The Morning After...
Words escape me still.
Kerry has conceded and we have 4 more years of George Bush to endure. Here's hoping our worst fears are not realized.
Kerry has conceded and we have 4 more years of George Bush to endure. Here's hoping our worst fears are not realized.
posted by Todd at 8:57 AM
6 Comments:
Democrats really only have themselves to blame ... Bush COULD have been beaten. Instead, in their ABB/Hate-driven rush to annoint a nominee they overlooked - hell, they didn't even explore - Kerry's multiple flaws. Not vetting a nominee properly BEFORE the Convention is insanity. But considering that the Democrat's main case for winning this year boiled down to Bush=Hitler, I guess they were just true to form. You all just played electoral Russian Roulette. Too bad you did so with an automatic and not a revolver ...
Hate, anger and opposition to something/someone without a postive alternative of your own doesn't win elections, and considering how the Democrats taught Republicans this particular lesson so effectively with Clinton in the mid-late 1990s, it's stunning that they didn't bother to learn it for themselves. In politics hate and anger are double-edged swords: they turn out your base, but energize the other side's base just as well. And it annoys the hell out of the undecided center. Hopefully, with the highest turnout in American history and Bush winning by nearly a 4-million vote margin, this will be a lesson you all will learn. If not ... want some more wood?
Here's a suggestion: if you want to win the White House in 2008, make sure that your party stands FOR something, not against someone. Make sure that you pick a nominee based on the very best you have to offer, not the very worst you have to throw at the other side. Go out with support FOR your candidate and not just opposition, anger and hate to the other guy.
You do that next time, you'll do better.
What was the deal with the exit polls being so off target?
apparently they oversampled women and minorities. what's amazing is that both campaigns and expert pollsters still took them as indicative of the actual vote. how could they have been SO wrong? well, there are theories about vote fraud but let's not go there, shall we?
How about a morning after election pill. LOL
I think that we all need one.
Regarding the exit polls:
1.) The numbers that were off were just the first
sweep, heavy with the midday voting crowd.
Democrats and women tend to vote early, Republicans and men tend to vote later on. It's a fact that's been established over dozens of different election cycles.
2.) Given the level of hate and anger directed at
them, it's likely that good numbers of
Republicans/Bush voters either refused to be
interviewed, or lied to the exist pollsters. This is
a well-documented occurance. In the US it tends to be
closely associated with Doug Wilder's election-day
slip from a 10 point lead to a 2 point win in the 1989
VA gubernatorial race. In England it's called the
"Shy Tory" effect ... it was partially reponsible the
surprise nature of John Major's Conservative victory
over Neil Kinnock's Labour in the early 1990s.
The above is to be expected, and any good news shop will know this and take it all into account. So why did we see what we did? Well, my take is that rather than showing a healthy skepticism for the early exit polls, the news media just saw them as reinforcement for what they were already expecting: a Kerry victory. While the news media has often been prone to allowing it's pro-Dem biases to creep into what it reports, that has been especially true this cycle with the media running hasty anti-Bush stories without proper verification/validation (even though Todd neglected to cover it, I think we're all pretty familiar with the CBS/Dan Rather forgeries incident).
Since the exit numbers were just reinforcing what the media expected, but because they were embargoed, a number of media members who had access to them decided to leak them out to the blogosphere (note that Wonkette, one of the more successful Liberal bloggers, has been pegged as an early recipient and publisher of the first exits). The Kerry Campaign, knowing that early indications of success will suppress the opposition's voter turnout (West Coast 1980 for the Dems, Florida Panhandle 2000 for the GOP being the two best examples of this), seized on the early release and started hyping the numbers as being representative of what they were seeing as well. In the feeding frenzy, the media (again, in their bias) overlooked that the exit polls were biased to early voters (women accounted for nearly 60% of respondants) and had Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 20 points and breaking even with Bush in Virginia and even Mississippi (all of which is pretty insane, and was picked apart by Republican bloggers and netizens on places like FreeRepublic just as quickly as they'd picked apart the CBS/Rather forgeries). They also "forgot" how past early exits (NC and CO Senate seats last cycle) had been horribly wrong.
I appreciate your analysis, mystery blogger (or maybe not so mysterious) but I wasn't aware that the mainstream media reported on the exit polling. Please cite a source. The only place I saw the exit polling numbers were on myDD, dailyKos, Drudge & Wonkette, blogs all. And as for not covering the Dan Rather/documents story, that's not entirely true, but to the extent that I didn't give the story as much play as other liberal outlets, some on the right might choose to give me credit for not jumping on the story as proof of anything. I saw the memos as an irrelevant distraction, quite frankly, from the larger and quite relevant story of Bush's failure to fulfill his service requirements. The brilliance of the whole thing for Bush was that the debunking of the documents appeared to debunk the entire story.
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