ELECTION STRATEGY BY KARL ROVE... MOBILIZING THE EVANGELICALS

It was interesting listening to a segment on CNN on one approach by Karl Rove during this election. In the past, some campaign strategists have targeted the end of the political spectrums during the primaries and moved towards the center afterwards. Rove took a different approach and moved outwards not in. He focused on issues, such as gay marriage, that drove evangelical Christians to the polls. In 2000, over 4 million evangelical Christian voters stayed at home, so his objective was to get them out this time around.

One anecdotal example of the effectiveness of this strategy is looking within Korean American churches. I know from a handful of friends who told me that their parents were voting for the first time in their lives because of the gay marriage issue. Korean American churches, which are notoriously apathetic when it comes to any community issue much less political, were establishing voter drives and pushing their members to vote for Bush. If Korean American churches were this active, I can only imagine what some mainstream churches were doing. Chalk one up for Rove.