Myths About Political Campaigns
Myth- Politicians need to mobilize minority voters to win elections?
Anybody who wins the presidency, the majority of their voters are going to be white voters. Even though these minority voters can seem critical, candidates always have to be careful, that when they are appealing to minority voters, that they are not at the same time, losing more mainstream white voters. In the same sense, this was something that Nixon captured with the southern strategy and something that the Democratic Party has always had to have a balancing act with. That's one of the reason why political science, scientists claim that George McGovern, was a very liberal senator, why he lost - because he focused so much on the minority voters that he lost his blue- collar, white voters. So minority voters can be critical, but the truth is, is that any presidential candidate has to be more concerned or has to be very concerned with capturing the white voters. If it comes to a chance of losing white voters, to capture minority voters, most of them are going to take the white voters.
Myth- Politicians need a lot of endorsements to get votes?
Yeah endorsements are a kind of insider politics kind of a thing. You're average voter doesn't care about most of the endorsements, they look at that as a level of politics that's generally beyond them, or not so much it's over their heads but their just not interested in. A lot of times they view it as just natural, when you have Al Gore, for instance, endorsing Howard Dean over John Kerry, people in the Democratic Party and other talking heads were like, “Oh my God! This is amazing”. But most of your average Democratic Primary voter, or your average voter, it doesn't matter to him – he's just going to vote for who he cares about, not who Al Gore cares about. We see this in terms of James Upson and Pat Robinson who and are leading figures in the Religious Right. They have strong reservations about John McCain and Rudy Julianne but you saw significant numbers of white voters for John McCain and Rudy Julianne. Voters can make up their own minds; there not mob mentally people who follow step with who ever the latest civic miser is. If somebody says something, they take that into account and they give it a certain weight in their calculations, but it doesn't determine anything.