even more of their troops.

Now, Democratic strategists have settled on unmarried voters for 2006 and 2008.
Women's Voices has produced an 80-plus page report being embraced throughout the party that correctly notes that unmarried people are less likely to vote than their married counterparts. In 2004, Bush carried the 63 percent of voters who were married by a 57-42 percent margin. He lost among the 37 percent who were single by 58-40 percent.

It goes into great detail about how unmarried people are likely to be poorer and more alienated than their married counterparts - with the obvious implication that these are prime Democratic targets.

And, no doubt they are, except for a big chunk of the group, single white men, who are probably the most Republican of all demographic groups.

Republican turn-out-the-vote campaigns have always been highly effective, mainly because they are better able to identify those voters more likely to vote Republican, and don't waste much effort trying to woo voters that aren't going to respond. The Dems, on the other hand, seem to choose a "flavor of the month", and this year's flavor is young singles, a demographic that traditionally doesn't turn out in strong numbers because they just don't care. They were supposed to turn the tide in 2004, and yet when the numbers came in, they didn't turn out in any stronger numbers than they had before.

Given how the Dem party has turned in to a loose-knit collection of special interest groups without any central focus or common collection of beliefs, this strategy will not likely increase their turnout by any significant margin.