Word: base
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...another tack and argue that the length of the campaign season forces out lesser-known candidates without a large war chest to keep them going over so many months. However, this effect is dwarfed by the advantage they receive by getting more time to build momentum from a tiny base of energized supporters—witness the meteoric rise of the obscure Republican Ron Paul, who recently set a record for the highest fundraising total in one day, and the speedy ascent of Mike Huckabee, the new champion of evangelical Christians. Newspapers groan at the cost of covering so many...
...voters showed up at the polls on Sunday. Low turnout was supposed to have hurt the opposition's "no" vote; but in the end it was Chavez, thought to have a reliable populist political machine at his disposal to get out the "yes" vote, who couldn't rouse his base among Venezuela's majority poor. Even that cohort, despite having benefited from Chavez's vast socialist project, backed away from his bid to solidify "21st-century socialism," which also would have put the autonomous Central Bank under his control and exerted deeper federal authority over local and state governments. Given...
...meet their loved ones. Apparently in reaction to the negative coverage, the Foreign Ministry then announced it had changed its mind for "humanitarian reasons" and would allow the carrier to visit after all, though by this time the ship was already well on its way to its home base in Japan. Similar confusion seemed to be in evidence a few days later when, during a visit to the White House, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reportedly told President Bush the episode was due to a "misunderstanding." But the next day, ministry spokesman in Beijing Liu Jianchao, told reporters that reports...
...injected life into the opposition when he, along with the former pro-Chavez party Podemos (Spanish for "We Can"), called for people to vote no. But the results raise another, perhaps more important, question: how much help did the opposition actually receive from the poor, Chavez's main support base...
...after logging 49% of the vote for his controversial reform, Chavez still has many of the poor on his side. The electoral council has yet to release detailed results that would indicate how impoverished areas voted. But an abstention rate of 44% suggests some of Chavez's traditional support base didn't show up to vote. And, narrow as the vote count was, the rejection of his proposal only one year after he won reelection by a margin of over 20% raises the possibility that abstention was compounded by some supporters actually voting no. If, as interviews in Caracas this...