Maxed-out GOP

This finding is the key to understanding the constraints on Bush's behavior. Every other slice of the electoral pie that may be attainable to Bush is prefaced by "moderate and liberal." As an example, consider the electorate by categories of race. The data below are drawn from the most recent ABC News-Washington Post poll.

At face value, these numbers don't look discouraging for Bush. He is running two points below expectations among white voters, and a Republican candidate ought to be facing friendly turf in appeals to that set of voters. But a consideration of the data for the ideological breakdowns discussed above suggests otherwise. Bush seems to have capped his support among conservative whites. The white voters yet in contention for Kerry and Bush are moderates and liberals.

This point is also reinforced by the stillness of Bush's support among white voters in the past four ABC News-Washington Post polls. Between April and mid-July, Bush's support among white voters did not budge: 52 percent in April, 52 percent in May, 51 percent in June, and 52 percent in July.

Viewed from this perspective, the voters still up for grabs -- white and black alike -- are not going to be persuaded by the conservative agenda of the Bush campaign. Some, of course, will vote for Bush based on nonideological grounds -- because they prefer Bush's package of traits and skills to Kerry's package, for example.

Perhaps the one encouraging sign for Bush is that, in purely statistical terms, the African-American vote has been much more volatile in the four ABC News-Washington Post polls between April and July than has the vote of any other demographic category. In only one of those polls did Kerry reach 80 percent support from African-Americans. Kerry's efforts to shore up this important party base in dramatic fashion, such as his appearance at the NAACP convention last week (which Bush shunned), address this vulnerability. But notwithstanding the potential for weak poll numbers with this key Democratic bloc, the ideological environment in which Kerry and Bush must reach out to expand their coalitions augurs a better outcome for Kerry than for Bush.

Over the past two months, polls have also displayed the emergence of the ever-present quadrennial gender gap. The data below come from the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll.

These gender breakdowns reflect mirror images for the two contenders. Kerry leads among women and is close to the expected Democratic vote among females. He trails among men and is relatively more distant from the expected Democratic vote among males. The reverse is true for Bush. In a normal election, one would expect both Kerry and Bush to achieve their expected percentages for each gender, respectively, producing a virtual tie.

It is entirely plausible that such symmetry will not occur in 2004, however. There is a reasonable chance that Kerry will appeal more effectively to nonconservative men than Bush will appeal effectively to nonconservative women.

Finally, the data related to levels of education provide some interesting patterns that illustrate how the use of partisan benchmarks can shed different light on the obvious. These ABC News-Washington Post poll data show that Kerry may be en route to assembling a top-to-bottom coalition. Pluralities of both high school graduates and college graduates support Kerry. By contrast, the middle educational category, those with some college but not a college degree, supports Bush.

As the chart above demonstrates, however, these findings are not totally unexpected. Bush captures about as much of the noncollege vote as a Republican candidate should. The least-educated voters would not be expected to support the Republican candidate and they do not. The middle category does lean Republican, so Bush matches expectations among this group.

Beyond that, this chart demonstrates that nothing is as it would be in a typical year. Kerry leads among the least-educated voters, as a Democrat should, but is running nine points below expectations. He should be trailing among the middle group, but not by a staggering 14 percent -- which is 10 points below expectations. And neither candidate is following the script for college graduates. The Republican should be leading by 10 points there. Instead, Bush trails Kerry by four points and fares nine points worse than expectations. Kerry is running five points better than expected.

Nevertheless, these data reinforce much of the conventional wisdom. Bush's disdain for complexity and nuance is costing him the support of voters with a broader understanding of the world. Kerry's patrician manner has not yet won over voters wary of his background and style. They await nonverbal cues and verbal pledges that he cares about them.

Just as the ideological breakdown of expected votes presages the challenging course the Bush campaign must traverse, the educational breakdown of expected votes maps the creaky bridge the Kerry campaign must cross. Communicating effectively with these voters requires an understanding of who they are and what they know.

All things considered, Kerry (as well as the Democrats through him) has achieved remarkable progress in making himself and his party relevant following the post-9/11 political doldrums and the Republican tsunami of 2002. The data collected for the 2002 American National Election Study portrayed a Democratic Party tattered, fearful on national security matters, and lacking confidence in its own leaders. That Kerry stands poised to win a presidential election in the aftermath of the preceding few years is, in itself, extraordinary.

General trends corroborating the steep climb facing Bush were reported last week by GOP consulting firm Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates. Findings from its survey of battleground states indicate that undecided voters there "are currently poised to break away from President Bush and to John Kerry." By more than 5 to 1, these voters see the country as worse off rather than better off compared with four years ago.

As Kevin Phillips notes in his article ("How Kerry Can Win") in the Aug. 2 issue of the Nation, there is a soft underbelly of the Republican coalition that is susceptible to Democratic appeals. He suggests that tough talk on the set of issues that John McCain, Ross Perot and even Pat Buchanan emphasized in the campaigns since 1992, particularly on the federal deficit, is vital to Kerry's prospects of drawing votes away from what Phillips refers to as the "unbase" of the Bush coalition.

All of these indicators point to the likelihood of a Kerry victory. But it is also important for members of the Kerry campaign to understand the pool of voters they must persuade. The distinguishing characteristic of this audience is that it is not very well educated.

In his book "The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns," Samuel Popkin suggested that the differences between the least-educated and the best-educated voters are not necessarily rooted in depth of knowledge but in breadth of knowledge. Educated voters travel more widely, see things less parochially, and are familiar with a larger world. Less educated voters are more likely to draw political connections from their individual experiences in the smaller world of their own neighborhoods.

It is not clear, therefore, that these voters will respond to tough talk, as Phillips suggests, on issues that may be only peripherally related to their own lives. Such an effort might prove awkward at best on issues such as free trade and the power of lobbyists given Kerry's record on free trade and John Edwards' association with trial lawyers.

For these voters whom Kerry must reach, much of what might matter politically resides in personal encounters at the most rudimentary level -- friends and relatives who have lost jobs, the shuttered businesses on Main Street that they walk by, health problems that go untreated because of the high costs of healthcare, personal knowledge of an increasing crime rate in town, sons or daughters who cannot afford college, nephews and nieces serving anxiously in Iraq, the leaking roof they cannot get fixed, the water that tastes funny, the mounting balances on their credit cards.

To communicate effectively with these voters, Kerry must recognize the limits of what this constituency knows compared with better-educated voters, and he must tap into the reservoir of experiences that inform their outlooks.

Making their experiences matter politically is Kerry's job next week and beyond. To do so, he needs to remind these voters of the icy indifference that has characterized the incumbent president's insensitivity to their daily experiences by asking them: "Who are you going to believe -- President Bush or your own eyes?"

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