Kilgore on Tom Frank and Explaining Gore's Defeat

There's a ton of good stuff in the current Blueprint, but let me especially recommend Ed Kilgore's review of What's The Matter With Kansas? which is fantastic except for his typically DLC insistence on mooting a monocausal account of Al Gore's 2000 defeat.

Here, for example, is one interesting factoid from CNN's 2000 exit polls which I may well abuse in a future article of my own: Twelve percent of the total electorate said "world affairs" were the most important issue in 2000, of which 54 percent voted for Bush and just 40 percent voted for Gore (1 percent Buchanan and 4 percent Nader). In other words, even in a campaign where national security played almost no role, Gore lost because Democrats were perceived as soft on defense. Indeed, a strikingly large 47 percent of the population reported the belief that the military got weaker under Bill Clinton, while just 17 percent said it got stronger. Since, as evidenced by its performance in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military is strong indeed, this is a remarkable political vulnerability for Gore to have developed. Bush got 72 percent of those who said it became weaker, and only a quarter of those who said it got stronger or remained the same.

Unrelated exit poll fun fact -- according to CNN the proportion of the electorate that attends church "never" or "seldom" is exactly the same size as the proportion who attends church once a week or more (42 percent for each). Gore won the former groups and Bush won the latter -- do the Republicans have a secular problem?