Reply #29: You have misunderstood. I am not fighting you. [View All]

[pmbryant]

This has nothing to do with policies etc. This has nothing to do with being "more left" or "republican-lite". This simply has to do with rhetoric, with the words we use.

You have fallen into the trap of believing the red state/blue state rhetoric. Yes, some states vote more Republican and others more Democratic. But, as I tried to point out above, the differences are not huge in the vast majority of states.

Even in "landslide Texas", if only one out of every eight voters switched to our side, Texas would have given its electoral votes to Kerry. One out of eight!

In most other states, the numbers we need to switch are even smaller.

Yet by states such as Texas (or Missouri or Florida or Ohio) being labelled "red", more and more people in those states will start to identify themselves as being on the "red team". That just makes our job of convincing the few we need to switch even harder.

I am absolutely not fighting you. I am absolutely not offended by having my state (Texas) called a "red state". Rather, I am trying to convince you to use rhetoric that will enhance our ability to win the next election, and not doom us to an even more uphill fight than we already face.

Is it really that much to ask?

--Peter