HIS DOMAIN President Bush in the Oval Office in early December
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If you go hunting for Bush's margin of victory, you won't find it among Evangelicals, who voted in roughly the same proportion as in the past. You'll find it among groups that traditionally don't vote Republican. Bush improved his standing among blacks, Jews, Hispanics, women, city dwellers, Catholics, seniors and people who don't go to church. His biggest improvement came in the bluest of regions, the corridor from Maryland up through New Jersey and New York to Massachusetts. In Kerry's home state, Bush found close to 200,000 more voters than he did in 2000. He won a majority of the vote in a country that a majority of voters thought was heading in the wrong direction. Since, according to polls, more people consider themselves conservatives than liberals, he didn't need to win over a majority of the voters in the middle. He just needed to convince enough to put him over the top.
Run as an Outsider
During the 2000 campaign, Bush never left home without a podium. To support the promise to "restore honor and dignity to the White House" and combat the notion that he was a lightweight, his team wanted to make him look presidential whenever possible. But four years later, with the re-election campaign under way, his imagemakers had the opposite worry. There was too much pomp, too many suits. They needed to get him out from behind the lectern and let him be a regular guy. So Bush went from set speeches to town-hall meetings, from suits to shirtsleeves.
Of course, the audiences were carefully screened to admit only high-fiber Bush supporters. And on most nights the candidate was back home in the First Bedroom because he doesn't much like hotels. But the overall goal of running an outsider campaign came naturally. Bush has been President for only four years but has always been a punk at heart--the guy who in 1973 used to walk around Harvard during antiwar protests wearing cowboy boots and a bomber jacket, who was an outsider even in his own, high-achieving family (the black sheep, he once told the Queen of England). Forty-one newspapers that endorsed Bush back when he ran as a pragmatic reformer revoked their support this time around. But that just made it easier; he was running against the mainstream media, and his campaign was feeding the bloggers and surfing talk radio. "You wouldn't have known that we were the out party," says Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, "because we defended the status quo on some stuff. Bush was able to sound like he was the guy who wanted to be a reformer and be the outsider."