As Noam Scheiber states in his blog at TNR:

"But what I think everyone is overlooking here is the degree to which cultural issues and national security credibility are connected (Ed probably wouldn't disagree with me on this point). In my mind, the most important question swing voters asked themselves when deciding whom to vote for was, "which guy is going to keep me safe." But, in answering this question, they didn't think through the details of how Iraq was going, or how much loose nuclear material the administration had secured, or even how many members of Al Qaeda we've rolled up in the last three years. What they thought about was "which candidate do I trust more: my plain-talking, brush-clearing, evil-denouncing commander-in-chief, or this windsurfing, pate-eating, well-coiffed guy from Massachusetts." Obviously, the answer to that question wasn't very close."

It was a particularly bad strategic plan this year.  Kerry had to demonstrate that he was ready to lead the nation, instead he only tried to convince swing state voters.  

Apart from the apparent failure to increase turnout in the Democratic base in safe states, the failure to run a national campaign prevented Kerry from pushing Bush/Cheney to the tipping point in the national polling.

One of the public perceptions that dogged the Kerry campaign was the widespread belief, even among Democrats, that Kerry could not win.  If he had run a national campaign, and ground down Bush's support in Red States, the national polls would have shown Bush's national support decreasing in line with national approval/disapproval and right track/wrong track polls.

While these polls drove everyone crazy, and continue to perplex, their most important impact is the way in which they are used throughout the campaign to show what the national as a whole is thinking, and the way they are used to portray each campaign in the press/media.  This latter audience is the most poll-obsessed audience in the world, and they react to what they see in the polls when they are slanting their coverage.

This is yet another reason that the DNC needs to clean house.  The mentalities of the electoral puzzle and the mechanical appeals to discrete demographics permeate everything they do.

the Long and short of it is: dub dub won texas by 1.5 million and four other southern states by .6 million each.

15 million (of the 115 million electorate) gave dubdub his 3.5 million popular vote lead.

I hope I hope I hope that Dems via the DNC or whatever the appropriate organization, will have a strategy to organize and focus us next time.  Okay, maybe starting next week.

We need a fire-starter at the helm who understands the need --  and the potential of the internet to empower us all. Dean?

Let's learn a few lessons from the Repub's tight ship.  I don't want to march in Rovian lockstep, but we could at least be in the same parade, couldn't we?

Take for example Bush visit to Britain with the invite of the Royal family, this was a week of coast to coast advertising for Bush, same with NATO meeting and G8 meeting. Domestic issues also kept him in the lime light.

Last week I looked at Steven Freeman's celebrated PDF announcing 250 million to 1 odds against the exit polls veering so sharply in Bush's favor. Freeman is obviously completely ignorant of the partisan index realities, if he embraces numbers like Kerry leading by 10 points in New Hampshire, etc. He not only ignores the partisan index, but also the average of state polls in those states, which come much closer to predicting the actual vote, other than in Florida.

Even when I accepted every exit poll percentage among Freeman's PDF and adjusted the actual vote in those 11 states accordingly, Kerry only gained 1,567,498 votes net. That's less than half the popular vote margin. Bush would still be leading the national vote by 50.67% to 48.99%, even after those adjustents, including 7 states with more than 2 million votes. It was obviously the ignored states that provided Bush the bulk of his margin, and as you say, cushion against controversy.  

But, one clear characterisitc of the campaign was the incessant pro Bush corporate media drum beat which increased the effectiveness of the Bush campain in the "safe" states.

In another thread I mentioned how one of our local news stations keeps up the nightly pro - war, pro - Bush policy equals patriotism message, the propaganda continues night after night.

In the face of a very negative campaign by Bush Kerry was unwilling to go negative and did not attempt to tarnish Bush and his personality and foibles, they felt that would back-fire.

Clinton and Carter among others held that would be the wrong stratagy.

But the critisism that Kerry was overall too timid seems valid. He believed mid year that all he had to do was to preserve his electability, and that would be sufficient to defeat Bush who was nose diving in the polls at that point.

The constant pro Bush corporate media and constant Bush campaign negative attacks against Kerry succeded in turning the numbers around.

Yes, a better more appealing candidate than Kerry could have done better in these circustances in all 50 states.  

So your points are right but again, Kerry had his own limitations and circumstances to deal with.

They obviously felt they did not have the ability to move the numbers in those safe states and electorially made the right decision.

The swing state stratagy, if the votes had not been stolen and supressed, would have been the winning stratagy.

Again, I do not believe the results that have been given to us to date, particularly in Florida and Ohio and there are other states still in doubt like NC and NM.

Your points about running a 50 state campaign as a means of increasing vote everywhere including the swing states is a valid criticism of the Kerry campaign. The presidental race is to a degree a popularity contest and the Bush campaing tarnished Kerry's image.

But I believe our loss comes down to stolen, converted and surpressed votes in the vital swing states and there was little Kerry could do to move the numbers in the safe states.

And these factors in addition to Kerry's timidity to stake out a truely divergent set of policies from those of Bush were limiting factors as well.

What this all really leads to is this;

1. find a candidate next time who is so popular that he/she wins despite these factors, unlikely

2. don't take your base for granted in safe states, electoral impact = 0

3. learn to fight fire with fire, which democrats are un-willing to do (go negative, supress and deny GOP voter's rights, run dirty tircks against them),

FLORIDA 2004 - CHECK OUT THE DATA IN YELLOW FOR 'BALLOT SCANNED' COUNTIES

"Among their preliminary findings, the group listed a shortage of early voting locations in Duval County, Fla., the largest county in Florida in area and voting-age population, the failure of electronic voting machines in three South Carolina counties, and the loss of votes at a North Carolina precinct when too much information was stored on a computer unit."

Group Finds Voting Irregularities in South

"Check page 23 Gahanna 1B for the unbelievable Bush victory, page 285 prop 1 is the Gay Marriage Ban- which you'd think at least some of the 4,258 rabid Bush voters would have also supported, but amazingly all 4,000 of them forgot."

Too many voting 'irregularities' to be coincidence

The argument about the popular vote is academic.  We should be asking "Why Kerry's 20 state strategy didn't work."  

BC'04 advertised on national cable.  They ran nationwide ads on Fox News, on the country music channels, on "red state events" like NASCAR and truck pulls.  If you live in a safe state and didn't watch those stations, you didn't see ANY presidential advertising.

They also worked through other channels to maximize their national turnout: emails and churches, especially.  It was an under-the-radar targetted strategy by Rove to inflate Bush's popular vote and avoid being re-elected as the popular vote loser.  It was not a red or blue state thing, either: it worked in both Red states AND Blue states: it gave Bush larger margins in Red states, and it cut into Kerry's margins in Blue states.  

Only in the battleground states where KE'04 was active was the election actually contested: that's why the "national popular vote victory" this year is irrelevant - one side made a determined effort to win it, the other did not (unlike 2000, when prior to the election, nobody cared about it or took any measures to inflate their totals).

Yet, had Kerry WON the electoral vote, which of course he came very close to doing, he would have been hailed as a genius, and the Bush campaign lambasted as fools, because of how each focused their campaigns.

It may be of course that Bush got some extra votes even in the swing states because of his standing in the national polls. Who knows? Certainly, whatever votes Kerry might have lost in the swing states because of this highly indirect effect was very likely more than compensated for by the many votes he won by focusing his advertising on, and targetting his message to, the swing states.

It's very hard to see how the gap between Bush's numbers in the safe states, and his numbers in the swing states, is a sign of strategic brilliance.

In the end, greater success WHERE IT COUNTS almost has to be a sign of a more intelligent, more strategic campaign, and the flip of this has to be the sign of strategic ineptness.

Again, if you think this is false, entertain for a moment how Kerry's campaign would have been judged had it swung an additional 70,000 votes to its side in Ohio.