Reply #13: Net change from 2000, in other words, = 0.

[BurtWorm]

My sense is that Bush will retain his core but could lose enough at the periphery if the Dems attack there. Make the periphery lose the will to bother to vote.

Here is the math: in 2000, only 40% of eligible voters voted. Of those, 48% went for Bush, and 48+% went for Gore. If you assume that the same 40% vote in this election (and if it follows trends in recent history, it will actually be less than 40%), then Bush will have to score his same numbers plus some of the Gore voters in order to win. But this assumes the 3% who voted for Nader will again not vote for the Dem, which is probably not the case this time around.

Can Bush inspire some of the 60% who haven't been voting to go to the polls? Is terror enough of a reason to vote FOR Bush? I don't know. I doubt it, but it can't be ruled out. But it seems at this stage that Bush will have to work a LOT harder to get non-voters fired up to vote for him. Chances are, they will continue to try to win this at the margins, by working extra hard to shave off Democratic voters through disenfranchisement techniques (like felon scrubs) and intense negative campaigning against the Dem. Their goal, as usual, will be to make the electorate totally sick of the whole campaign. If they succeed, turned off Dem voters will stay home and the automatons who vote Republican will once again depress the shit out of us.

It would be nice to wake up some of those automatons to their humanity. Just enough of them.