Throughout this election cycle, we've been told by pundits from both parties that candidates have to choose between a "swing voter" strategy aimed at voters in the political center, and a "turnout" strategy aimed at mobilizing "base" voters who might otherwise stay home on November 2. And indeed, George W. Bush appears to have chosen the latter strategy, while John Kerry appears to be aiming at both audiences.

The planted axiom in the "swing versus turnout" choice is that "peripheral" voters -- those not highly committed to voting -- are more like "base" voters than "swing" voters: susceptible to highly partisan, highly ideological appeals. According to a new analysis of the electorate by the DLC, this is a false choice. "Peripheral" voters are not only more like "swing" voters than "base" voters; they are swing voters by every significant measure.

This analysis, conducted by former DLC Research Director Victoria Lynch, is based on the best available data on "peripheral" voters: the University of Michigan's National Election Studies. Lynch focused on voters whose willingness to participate varied in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections (the first being a relatively high turnout year, the second a low turnout year, and the third falling in between), and discovered that in most respects, they resemble the classic swing voters: political independents.

This is a simple but revolutionary observation. It throws cold water on the belief common on the Left and Right fringes of the political spectrum that there's a "hidden majority" for a more extreme partisan message among lukewarm voters. It also suggests that peripheral voters, like other swing voters, are voters who must be persuaded, not just "mobilized" or "energized."

There's a lot of good news for Democrats in Lynch's analysis. Peripheral voters are much more like Democrats than Republicans in supporting an activist government; in their commitment to equal opportunity; and in their rejection of cultural conservative "wedge issues." Demographically, peripheral voters are more like Democrats than Republicans in that they are relatively younger, less educated, more likely to consider themselves "working class," less likely to attend worship services regularly, and much more likely to self-identify as ideological "moderates" rather than conservatives. Indeed, this analysis casts a lot of doubt on Republican claims that non-voting Christian conservatives are a big part of the pool of "mobilizable" peripheral voters -- in part because these voters are disproportionately disengaged from civic as well as political involvement, and do not readily follow opinion-leaders, much less the "voter guides" distributed in churches that they do not regularly attend.

The cautionary tale for Democrats here is that peripheral voters, like independent voters, have a healthy skepticism about government as an effective institution. Thus, even though they do not share the Republican hostility to public sector activism, they are ripe targets for GOP accusations that Democrats favor big government without reform.

To the extent that strong public interest in the 2004 presidential election drives up turnout, the DLC analysis suggests that (1) this is good news for Democrats, especially insofar as their candidate is focusing on persuadable voters; but (2) that Kerry must continue to remind voters that he will cut middle-class taxes, not raise them, and cut the deficit in half, after four years of a president who never vetoed a single spending bill.

Sure, both parties will make every effort to selectively increase turnout among elements of the peripheral voting population that are reliably Democratic or Republican. But in a high-turnout election -- which is what we are almost certainly about to experience -- there's no substitute for persuasion, and fortunately, no choice that must be made between swing voters who are undecided about the candidates, and undecided about whether to go to the polls.