Is this great or what? The Washington Post had a front-page article today on "Bush Fortifies Conservative Base: Campaign Seeks Solid Support Before Wooing Swing Voters". According to the story--which is certainly consistent with the Bush campaign's recent choice of rhetoric and audience--the campaign is concentrating single-mindedly on shoring up its conservative base and getting it revved up for the election. As for the swing voters and independents....well, they're just hoping that the same hardline approach they're taking to tax cuts and terrorism to reach GOP partisans will, as kind of an ancillary benefit, somehow also yield a reasonable number of swing voters.

It's the Zen approach to reaching swing voters! You can't hit the target if you're aiming at it!

Or, as James Carville is quoted as saying in the article: "It's a new way to run for president...usually you quietly shore up your base and aggressively court the swing voter, Bush is aggressively shoring up his base and quietly courting the swing voter."

The former approach, of course, is what Kerry is pursuing--he's taking advantage of the exceptionally united Democratic base to go out there and assiduously cultivate swing voters and independents. And the polling data suggest these voters are very open to the Kerry message and are leaning heavily in his direction (see, for example, my many posts over the last several months on independent voters, this post on persuadable voters in swing states and these two recent memos by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio on undecided voters in battleground states and on “approval gap” voters in battleground states).

These well-known facts have led some GOP partisans to run up the white flag on swing voters, arguing that they are few in number anyway, and put their faith in high turnout of "their people". The reliably hardline, but influential, Grover Norquist has this to say:

How much time and energy do you give to picking up the 10 percent, who are disengaged from politics, and how do you communicate with them even if you want to? You can go to the 45 percent [who already support Bush] and ask them to bring a brother or a sister or a friend to the polls.

Does any of this make any sense or is it properly viewed as an adjustment to political weakness (disunity in the conservative ranks and unfriendly swing voters) that is perhaps congealing into a foolish strategy (the heck with those swing voters, let's call Aunt Mary and get her to the polls!). I believe it's the latter.

Consider this analysis. The article asserts that Republicans have been supporting Bush at about the 90 percent level in this campaign. Averaging the last four Gallup polls, that's about true. But it's also true that, averaging the last four Gallup polls, that Democratic support for Kerry has been running near that level and that the margins of support each candidate enjoys among their partisans are pretty close. Therefore, it appears unlikely that Bush will have as much of an advantage as he did in 2000 from a wider margin among Republicans than his opponent had among Democrats.

If that's true, then Bush is toast unless he erases the Democrats' traditional turnout advantage in Presidential election years (Democrats generally run 3-4 points higher as a proportion of voters), since that advantage won't be offset much by the Republicans' superior margin among their partisans. (That could be part of the reasoning behind their base mobilization strategy.)

But then there are those pesky independent voters! You can erase the Democrats' turnout advantage--which I am, incidentally, quite skeptical they can do, based on recent party ID trends and apparent mobilization levels among Democrats and Democratic organizations--and still wind up losing handily because the independent voters break the tie against you.

And in the last four Gallup polls, independents are averaging a 14 point margin against Bush. To make up that deficit, Republicans would have to not only equalize their turnout with Democrats--against historical patterns--but actually beat the Democrats by about 4 points as a proportion of voters.

I don't think this is remotely plausible. Such a scenario is only possible with high mobilization of Republicans that is not counterbalanced at all by mobilization of Democrats. That just isn't going to happen this year (memo to Rove, Dowd and loveable ole Grover: we're not in 2002 any more); to think it might is a complete fantasy.

But I hope they keep believing it! And let Kerry-Edwards have the swing voters and independents all to themselves.