Feb. 15 — The president's visit to Daytona this weekend raises inevitable discussions of the latest alleged swing voters, "NASCAR dads." We say: Throttle back.
Soccer moms, campus kids, "freestyle evangelicals," "office-park dads," "security moms" — they crop up every election like mushrooms behind the barn (and they thrive in the same kind of medium). We call them the "group du jour" — the crucial swing voter group that's said to hold the key to the next election. In fact, as Ellen Goodman once put it, they usually can't swing anything more than a headline.
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For good measure, we checked rural, suburban or small city married white men with children and incomes under $50,000 in the 2000 exit poll. They accounted for 2 percent of all voters, and supported Bush over Gore by 70 percent to 27 percent. You really want to call this a swing voter group?
Give us a definition, we'll run the data. But we've seen it before: Take soccer moms, the group du jour in 1996. We found, when we analyzed the exit poll, that they made up a fragment of voters — 6 percent — and voted like all other moms — essentially like all other women.
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