Bishop's "The Big Sort": On Base-Cranking & Priorities

One thought that warrants putting into the context of Bill Bishop's "The Big Sort" is the impact I fear it could conceivably have on politics. Much of campaigning comes down to prioritization. A candidate only has so much time, campaign workers only have so much time, and there's only so much money to do the communication necessary in the course of a campaign cycle.

Bishop notes Howard Dean's pollster, Paul Maslin, giving the classic case for "cranking the base" ...

If I had to say one true statement about the entire process you are describing, I think that at the national or state level, it's making life increasingly difficult for people who are trying to threat the needle, to find the swing voter. In a way, Karl Rove and Howard Dean and [Dean campaign manager] Joe Trippi were all right here. It's probably one of the things that's driving our politics into a more polarized situation. While the swing vote and the classic vote in the middle still matter, you are much more willing to say now that you ignore at your peril your own base. Because as everything spreads apart, the base becomes more important because they are demographically more together. You don't have a whole bunch of 51-49 communities out there. You have more and more 60-40, 65-35, 70-30 place. Well, you better damn well be sure you maximize your 70-30 votes, whether it's inner-city African-Americans or liberal, educated Democrats or whether it's suburban, conservative Republicans or small-town, main-street, or Evangelical Republicans. We have to maximize our base, and they have to maximize their base. Ergo, polarization.

pg 39-40

Obviously, if you've read this blog for any length of time, you might know that I disagree rather strenuously with that notion. And for starters, allow me to point out that this concept was formulated over the course of a primary campaign ... one that Howard Dean didn't even manage to win despite every method taken and dollar spent to "crank" the liberal base. So it hardly qualifies as expert opinion with a track record like that.

But beyond that objection, there's the matter of how campaigns prioritize things. One bit of inside baseball I'll offer from my own experience: overheard in convo with one candidate (not a client) was that it wasn't worth engaging any of the larger, predominantly Anglo and presumably conservative churches within the district. Ethnic churches, however, were fine. The reason for skipping over the former? "There's no votes there."

Now, if you assume that Church A has attendance of 5,000 voters and you get a third of them, how does that compare to the ethnic church of 500 that you might get three-fourths of? Go ahead, count the votes. The decision-set, however, isn't limited to white churches vs ethnic churches. Such a reasoning finds its way into questions involving precincts, target audiences for mail, and so on. At every step along the way, you're limiting the audience you're talking to. To date, I've yet to see much logic in how limiting the size of your overall audience to address in the course of a campaign ends up helping you actually win. And in the case mentioned above, it didn't.

So my concern with Bishop's thesis is that by stating the phenomenon that he describes in the way he describes it, it seems that there's a high risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Candidate A either reads the book or gets the jist of the idea, acts accordingly, which then becomes a solid case study for verifying the book's thesis.

So, my operating theory as I'm about a third of the way through the book now is this: I think Bishop captures something that's worth exploring here ... I'm just not sure it's his notion that we end up sorting ourselves out in communities that ultimately vote alike, think alike, shop alike, and drive the same vehicle as we swing by the same Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts (depending on the zip code) on the way to work in the morning or evening (depending on voting precinct).

Assuming, of course, we're not sorted into a community of telecommuters.