This isn’t just my gut. Let’s look at the data.

  A standard poll question I ask in campaigns is what people consider most important in voting for a candidate: (1) issues, (2) character, or (3) experience. I ask it because I know that all three are important in a leader, and that it can be tough to rank them.

  According to a recent poll we did, a large plurality of voters—48 percent—believe that a candidate’s stand on the issues is most important, with character a distant second at 32 percent. That preference for issues holds steady whether or not voters have been to college, whether or not they are religious, and across race. Where it does not stay constant, however, is across income. Once voters reach the magic line of $100,000 per year, their priority shifts to character, by a significant margin. As the table below shows, people earning under $100,000 prioritize issues over character by a serious 51 to 30 percent. But once they reach $100,000, they switch, to character over issues, 45 to 37 percent.

  Which of the following is most important to you in voting for president?

  Education Income

  All No

  College College

  Degree <50k 50k+ <75k 75k+ <100k 100k+

  Stands on Issues 48 48 48 50 50 51 46 51 37

  Character 32 22 35 28 34 31 33 30 45

  Experience 19 29 15 22 15 18 19 18 18

  Don’t know 1 1 2 1 1 0 1 1 0

  That is a 29-point swing. A shift barely ever gets clearer in polling.

  Now while “character” can sometimes mean something core about a person, like dependability or decency, it just as often means something ephemeral or superficial like who you’d like to have a beer with. Sure, likability and buddy potential are important in choosing a president. But are they more important than solving health care and creating jobs? Most Americans say no. Frankly, the only people who say yes are the very well-to-do. And the chattering classes, in the media. Publications like the New York Times, believing they have been too serious and missed out on the trend toward the personal, now have Maureen Dowd writing psycho-profiles on the op-ed pages, and news reporters like Mark Leibovich filling front pages with personal impressions about candidates’ personalities. And the Times was just catching up to the Washington Post, which had reporters like Lois Romano looking at the personal side for years. In March 2007, even the Wall Street Journal blared a piece about Barack Obama’s suits, John Edwards’s boyish looks, and Rudy Giuliani’s power ties. Suddenly we have gossip in the Times, the Post, and the Journal, and more in-depth issue analysis in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Kansas City Star. Woodrow Wilson would be too stiff for today’s elites; he’d be just right for a populist peace movement.

  In many ways, the eggheads have become jugheads and the jugheads have become eggheads. And you can see the effect of this rippling through the media. How many talk show guests make less than $100,000 a year? How many reporters talk to many people making less than $100,000 a year? The elite information circle is dominated by people who live in the world of the top 10 percent, and while in the past that helped drive discussion to more substantive levels, today it does just the opposite. Today, the elites are more fascinated with gossip, and they are driving the debate away from the substantive and toward the superficial.

  Now all of this would be just a quirky observation about “Tabloid Papers of Record” and “Real-News Rags”—if it weren’t for the fact that the different ways the elite and the masses view leadership has an increasing potential to distort presidential elections. Due to changes in campaign finance laws that were meant to separate money from politics, a new class of Increasingly Important Donors has sprung up that has more influence over candidate selection and campaigns than ever. Instead of a few donors giving large sums, we now have a lot of donors giving in the $10,000 range. And they all make over $100,000 a year (who else could give away $2,300, once in the primary and once in the general, after taxes, for a politician?). This suggests that they are nearly all, as described above, out of the voters’ mainstream.

  Here’s how the new political donors got to be so important. After Watergate, in 1974, a clean-up-the-mess Congress passed a series of campaign finance reform laws to limit campaign donations and require more disclosure. What they didn’t regulate, though, was “soft money”—contributions to political parties that could be used for general “party-building activities,” like getting out the vote. So over a few decades, the soft money provisions got abused. In 2002, Congress passed a set of reforms abolishing soft money—but it doubled the amount of “hard money” individuals could give to candidates. (As of 2007, the limits are $2,300 per person per candidate, in the primary and in the general; and $28,500 per person per party, with an overall federal two-year limit per person of $108,200.) But what this Congress left unregulated was donations to nonprofit advocacy groups, known as 527s for the section of the tax law that created them. Now 527s (like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Progress for America on the right, and MoveOn.org and the Service Employees International Union on the left) raise unlimited funds from wealthy party loyalists, and use these funds to do what the party used to do—like advocate for issues, run issue-focused TV commercials, and get out the vote.

  To my mind, the 2002 reforms have triggered two small groups of intense and increasing importance. First are the Mega-Donors—the very wealthy and committed givers who, instead of giving money to party professionals to spend, now underwrite 527 advocacy organizations and call the shots themselves. In the 2006 midterm elections, the 527s raised about $380 million, at least one-third more than what they’d raised in 2002. In 2004, it was reported that five people, including two who were married to each other, gave $78 million to Democrat-leaning 527s, which was about one-quarter of the Democrats’ overall receipts.

  The second group is the Elite Donors—the couples making $300,000 or more a year who can give $10,000 or so to candidates without feeling it. They are well-educated professionals, and they are by and large removed from what the electorate as a whole is facing. They have health care, schools, and houses. They are almost all drawn from the top 5 percent of America—most from the top 1 percent. Political candidates in America probably spend half their time at dinners with these people, and half their time with the other 95 percent.

  So between the 527-underwriting Mega-Donors and the increasingly powerful Elite Donors, we have a new class of givers playing an increasingly important role in politics—and statistical proof that their heads are nowhere near the voters’. And not only not near them, but driving the debate in a more superficial direction. Elites may have set up PBS, but that’s not what today’s chattering classes are watching.

  We are not yet at the critical stage of Nero fiddling while Rome burns—the classic depiction of ultimate disconnection of the leadership classes. And the flip side of all this is that the mass of voters have never been truer to the principle that voters are not fools. They are more alert, more informed, more educated, and more substantive than ever. So if you can get over all the din created by the chattering elites and the out-of- touch journalists, you can talk to some pretty smart people out there.

  Swing Is Still King

  The Myth of the Polarized Electorate

  We hear it every day: America is divided into two camps—red and blue—and the key to elections is just energizing the base. Books have been written about it, careers have been made on it, and movements have been founded on it. But it is simply not true.

  The reality is that at the polls, Swing is still King—meaning it is not the ideologues, but rather the pragmatic voters who have little allegiance to any movements, who determine who occupies the White House and runs Congress (and in Britain, who sits in 10 Downing Street). These voters are independent, not party-driven. And more and more, elections are turning on the preferences of middle-aged voters, not senior citizens or the young.

  Just look at the math regarding generating turnout for the base versus courting the swing voters. Voting is based on history—the most likely voters are those who voted last time. Based on that, the case for winning with just the base is daunting. Suppose you have ten voters who voted last time, splitting their preferences 50/50. Now if one swing voter changes his or her mind, the vote becomes 60/40. If one new voter gets added to the pool, thanks to your efforts to turn out the base, the vote is still 55 to 45 against you (you have 6 out of 11). If a second voter who didn’t vote last time is chauffeured to the polls, you are now back to 50/50, as you have 6 out of 12. In other words, it takes two new voters to overcome one voter who has changed his mind, and three new voters to overcome his defection. In almost all cases, therefore, it is more strategic to get one voter on the edge to switch opinions than it is to bring two or three new voters to the polls. It’s theoretically possible for additional base turnout to be a factor, but in 95 percent of the elections, it is the swing voter who is decisive.

  In the 2006 Senate reelection campaign of Hillary Clinton, I predicted that we would not bring a single new voter to the polls, because it was a midterm, low interest election, and so instead we had to work intensively to win over suburban swing voters with a long history of voting. By identifying their psychographics, we “micro-targeted” them into six distinct groups, and reminded them of Clinton’s record on issues that matter to their daily lives, like property taxes, video game violence, and local issues. She went from a net loss of nearly 150,000 votes in those key suburban counties to a nearly 150,000 vote advantage—an 18-point increase in her vote from some of her toughest regions.

  The myth that America is hopelessly “polarized” gets perpetuated because in Washington, D.C.—where most of the pundits are writing from—everyone has to choose sides to survive. But that’s not the way it is in most of America, or Britain or France or Thailand. In fact, because of the increased flow of information, voters are less rigid than ever, and increasingly open and flexible. Take a look at the trends.

  In the past fifty years, the number of Americans who call themselves Independents, rather than Democrats or Republicans, has grown from under one-quarter to over one-third of the voting public. In California alone, the proportion of Independent voters more than doubled between 1991 and 2005. The fastest-growing political party in America is no party.

  According to American National Election Studies at the University of Michigan, the percentage of split-ticket voters—meaning people who vote for a Democrat for president and a Republican for Congress, or vice versa—has gone up 42 percent since 1952. That is a radically new willingness on the part of Americans to look at individual candidates, not party slates. It’s the sign of a thinking electorate, not a partisan one.

  When asked, Americans sometimes display a little swagger and say they definitely will or won’t vote for certain candidates or parties. But this turns out to be fairly unreliable bravado. In 1995, 65 percent of voters said they would never vote for Bill Clinton. One year later, they reelected him in a landslide.

  Look at what happened at the U.S. midterm elections of 2006—the Democrats won thirty new congressional seats in areas the Republicans had declared too polarized to switch. The Republicans had gerimandered the districts to avoid change, but they were still defeated for the simple reason that if you get just a small flip of independent pragmatists, you get a huge flip in the political landscape.

  Or look at what pollsters call the generic congressional ballot—“if the elections for Congress were held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for?” Between late 2004 and early 2006, voters swung from a 5-point Republican advantage to a 15-point Democratic advantage. And when the election was held, a Democratic tide undid twelve years of Republican rule. Youth turnout was down to 12 percent from 17 percent of the electorate in the 2004 presidential election, so the Democrats did better with far fewer Democratic leaning voters. The answer is that contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a massive swing electorate out there, receiving more information from more sources than ever before, and acting on it.

  According to CNN exit polls, in the presidential elections of 1996, 2000, and 2004, between one-fifth and one-third of the electorate made up their minds in the last month before the vote. That’s borne out by the fact that in the summer of 2004, voters swung from an 8-point lead for Kerry to a 13-point lead for Bush, and in the end gave President Bush a victory of only 3 points.

  Indeed, in the 2004 election, while it is true that overall turnout was higher, it was higher on both sides, canceling out the impact of the appeals to the two bases. It was swing voters—middle-aged women and Hispanics—who made the difference for George W. Bush. The impact of women can’t be overstated. In 2004, women were 54 percent of the American electorate, the highest percentage in history. Their interest in and impact on politics has been steadily increasing.

  You may recall that in 1996, Soccer Moms were the critical swing voters. Today, those Moms remain at the center of the swing vote, but they are about a decade older, and their kids are going off to college. Now they get their information from the Internet as well as TV and radio, making them the most informed swing voters in history. And while they had little time when their kids were 6 and 8, many of those boomers are now getting some extra time to think about what’s going on in America and the world.

  The power of the swing voters versus the base is not limited to the United States. In the U.K., there is the same kind of shift making the difference between Labour and Conservative governments. Once again, voters free of the party reins switch back and forth, most often based on who they believe will make the best leader, not which party they believe has the right platform. And in working on twenty-four successful elections around the world, I have increasingly come to see voters won over with TV, media, and message—everywhere from Colombia, where the president I mentioned earlier was not ready to take on the drug lords, to Thailand and Greece. In every one of these cultures, the methods I suggested were similar, even though the cultures were vastly different. Karl Rove, who was hailed as a great strategist in 2000 and 2004, has recently been chastened by his failure to shift strategies after the midterm elections. Just a switch of 2 percent of the voters from one side to the other made a big difference.

  Often, the microtrends identified seem to be tearing our society apart, taking it into two more extreme directions at the same time. But this trend—the need for all parties to recognize that their future lies in winning the center—is different. This trend puts the brakes on how far most democracies can go toward one extreme or another.

  The impact is profound. The movement to watch is really the global Third Way movement—the triumph of pragmatic, independent thinking over left- or right-wing ideology. It is the growth of mass media and communications that has fueled it, and that gives voters more ability to judge the competence of their leaders and their policies. Though the Internet has seemed to spawn more fragmented movements, the vital center remains the decisive sliver of voters. Over time, this is what will keep many countries out of war and away from radical income redistribution, and into creating more alliances, freer markets, and values that overcome the tensions of the day.

  Militant Illegals

  If there is one group of people in America that has generally kept a low profile, it is the 12 million illegal immigrants in this country—and generally with good reason. As Edward R. Murrow said in his famous 1960 documentary, Harvest of Shame, “migrants . . . have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables, [but] they do not have the strength to influence legislation.” They have been quiet and in the shadows. As a result, they have been the truly forgotten in America.

  Now fast-forward to the spring of 2006. A bill introduced by Republican James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, and passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, pushed many illegal immigrants and their families too far. The bill would have made it a felony to be in this country illegally, or to give assistance—like food or medical care—to anyone who was. Deeply wounded, American’s illegal immigrants took to the streets.

  In broad daylight. In matching white T-shirts, in 140 cities, and in at least thirty-nine states. From Phoenix to Philadelphia, from Boise to Birmingham, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants marched in organized parades, in front of TV cameras, to protest the House-passed bill and to call instead for liberalized immigration reform that would not narrow but widen the path to citizenship. In Atlanta, the birthplace of America’s civil rights movement, the marchers held placards reading, “We Have a Dream, Too.” In Mississippi, they sang “We Shall Overcome” in Spanish. In Los Angeles, the rally in March 2006 was said to be the largest in the history of the city, and perhaps in all of the Western United States. (Referring to the border-long security fence that many lawmakers supported constructing, comedian Carlos Mencia asked, “If you deport us, who will build the wall?”)

  At this moment, the illegal aliens were Americans in the truest sense of the word—using the democratic political system to accomplish their ends. They may not have been able to vote, and they could have been deported at any moment—but there they were, speaking up for their rights and getting lawmakers to listen.

  It is a profound sign of the times that in today’s America, hundreds of thousands of America’s 12 million illegal immigrants not only felt secure enough to march, but found that they wielded actual political power. For the first time in American history, noncitizens’ needs and passions might actually be the critical element that tips a presidential election.

  It’s not that immigration itself has become America’s top concern. While large majorities of Americans followed the news about the marches, and immigration climbed somewhat on the list of issues Americans consider most important, it still lags well behind Iraq, the economy, and terrorism. And as of this writing, Congress still hasn’t resolved its differences to produce a new immigration law.