Love Him, Hate Him President

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The new wisdom about this election is that the side that wins will be the one that does a better job of ginning up its base. And while more voters are calling themselves independent, they are voting like partisans. In 2000 and 2002—the election that put Bush in the White House and the one that tested what voters think of his presidency—ticket splitting reached its lowest level in 30 years, according to a study by David Kimball of the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Some suggest this will only get more pronounced.

Laura Stoker, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that as more young voters who grew up during the culture wars that raged from the '60s through the '80s start going to the polls, they will be even more strongly polarized than their parents.

Against this landscape, both sides are focusing on their core supporters. Republicans are signing up those who share their values but haven't registered, in particular chasing young, mobile Evangelicals with a message aimed straight at their hearts. "It's the heavy, heavy red-meat stuff," says a top Republican activist. On the Democratic side, Dean's rise to the top of the heap is not so much the raising up of an obscure ex-Governor from a tiny state as it is evidence that a candidate can ride the tidal wave of Democratic indignation. The Democratic base still burns with resentment at what they saw as Bush's theft of the 2000 election. With his barely concealed anger and his transparent disdain for Bush, Dean is, in fact, the Hate Him candidate, the one Democrat who has been able to channel the rancor many hard-core Democrats feel toward the President.

Republicans have no better asset with their base than Bush himself, and in gubernatorial elections in Kentucky and Mississippi three weeks ago, they gave their strategy a test drive. Bush swooped into both states the weekend before the election, and after he spoke, 2,500 volunteers were loaded on buses, given cold water and sandwiches and sent to precincts to knock on doors. Armed with pdas that had been fed over the course of the campaign with precise information about the interests of those on the other side of the doors, the volunteers came prepared with individualized talking points. In some Republican counties, turnout was up more than 200% over the last election. In mobilizing the Republican base, Bush is the party's principal and all-purpose weapon.

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