Chris Floyd has an interesting piece at RedState on how the media can’t seem to find the many Gore voters turned Bush voters. The 9/11 Democrats aren’t all that hard to find, as the article and subsequent links made clear – unless you’re with the “mainstream” media, in which case they might as well be albino boll weevils in a cotton field.
And therein lies the problem for the media.
There’s the old story of how former New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once exclaimed in 1972 “I don’t know how Nixon could have been elected; nobody I know voted for him.” Like Kael, the liberal media, is, well, liberal. It exists within a comfortable bubble of liberalism in which everyone is as pissed off about Bush as they are. It’s a convenient reality distortion field that colors every aspect of the overwhelming majority of US media workers.
The problem being that if you’re going to offer objective analysis, you can’t do that will living in an insular ideological bubble. Yet that is precisely the way the media operates these days.
Certainly the flood of negativity has hurt Bush recently, and Bush’s poll numbers are well down from where they were. But Bush has yet to have his convention, and the debates are yet to come. It’s far too premature to say that Bush is down for the count. At the same time, one wonders how big a factor these 9/11 Democrats will be. Even if they represent only 1-2% of the electorate, that’s enough to swing a close race, but also a sufficiently small group that they would only register as a statistical blip in polls.
Certainly the Gore voter turned 9/11 Republican is hardly the mythological creature that the press would make it appear to be. It very well could be that the media will be sitting around on November 3 wondering how Bush won when no one in their ideological bubble voted for him.
UPDATE: Judith Weiss has more on the Voters That Shall Not Be Named….
UPDATE: VodkaPundit also notes that even Hollywood has gotten in on the act. Gary Oldman, Gary Sinise, James Woods, Dennis Miller, and Dennis Hopper have all said they’re Bush voters. Could it be that La-La Land is losing it’s loony liberalism?
OK, so probably not. But it’s still nice to see.
(And as an aside, James Woods has personally come face-to-face with Islamic terrorism. He may well have witnessed a dry run by the September 11 hijackers. One can easily see why such an experience would dramatically change one’s worldview.)
What’s interesting about the September 11 Democrats is that they may have radical disagreements with Bush on many other issues. They tend to be economically liberal and socially permissive. But when it comes to the War on Terrorism, they’re as hawkish as anyone. They probably don’t even give Bush a positive rating on many issues, except for the one that may well be Bush’s key to reelection.
It’s plausible that 9-11 Democrats could swing the election, but it seems very unlikely. My suspicion is that most of them hail from uncontested states. Many of them are probably from the South, conservatives still registered as Democrats who haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since Jimmy Carter in 1976. No help for Bush if he wins 15% of Georgia Democrats. Many others are likely to be upper-income social liberals from New York and New Jersey, including a significant slice of the Jewish vote. It would be highly unlikely that Bush could peel off enough Democrats to make any of these Northeastern states turn red.
The 9-11 Democrat factor doesn’t seem to be prominent in the battleground states. Florida is full of upper-income Jews, but polls indicate no shift from where the state stood four years ago. Terrorism consistently ranks in single digits as a primary concern for voters in Middle America, so the only way I suspect a transformation of 9-11 Democrats in most of the battleground states is another terrorist attack. Furthermore, if Bush parades out the hard-right “specifics” of the GOP platform at his RNC acceptance speech like you suggest, many of these 9-11 Democrats could balk.
I’m not sure if the celebrities you list were all Gore voters in 2000, but I’ve James Woods has always been a Democrat. Dennis Miller has always been quite conservative and I know he didn’t vote for Gore. On the surface, the demographic is frightening, but I still believe it represents a small minority in mostly uncontested states. Meanwhile, Kerry is more than making up for them with his sizable advantage among independents.