« Head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee: It's Obama's Fault That We Lost |
Main
|
"Reporter" Nancy Cordes Pushing Out Daily Kos Propaganda Under Aegis of CBSNews »
November 07, 2014
Did The "War on Women" Campaign Actually Kinda Work?
Before getting to that, MZ Hemingway writes that the Democrats must accept that the War on Women was a disaster in 2014.
Well, it certainly did not win the day. But Mark Uterus' efforts did bear fruit. (Ahem.)
I had thought -- wrongly -- that the War on Women just didn't work this time, and that people who have been rather embarrassingly persuadable by trivial and silly pitches might finally have started to wise up.
Nope, it turns out.
Mark Uterus relentlessly courted this demographic and did in fact get more votes from it than even Obama had in 2012.
Now, as John Ekdahl noted on twitter, the cost of doing so might have exceeded the benefit. When you court only a single segment of the electorate so maniacally, other segments of the electorate might get the idea that you're not for them. (This is something I bring up a lot in the context of the GOP excessively narrowcasting to highly specific and limited cultural cohorts.)
But the Democrats actually did succeed in their primary goal of scaring the bejeesus out of hysterical single women.
It could be that their message merely needs tweaking -- perhaps they just have to be less overtly, obnoxiously single-issue/single-constituency in the future. Or perhaps they just need to dog whistle these appeals to Single Ladies, rather than being so crudely, stupidly explicit about them.
It's something to worry about, though, I think.