Rove with Details About How Obama Won

By Jim on November 6th, 2008

Some interesting commentary from Karl Rove. I too am waiting for the details and for the “hopenchange” chants to fade away as reality overtakes Obamania.

So the two Davids registered millions of voters in states the Obama campaign picked as battlegrounds, especially where there were many heretofore-disinterested African Americans and younger Democrats. Messrs. Plouffe and Axelrod understood that over the last 28 years only 11 of 20 eligible Americans on average cast a presidential ballot. They focused on registering and motivating the other nine who don’t usually vote. This decision, perhaps more than any other, allowed Mr. Obama to win such previously red states as Virginia, Indiana, Colorado and Nevada. It forced Mr. McCain to spend most of the fall on defense, unable to take once-reliably Republican states for granted.

Second, Messrs. Plouffe and Axelrod pried away from the GOP ranks small but decisive slices of the Republican presidential coalition. We can’t be precise, because for the third election in a row the exit polls were trash. The raw numbers forecast an 18-point Obama win, news organizations who underwrote the poll arbitrarily dialed it down to a 10-point Obama edge, and the actual margin was six.