The following is from “Before The Storm, Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” by Rick Perlstein:
“On of them was the state’s most effective political operative. Swarthy, intense, standoffish, Stephen Shadegg was a master of appearances, a man fascinated by the space between deception and detection…
“There were three types of voters, he theorized: Committeds, Undecideds, and Indifferents. The first step to victory was identifying the Indifferents – ‘those who don’t vote all, or vote only in response to an emotional appeal, or as a result of some carefully planned campaign technique which makes it easy for them to reach a decision.’ Indifferents were the kind of suckers another master of persuasion said were born every minute.”
In part due to the influence of the Internet, by the year 2000 top Republican strategist Carl Rove had recognized that the number of “indifferents” has shrunk to only a few percentage of the voting population. So throwing raw meat to the Republican “Committeds” to bring out the vote was far more important than courting swing votes.
The Democrats quickly learned the same message, which is the main reason for the extreme polarization of politics and the dysfunction of Congress.
