Feingold as the Presidential nominee would really help turn out the base. He could get away with picking a much more conservative running mate. The other way around wouldn't work so well. Also, Feingold ran 7 or 8 points better than Kerry in this last election.
We turned out our ENTIRE base in 2004 and still lost. We must appeal to moderate Republicans, right-leaning Independents, and Centrists or we will continue to lose election after election.
Kerry won among moderates 54-45.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
The reason Kerry lost is that people did not vote on economic issues. Plain and simple, you can tell from the exit polls. The only age group Kerry won was 18-29, but they didn't turn out any more than they did in 2000, while every other group did (% wise).
Turnout was not as good as we would like to think, among the groups we needed.
Those "moderates" were probably Democrats who didnt want to refer to themselves as Liberals.
If you scroll one section up in those exit polls you can see President Bush pulled 11% of Democrats while John Kerry only managed to bag 6% of Republicans.
That has a lot to do with Democrats in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Louisana (& oher souythern states that are out of reach for the Dems) going 25-30% for Bush. Keep in mind that their are still a decent amount of dizxiecrats left. Still consider themselves Dems, & will vote for Dems sometimes at the local level, but not at the national level no matter who is the candidate. I think Feingold would be able to fight off the labels much better than Kerry did. He is MUCH MORE charasmatic & a better speaker, the labels will get thrown around, but will have a much tougher time sticking to Feingold
Yeah, and there is no way there could have ever been a worse campaign than the Kerry-Edwards campaign.
And with the Southern Democrats, they are not really Zell Miller Democrats. Maybe 5-10%, but really most Southern Democrats are economically moderate-left (support getting rid of welfare and such) and socially conservative, but regard the two types of political affiliation equally.
Poll
