‘Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.’ ” Dowd realized, looking at his chart, that presidential campaigns were conceptualizing elections all wrong. They had imagined the bulk of the electorate as open to persuasion and had been “putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation.” In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for—indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were
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