It's the turnout, stupid. Or, A GOP horror movie

Go ahead, relive the awful day of November 2. But look on the bright side, at least you weren't a member of ACT, trying to get the Democratic vote out in Ohio. If you were, you've probably already considered opening up your wrists. The New York Times Magazine story begins to read like a Stephen King novel after a while.

But ACT had done its part, both in Ohio and nationally. Kerry received a total of 4,862,000 more votes nationwide than Gore did, and, according to ACT's breakdown, 58 percent of that increase came in the 12 battleground states that ACT had targeted. Results in some states seemed to bear out Rosenthal's theory on expanding the base; in Florida, for example, according to exit polls, 13 percent of all votes were cast by first-time voters, and a clear majority of them voted for Kerry.

None of this felt very consoling, however. ''If we could detach that way, we could say, 'Well, we're a registration-and-turnout organization, and we did our job,''' Bouchard said. ''But it's hard to detach from the political reality that it wasn't enough.''

Why wasn't it enough? In the days that followed, theories circulated claiming that Republicans had stolen votes from Kerry by messing with the results from electronic voting machines. But the truth was that the Bush campaign had created an entirely new math in Ohio. It wouldn't have been possible eight years ago, or even four. But with so many white, conservative and religious voters now living in the brand-new town houses and McMansions in Ohio's growing ring counties, Republicans were able to mobilize a stunning turnout in areas where their support was more concentrated than it was in the past. Bush's operatives did precisely what they told me seven months ago they would do in these communities: they tapped into a volunteer network using local party organizations, union rolls, gun clubs and churches. They backed it up with a blizzard of targeted appeals; according to the preliminary results of a survey done by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, one representative home in Portage County, just outside Cleveland, received 11 pieces of mail from the Republican National Committee.

This effort wasn't visible to Democrats because it was taking place on an entirely new terrain, in counties that Democrats had some vague notion of, but which they never expected could generate so many votes. The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent.

For Democrats, this new phenomenon on Election Day felt like some kind of horror movie, with conservative voters rising up out of the hills and condo communities in numbers the Kerry forces never knew existed. ''They just came in droves,'' Jennifer Palmieri told me two days after the election. ''We didn't know they had that room to grow. It's like, 'Crunch all you want -- we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans.''

Eeeeeek!

The Democratic Party is slow to change. Basically, they ran what may have been their most successful campaign for president in 50 years. And they lost. They didn't lose because of "values," gay marriage, or a huge turnout by evengelicals, despite whatever today's meme in the press may be.

They lost because the game has changed. It's changed physically and it's changed demographically. Population centers have been moving away from urban areas for 30 years, and in the past few years it has even begun moving away from the suburbs, to the exurbs. The GOP recognized this. Democrats did not. And it's changed in the way candidates are marketed effectively. Democrats looked at party affiliation and hammered away at what they thought was their base. And that worked spectacularly. The base came out in droves. Republicans also hammered away at the base, but they also looked for more than party affiliation. Ken Mehlman and the RNC looked at demographics. They recognized that how people lived gives clues as to whether or not they'd be receptive to the GOP argument.

"We did what Visa does: We acquired a lot of consumer data. Based on that, we acquired a model based not on where they live, but how they live. If you drive a Volvo and do yoga, you vote Democrat," he said. "If you drive a Lincoln and own a gun, you vote for George W. Bush."

The good news, I think, is that there are more people in this country aligned with Democrats on a range of issues, from civil rights to economic fairness to the environment. We need to take a page from the RNC and align these issues with demographics to better target the message.

And we had better do it quickly. Mid-term elections will be upon us soon, and they are the only chance we'll have to send a message to the swaggering Republicans in Congress and the White House.