A good read about the MoveOn.org ads featuring
Republicans who won't vote for Bush again..
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040823fa_factSWINGTIME
by PHILIP GOUREVITCH
Former Bush voters advertise their disaffection.
Issue of 2004-08-23
Posted 2004-08-16
Kerry’s most urgent advertising objective is to establish his Presidential credentials in a time of political anxiety and war, and he has run a predominantly positive, self-promoting television campaign, leaving the attack ads to independent political groups. These organizations are called 527s, after Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows them to retain nonprofit status while running partisan ads, as long as they are not in any way coördinated with the parties or candidates they support. After months of fruitless discussions with the Kerry campaign about his ads, Morris concluded that the campaign’s “maybe later” meant never, and he took the idea to Wes Boyd, the co-founder of the most successful and innovative of the 527s, MoveOn.
snip
On July 1st, MoveOn sent out an e-mail and questionnaire seeking “authentic American voices committed to change” to take part in Morris’s campaign. It didn’t explicitly state that Morris was seeking Republican switchers, but the questionnaire was crafted to make converts from Bush to Kerry easily identifiable, and, of the twenty thousand responses MoveOn received, at least five hundred fit the criterion. Two weeks later, when shooting began, in a studio in the Boston suburb of Canton, that number had been winnowed to forty-one men and women from twenty-one states, who were brought before Morris and the Interrotron—ten a day—for interviews that lasted as long as an hour each.
snip
"I think the biggest thing and most important part of this work is the breaking down of stereotypes,” MoveOn’s Wes Boyd told me. “The way that political consultants and therefore leaders look at the electorate is sophomoric—they classify people into these groups, and then they think that what they have to do is slice and dice and then communicate to each of the individual groups. It’s essentially a process of pandering, and that’s not what America should be about.” Instead of treating voters as demographic phenomena to be manipulated and patronized, Boyd said, “this kind of ad campaign brings out how impressive the American people are, and how much we should be listening to them, and how much the stereotypes that are projected onto us all the time are bullshit.” He saw Morris’s ads as “asking people to lay down their partisanship for a second to think about what they really care about.”
snip
Boyd’s assessment is echoed by Tony Fabrizio, of the Republican polling firm Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, who issued a gloomy memorandum last month on Bush’s prospects among swing voters. “Our analysis of ‘undecided’ voters in our most recent Battleground State Survey reveals that they are currently poised to break away from President Bush and to John Kerry based on the following findings,” he wrote. “They are more than twice as likely to see things headed down the wrong track as compared to voters overall. They give President Bush a net negative image rating. They give President Bush a net negative job-approval rating. A solid majority sees the country as being worse off than they were four years ago. They are significantly more pessimistic about the current state of the nation’s economy. They are significantly more pessimistic about their own current financial condition. They are twice as likely to see the number of jobs in their area as decreasing instead of increasing. They are significantly more likely to favor the federal government doing more as opposed to doing less. They are more likely to be pro-choice on the issue of abortion. They are more likely to have seen or heard advertising critical of President Bush than of John Kerry in the past year. John Kerry holds a slight net positive image rating.” In conclusion, Fabrizio wrote, “Clearly if these undecided voters were leaning any harder against the door of the Kerry camp, they would crash right through it . . . which would hand Kerry a lion’s share of these states.”
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