Mark Penn's Microtrends
I spent part of Thanksgiving reading Mark Penn's new book Microtrends. Mark Penn is the individual that came up with the term "soccer moms" in the 1996 election. What is more interesting is not just that he was able to identify a specific group of voters that turned out to be intregal to the election, but what was more important was what Clinton did with the information. The Soccer Moms did not want government intervention in their lives (usually a Republican ideal), but they did want government intervention in their children's lives. So Clinton started talking about drug testing in schools, measures against teen smoking, limits on violence in the media, and school uniforms. Mark Penn begins his new book by quoting V.O. Keys, that the voters are not fools. There is rhyme and reason as to how voters vote. In the Politics section he discusses what he calls "impressionable elites". That the professor class cares more about the candidate's personality than in the issues. He also goes on to discuss "militant illegals", "Christian Zionists", and "newly released ex-cons". He asserts in his section titled "Swing is still King" that we are not as divided into two camps (red and blue states) as the media leads us to believe, but rather there is still a large segment of swing voters. The section on politics is actually not that big of part of the book. He goes through trends in Family Life, lifestyle, education, technology, etc. Some of the trends are suprising, if not just downright odd. A big trend with teenage girls is knitting. Didn't see that one coming. I think this book will be discussed in much the way "The Earth is Flat" for so long. Definitely worth checking out. The County Library has a copy.