Going Red: The Two Million Voters Who Will Elect The Next President—And How Conservatives Can Win Them, by Ed Morrissey

[Note: This book was provided free of charge by Blogging For Books/Crown Forum Press in exchange for an honest review.]

In reading this book, I was struck by a great surprise in that the first of the battleground counties that the author discussed was a county I know very well—Hillsborough County Florida, a place I know very well. The author commented that even where people have economic motives for supporting Republicans, namely liking to keep their money from a bloated bureaucracy with an insatiable appetite for taxation and increasing burdensome regulations, there are various local factors that have hindered Republican success, like the fact that in New Tampa there is no stable or active community, but rather people working hard to move up and move out, as well as the fact that there has been a failure to locally engage in West Tampa among the heavily Hispanic population there, about which I have a few humorous stories of my own from my time working in that part of town and living nearby. It was intriguing to see the haunts of my teenage and young adult years through the pragmatic eyes of a political operator whose main focus is increasing Republican vote totals and ensuring the election of Republicans to high office on the local, state, and national level.

The contents and structure of this book are consistent and highly intriguing for those who are interested in reading about demographics and political tactics and strategy. Rather than merely content himself to study battlefield states, those few states that seem to decide elections every cycle, he decides to go even more local and examine the seven battlefield counties that he believes will decide the election in 2016. The book begins with a postmortem breakdown at the unpleasant surprise of Obama’s victory in 2012, when there were thoughts that Romney had a lead going into the election. The author then looks at seven counties in seven states with the idea that all politics is local, taking a very granular look, down to the neighborhood level, of the concerns and motivations of voters, of the concerns that they have about Republicans and Democrats, and of the cross-currents that keep them in play for strategists of both parties: Hillsborough County in Florida, Hamilton County in Ohio, Wake County in North Carolina, Prince William County in Virginia, Brown County in Wisconsin, Jefferson County in Colorado, and Hillsborough County in New Hampshire, followed by a brief conclusion about the need for the Republican party to focus on a turnkey operation that allows for locally focused messages that are ready to go for any party and that avoid expensive and alienating television ads that give the same message everywhere, a message that is tone-deaf to the concerns of the ordinary people whose support is being sought.

Although there is much about this book that is fascinating, including the author’s dedication to understanding counties and the neighborhoods that make them and to engage in very extensive ground-based research, the alert and critical reader will note that the author is interested in more than simply Republican victory, but also has a fairly obvious ax to grind in the internecine struggles of Republicans in a support of a conservatarian belief that seeks to reduce taxation, provide for small government that is responsive to the needs of its citizens, and that shows markedly liberal attitudes towards social issues. Here the author misses the mark, in that his focus on political calculations and his lack of interest in moral conservatism make his words one of many who call upon an abandonment of any public call for virtue in our political discourse, which is a massive danger for those of us who have little personal animosity towards a government that is capable of protecting people from exploitation from businesses but who care greatly about the enforcement of godly morality within our society [1]. What is the worth of winning an election at the cost of what remains of our nation’s spiritual health in the public sphere?

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/01/book-review-end-of-discussion/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/book-review-mother-should-i-trust-the-government/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/book-review-the-conservatrian-manifesto/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/in-those-days-there-was-no-king-in-israel-and-everyone-did-what-was-right-in-his-own-eyes/