AMELIA CHASSE: GOP ignores low-information voters at their peril.
Democrats – Barack Obama in particular – go after these voters with gusto. The 2008 Obama campaign broke ground by advertising on Xbox video games, prompting thousands of stoners to get off the couch and out to the polls. In 2012, when young women visited a beauty blog, they were likely greeted with video ads of Eva Longoria or Scarlett Johansson telling them Obama was fabulous. And lest we forget the infamous ad where Girls star Lena Dunham invited her fellow young women to make their “first time” special with Barack Obama. . . . Democrats succeed by bringing the message to low-information voters where they already are and presenting that message in a creative, appealing manner.
There’s a lot of free press too. At women’s lifestyle sites, about one article in 10 is soft PR for the Dems — why Barack & Michelle’s marriage is so great, 10 hot celebs who are voting for Obama, etc. The women’s lifestyle media are another arm of the Dems, and their stuff, especially the general sense of who’s cool and who’s uncool, often presented in a sort of Mean Girls style, is highly effective with low-information voters. If somebody like Sheldon Adelson really wants to have an impact, the money would be better spent creating a few publications that do this sort of thing in the other direction, as opposed to buying lots of expensive TV ads. None of this is news, of course, if you pay any attention, but folks on the right don’t seem to be doing much about it. Which is too bad, because such sites are cheap to set up and operate compared with political sites, much less political operations.