Checking New Mexico, there are, indeed, bizarre differences in turnout between counties. I believe the results suggest Bush's tiny margin will get a little bigger, but until this is resolved, this state should not be called either way.

Because the Republicans have indicated they are willing to accept the vote there, and not try to dig under every rock to try and help their side and drag this election out for a couple more weeks?

How Come Fox News and NBC aren't calling this for Bush? CNN, CBS and ABC called Nevada for Bush ten to fifteen minutes ago! With Ohio called on NBC and Fox, Nevada puts Bush over 270, so why not call the election by calling Nevada? Why wait, when everybody, including the AP, has called Nevada (and 100% of precincts are in)? Are they becoming hesitant with Ohio?


-Anxiety

Bush rocks!!!



(sorry, i have nothing constructive to add to this thread)

This is just comical. No one wants to call the race for Bush. Half the networks have Bush winning Ohio. Another half have Bush winning Nevada. Yet, not one network has Bush winning both. This in spite of the fact that both states have a margin of 2-3% and 100% precincts. No one is willing to take that step and call Bush as winning the president, despite the fact the numbers show a Kerry win in Nevada or Ohio is almost impossible.

Face it. No news organization wants to be the first to call it, particularly if there is going to be a challenge in Ohio. Democrat, Republican, whatever- I haven't noticed any station calling the race. Why? Because it's much better for ratings, not so much now but in the morning, for all the news organizations. Heck, even for tonight, I bet everyone still viewing this thread (8, which is about 6 or 7 more than anyone at this time of night normally) is still watching tv and that's helping their ratings. This isn't a blue or red thing, it's a green thing.

SI

Hopefully not like that god-awful idea by CNN to make Ohio a "Green State" for too close to call. That's what you have white undecideds for dumbass. If you're gonna go a 3rd color, at least combine the red and blue and make purple.

Alright, my essay's done. I think I need to go to sleep. Hopefully Kerry will concede by tomorrow night and we can move on.

Weird. They all speculate that Bush has won. But I understand that they might want to give Kerry the chance to exit gracefully.

Checking Nevada, there's no reason to suspect Kerry has even a ghost of a chance. Iowa could be called, so could Wisconsin the other way. Only New Mexico has oddities worth looking into. So my map is 281-252 for Bush. And I missed by 59 EVs (Florida, Ohio, Iowa and maybe New Mexico).

I'm with Jim on the result. I also agree with SI on the networks. For that reason, I am hitting the sack.

Nice to see FOFC back up and hopefully this will all be sorted out by the morning.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, CNN just made me laugh in my sleep adled state. After talking about Rove and how he was pressuring networks to call New Mexico, they call it... Too Close to Call!

This is too petty and funny, especially considering how tired I am. CNN basically just said "Fuck you, Rove. You want us to call New Mexico? Ok, we'll call it... GREEN!"

SI

Funny how Ohio and New Mexico are too close to call, but Wisconsin and Iowa remain white. Hmmmm...talk about being the news instead of reporting it.

You'd be wrong. No TV at work. :)

If I had access to one I'd be watching though so you're not completely right, only mostly right.

Arlie,

I think the reason they are calling PA and not Ohio is because of the provisional votes (something PA does not have according to my knowledge). While I agree that is seems the # of provisional votes left outstanding will not make up the difference for Kerry in Ohio, that's the only reason I can think why the networks haven't called it yet.

If I remember correctly, the provisional votes are a result of the Help America Vote Act and not limited to Ohio.

Ok...provisional voting just seems odd to me. Here in Delaware, we had to get a court order to have my wife vote (she registered at the DMV 4 months ago, but never received her card). If this provisional vote thing is true, we apparently jumped through a lot of hoops for nothing.

Man, I finally got access to the boards. We will know that Bush won Ohio in a matter of hours. The results could be posted as soon as this afternoon but even maybe on thursday. It seems the exit polls that predicted Kerry as a big winner were totally wrong and this allowed Bush to win the White House. We have a clean sweep by the Republicans and now they have the Senate, House and Presidency. It ought to be very interesting which direction Bush goes; will he try to unite the country by adopting a more bipartisan approach, or since he has major support in the house and senate, will he go conservative and Rip the Democrats plans for healthcare, taxes, tort reform to shreads. The Democrats and their supporters have to be devastated by these losses. I think that the Democrats are going to have to adopt a southern democrat to run in the Presidential election in 2008, because there is no way a northerner can win the Presidency.

On a more personal note, although I'm a registered independent I really wanted to see Bush lose. Wow, I just noticed something, I didn't say I really wish Kerry would win, but I really wanted to see Bush lose. Kerry was obviously not the best canidate that the Democrats could stand behind. He was pretty indecisive and his campaign was run horribly. The Republicans were much more organized and precise in their attacks and strategies. I really hope Bush becomes a little more moderate (not spending-wise, I wish he would cut the costs) on the economy and social issues. However, I doubt this will happen, I believe he'll probably introduce very conservative reforms, making the tax cut permanent, trying to get that ban on gay marriage (oh yea thats important) and probably continuing to be really pro-business and anti-environment. Its interesting to note that no war President has ever lost an election. I think this factored into it a bit, many people still believe there is a connection between al-qaeda and Saddam and some believe that there were WMD. Besides, Kerry really wasn't strong enough on the Iraq war and on terrorism. You know there is a big similarity between 9/11 and this election. That is, after 9/11 the Republicans and Bush had a real chance to unite the country and really bring America together, but they went the opposite direction. Now, since the Republicans have control of everything, they have a chance to make reasonable reforms and make this country better, hopefully they realize this. However, I highly doubt it and the Republicans will probably think its an opporunity to make conservative reforms. This isn't to say that conservative reforms are not reasonable, actually they are, and liberal reforms are unreasonable too, on almost every issue there is a healthy medium and hopefully the Republicans don't screw stuff up.

Just my thought, congrats to President Bush and the Republican party.

OKay, here's another one similar to the Ohio\Pennsylvania thing:

Wisconsin (99% reporting)

Kerry 1,480,256
Bush 1,466,963

13,000 difference, called for Kerry


Iowa (100% reporting)

Bush 741,325
Kerry 725,700

14,000 difference in a voter pool 1/2 the size, too close to call.

Is there some wierdness in Iowa like there supposedly is in New Mexico? Why is this too close to call?

Fox and NBC refuse to call the election for Bush in case they are wrong. And instead of having a repeat of 4 years ago when they called a state for someone and then took it off the board, they are refusing to call the rest of the states and leaving Ohio as Bush to avoid looking like they didn't learn a lesson from 2000. CNN and others, meanwhile, who didn't call Ohio, are sticking by that non-call and are free to call the other states, because it won't give either party the win.

From what I heard this morning, Bush is up by more than 140K in Ohio, and 77 out of 88 counties have reported 130K provisional ballots. Now, I don't know what counties are left, and maybe they are big, but even assuming there's 175K provisionals, (a) they would all have to be certified, and (b) Kerry would have to win around 155K-160K of those votes to take Ohio (depending on overseas ballots). There's just no way. But those who have the info on what counties those provisionals are coming from will know better whether the trend would be for Kerry in those votes. Still, I bet there wasn't a single county where Kerry took 85-90% of the vote that he would need to pull this off.

The votes will be counted in 11 days regardless - so this isn't about not allowing votes to count - and I hope the Kerry camp realizes this and says that even when those votes are counted, they still won't win. I think Bush's camp is right to push on this, for one simple reason - give 10,000+ lawyers 11 days to start fires elsewhere, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

AJC exit polling showed "moral concerns" to be a larger issue among Georgia voters than Iraq or terrorism. And every state that voted on the issue yesterday passed it (unless something changed dramatically after I crashed around 330 am) including some Kerry states.


If it isn't, then the next four years are meaningless domestically. And I don't much think too many people who just worked this hard on something this important are going to sit by & let their efforts be rendered meaningless ... and if that does happen, you'll see the GOP losing Congressional seats in 2006.

Are you sure about that? Lord knows, it was so late last night that I could have easily misunderstood, but if I followed the guy in charge of their elections correctly (their Sec of State?), then those ballots will only be counted IF there's more provisional ballots than the margin of victory.

Now, that said, I haven't heard (and hopefully someone here has) whether the certified ballots will be counted even if the margin is mathematically insurmountable.

Anyone been to the Democratic Underground web site last night or this morning? I'm about to check it out. I'll bet there's some pretty good UIC going on there right about now...

Agreed on all counts. The final difference in Ohio is 136,221 votes. Even if there really were 250k provisional ballots, do they really think well over 75% of them are going to Kerry?

Lets look at some of the lessons learned in this election:

Don't pay attention to polls, because Americans change their minds on an hourly basis.

Don't trust exit polls.

More people support and still support the war in Iraq than many people want to believe.


If you're a network, quickly forget the first two lessons before the next election season.

I'm pretty sure they have to be counted if they are found to be legit, but maybe I'm wrong. If not, then that's even more reason to call this election now. I thought that talk was just about whether they would make a difference. But hell, it was late and I thought I was seeing things all night (like a Bush win), so maybe I was hearing things as well.

I find it amazing that with all of the attention given to young voters, the same percentage of 18-25 year olds voted in 2004 that voted in 2000: 17%. More of them voted, but as a percentage of the voters, there was no difference.

That other 83% should be smacked.

That is so dissapointing, me being just out of that age range, I don't understand why or where that age group is when it comes down to voting time. Why wouldn't you want to vote, or do you just want to let everyone else pick someone for you, and then complain about it later? Did they misunderstand the MTV slogan or whomevers slogan it was, to "Vote or Die", and they thought it said "Vote and Die".

I've been canvassing all sorts of different boards - political and non-political alike - and I would equate the reaction I've seen to the reaction to the OJ verdict: stunned disbelief, anger, questioning how and why this happened, suggesting improprieties (or, in OJ terms, jury nullification), etc. And some people are simply in denial, thinking they'll pull out Ohio. Even more distressing is the number of Kerry supporters who want him to wage a a full-on war in a number of "close" states to try to steal this election as Bush allegedly "stole" 2000. The hatred is out there, it's very real, it's sickening...but luckily, more than half of the country did NOT vote based on hatred. And I mean that from a "state of our union" manner, not so much because the outcome favored my candidate. It's never a good thing when people vote out of hatred and their will is imposed in that way.

I bet Zogby is getting some "encouraging" phone calls this morning.

This is starting to get a little mind-numbing. New Hampshire was called for Kerry with the following:

John F. Kerry - 332,553 -50%
George W. Bush - 323,319 - 49%

DIFF +9,234 (1%)

Yet, Fox and some others are not calling Nevada for Bush:

George W. Bush - 388,963 - 51%
John F. Kerry - 368,458 - 48%

DIFF +20,505 (3%)

Can someone please explain this to me?

What are the amount of absentee ballots or votes not counted? If the lead is insurmountable than they will call it. Although the lead in one state maybe less than one in another, the one with a bigger margin may have almost every vote in.

As I said above, they are not calling it solely because they realize they called Ohio too early, but don't want to be in the position of either (a) appearing to give the election to Bush without Kerry conceding and/or Ohio being determined, or (b) having to pull Ohio off the board and admit to doing the same thing they did 4 years ago with Florida. You'll notice that CNN and other networks that did not call Ohio have called the other states. But the net effect is that no network wants to call the election without Ohio officially decided or Kerry conceding.

So, for Fox, it's a face-saving mesaure predicated solely on having called Ohio.

I see that, but provisional and absentee ballots have a chance of unseating Kerry in New Hampshire and Penn (but it is doubtful). IIRC, Ohio has around 175,000 uncounted provisional/abs/military votes with Bush having a 145,000 vote lead. And, in Nevada, there are 10,000 uncounted with Bush having a 20,500 lead. It's nearly impossible for Kerry to win Ohio (he would nead a combined 92% of the provisional and military ballots) and he would need 210% of the ballots in Nevada to win ;)

Too bad he can't run anymore push polls for his canidate of choice.

I think it is solely related to the Dems challenging the Ohio call. I haven't heard anything out of the Bush camp about the other states. Now, if the momentum starts to pick upfor Kerry to launch a full-scale attack on the Ohio process, it wouldn't surprise me to see Bush fall back on those states to at least question the outcomes.

The voter fraud issue is heating up, at least on the blogs/websites. The latest is that Bush was able to tamper with the voting in states where there are no paper trails for evoting, because as compared with exit polls, states with paper trails are showing a better correlation between exit polls and actual results.

Nevermind that the exit polls appear to be trash and unreliable...

I'll take this one a step farther: I wouldn't be shocked to find out that CNN/FOX/ABC/MSNBC have been in communication with one another on this one. If any one of them were to put Bush over 269 at this point, they'd *all* feel like they needed to call the election for him. On the off chance that they're wrong, they'd all end up with egg on their faces once again. Instead, they've decided to make it clear anyone paying attention that Bush will win the election, without any one of them calling it for him. I have some doubt that it is a coincidence that two of the majors have it called one way, and two others another way.

To take this on a slightly different tack: anyone else try to watch CBS last night and end up switching to another network just because Dan Rather looked completely lost, stumbling over lines, and generally like he just can't hack the fast pace of election coverage?

I find it amazing that talking heads keep talking about Bush being more concilatory towards Democrats during his second term. Er, why would we expect that? The Republicans basically got a mandate in this election.

Man it is sad that this is the last election that Brokaw will be running for NBC.

Now, more important than all this President crap, is that the referendum passed 54-46 percent in Arlington for the Dallas Cowboys to begin building their new stadium. :)

I noticed that Dan Rather was the king of simile/metaphor last night. "This race is hotter than the Devil's anvil!"

How can Hawaii with 0% of the precints reporting report Kerry as a weiner?

Terry Bosch lost an important shot at winning by only gathering one vote for his write in campaign. He figured he had his girlfriend, mother, father, son, and his own vote at least. Sadly, like usually, he only came thru for himself...

I also want to give a little credit to Jim. It would have been very easy for him after his predictions to simply disappear once the results came in far different than many, including myself, predicted. But he left himself in the game and faced his miscalculations. As a guy who may have questioned buying a political game from him before, I offer my kudos.

Now, to Delebar, who seemed downright giddy earlier in the day, but has been noticeably absent of late, I will only offer the following gloating... "Four More Years!" :)

That's what I started off the evening saying but I got slammed. I defer to my friend from Northern Colorado.

Case in point: Jim is a lot smarter than I and he said, "Early exit polls show this is going to be rout for Kerry. States are in play that I figured were safe for Bush, like Virginia. Pennsylvania shows a 20-point Kerry lead."

Disclaimer: By the way, this was meant in jest, in good fun, despite the fact that I've had my share of disagreements with Delebar.

Here was my prediction (from Ben's Place)

Prediction: A repeat of 2000 with a slightly different twist. We will not know for some time due to absentee and overseas ballots and a controversy in one state (not FL).

I should have said "provisional" and not absentee/overseas but it's close.

Just an FYI, I just heard that 20,000 of the provisional votes have been checked in Ohio and they have gone Bush by a 2/3 margin. This could be mathamatically impossible for Kerry by lunchtime.

How is that any different than anything he has done the past 20 years? To me, ever since he took over from Walter, he has been jittery and nervous in that seat. No one his ratings have bombed since then.

Lord, I hope not. There is nothing worse than any form of federal govt mandates.

To use a football analogy as someone did earlier, I believe that despite throwing 2 TDS and 4 INTS in the first half (4 years), the QB is not going to be pulled. The first half score started (up until late 2002) out as a rout but by the end of the half, they let the opponents catch up. I still say we change the rules of the game and allow more teams to play on the field.

Time is about to expire and the refs are reviewing the last play of the game (a late TD pass by the oppositions QB, WR looks like he was juggling the ball), and are likely to make a decision soon. By the looks of the replay, it doesn't look good for the opposition.

That's interesting, since the Secretary of State last night was adament that no provisional votes would be counted for 10 days because of state law.

Nevertheless, I think the battle was over about 1:30AM Eastern last night. Kerry would gain a lot more by being a statesman now.

More on this. Check the headlines at the major news sites:

CNN: Bush camp certain of win. (254-252 being reported as their count.)
ABC: Republicans certain. Dems defiant. (254-242)
MSNBC: "We are convinced." (269-238)
FOX: Bush camp claims victory. (269-242)
CBS: Bush camp confident amid count. (254-242)

I think your first two lessons are right on the money, but I'm not sure that the Iraq war the most surprising factor. Rather, another lesson of this election seems to have been the unexpected (at least for me) prominence of "morality" in choosing a candidate. In many states that was the 2nd or 3rd ranked item of importance for voters, and those folks voted heavily for Bush. I'm stunned by this, as just 8 short years ago people were voting for Clinton despite his questionable morality, ostensibly because they thought being able to do the job was more important than being a morally upright person. This seems to reflect an epic sea-change, if accurate.

In other words, it appears that the Bush-Cheney campaign's efforts to get out the religious vote worked beautifully (for them). And it didn't hurt that 11 states were voting on gay marriage bans, either. In that sense, I wonder if the effort to push gay marriages may have ultimiately worked against the broader interests of the gay constituency by provoking so many social conservatives to the polls.

Maybe not so much personally, but definitely for his party. I agree with Jim that he's going to run the risk of getting himself and the party getting labeled as whiners.

While typing this post, I just heard on the news that there are those within the Kerry camp saying that it is "hopeless" and that he should concede.

I was going to post something almost exactly like this. I think this is definitely true and was something that should have been predicted but seemingly wasn't. I think the gay marriage ban issue was really big for Bush despite the fact that his position is exactly the same as Kerry's. Bush, though, emphasized it enough so that people felt like he was the more "moral" of the two, and I think he reaped the benefit of that.

While I agree with teh general sentiment that Kerry's campaign made many mistakes, I'd give him a pass on this one. It was a no-win for Kerry on this issue. He couldn't afford to emphasize it as much as Bush did, for fear of pushing some in his camp away from voting at all, or to Nader. Bush had far less to lose by emphasizing his position on the issue than did Kerry.

Cool. :)

I agree. I think these new, silent morality voters offset the young, vocal voters that were seen as vital to the Kerry campaign.

I'm not necessarily saying that Kerry made a mistake on this at all. In fact, if anything I think Bush could have used it even more to his advantage, but as you said, it's a no-win issue. If you take one side, you're immoral to the right, but if you take the other, you're intolerant to the middle and left.

The only point that I was making is that I think this was tremendously overlooked as an influence in getting conservative voters to the polls in key states like Ohio, and seriously helped Bush win. It's not a strategy necessarily; it was just inevitable. I thought that before the election and was surprised it wasn't mentioned very much.

I think he backed off this once everyone realized that waiting 11 days would be of no benefit to anyone. But you're right, that was the public prouncement last night.

To tell you the truth, I'm not convinced that it wasn't a strategy from the beginning.

It may have been, but honestly I think that the Bush campaign became scared of it in the end. They thought that it would make them sound devisive and tilt the independent vote to Kerry, but I don't think they accurately anticipated the amount of voters it would bring in. If they had, they may have played it up even more, especially at the end.

The Gay marriage votes on the Ballot had to cause a lot of the turnout. While they were there, a lot just voted for bush as well.

Boortz is saying that it is an Ohio law that they can't count the provisional ballots for 11 days.

On this issue:


"In Ohio, Kerry won among young adults, but lost in every other age group. One-fourth of Ohio voters identified themselves as born-again Christians and they backed Bush by a 3-to-1 margin.

A sideline issue in the national presidential campaign, gay civil unions may have been a sleeper that hurt Kerry - who strongly supports that right - in Ohio and elsewhere. Ohioans expanded their law banning gay marriage, already considered the toughest in the country, with an even broader constitutional amendment against civil unions."

I have no idea. I think that's the first time I've tried to watch Rather during that time frame. I think the only time I watch these national news guys is during big elections ;-)

I think they have up to 11 days to qualify each ballot and make sure they are legit votes. In order to do that, you have to match the address and name and then verify the person did indeed vote in the presidential election.

So, while the official count won't be certified for 11 days, they were saying they would know the results of 50,000 ballots by lunchtime. That's where the 20,000 came from that I quoted earlier. My guess is the fact that Kerry had only gotten 7,000 out of the first 20,000 counted made it almost numerically impossible for him to win Ohio and that's why he conceded.

But, they are going through the provisional ballots in Ohio right know to verify the validity of the ballots. And, by doing so, they can see what each ballot has for the presidential election.

I think the whole numbers game played out like this:

Bush is up by around 136K in Ohio

77 of 88 counties reported around 136K provisional ballots. The remaining 11 counties counted for 10.5% of provisional ballots in 2000.

That means that there are probably 150K provisional ballots this time.

In 2000, there were 120K provisionals, 100K of which were found to be valid. That leaves 1/6 as invalid. Applying that to 150K, that means roughly 25K provisionals would be found to be invalid. That leaves 125K provisionals in a race where Kerry is losing by 136K. Throw in military overseas ballots, which you would think would run for Bush, or at worst split, and Kerry has no mathematical chance of winning.

Kerry called it.

I'm not even going to start on Georgia.

It really baffles me how crazy people get about gay marriage, I think pop culture and television have really scared people into thinking that gays and lesbians are taking over the country or something, so people feel its neccecary to protect themselves against a minority.

The GOP will lose seats if they become too conservative, because those reforms will backfire on them. I'm sorry to say its true, but very liberal ideas and reforms don't work and very conservative ideas and reforms don't work. Its just common sense that we need moderation in this country.

Baffled I can live with. There's countless things that leave me shaking my head in amazement on a pretty regular basis.

But I don't think it can be emphasized enough that this was far far far from being "a Georgia thing" or "a Mississippi thing" (I believe those are the 2 states with the largest margins of victory for their proposals). Similar measures passed in a couple of states that went for Kerry, and a much stronger measure in "too-close-to-call" Ohio. Across the board victory for the measures. Hell, to look at the numbers, it seems unlikely to believe you could get 11 states that split their Presidential votes to agree on a referendum to hand out free money or free beer. And yet this particular subject comes back unanimous.

I guess what I'm getting at is this -- in spite of the countless amount of media time spent ridiculously claiming otherwise, opposing recognition of
gay marriage IS the mainstream/center position in this country.

I agree, but I think the republican party is creating a pretty big net for social policies. There are many Pro-Choice, but against partial birth abortion republicans. There are some that are indifferent to gay-marriage, while others oppose it. There is also room for those that support civil unions. Some republicans think we have to be careful on religion in schools, while others don't have a problem with "under God" in the pledge or even after-school religious clubs. There are some that support federal funding for stem-cell research, while others oppose it. Some are pro-affirmative action, while others don't like the process.

I think a wide majority of people find themselves more at home with republicans from a social policy standpoint. Just look at their convention, you had Arnold, Rudy, McCain, Bush and Zell Miller. You have pretty much the wide range discussed above on social issues. When was the last time a Pro-Life or Anti-Affirmative Action or Anti-Gay Marriage or very religious person was embraced by the democratic party? Yet much of the US falls in the above categories.

Barack Obama, Arles?

Slight change of topic from across the Atlantic - looking at the queues and hearing of people waiting hours to vote, I was wondering how many voters each polling station would be expected to cover.

Which is why he might be the start of a new Democratic revolution. BUT, he is going to have to do more than make good speeches to do it.

I originally said:


Obama is pro-Choice, pro affirmative action, does not oppose gay marriage and favors increasing gun laws. While he's certainly an impressive candidate, he doesn't really fit what I was describing above.

Obama is a suspect candidate. He has a few skeletons in his closet that aren't widely known, but they make it hard for him to run for president. Still, he may be the Dems best hope.

H doesn't have to be President to start a revolution. Ask Newt Gingrich. If he can start forming a new coalition in Washington, he could be a big time player for many years to come.

True enough - I was just remarking on his presidential prospects.

Yeah, he was a cokehead when he was in school, was an alcoholic, dodged Vietnam, and ran a couple businesses into the ground.. oh, wait..

People make way too much of the skeletons in the closet. A good campaign strategist just makes them go away. Clinton waltzed past his skeletons and Bush buried his.

So anyway.. whats the dish on Obama?

I made my predictions a month or so ago. I said that Bush would win and gave the reason why I felt that. One of those reasons was the war. I still firmly believe the silent majority supported the war and always have. I'm not talking about the people who believe Hussein was connected to Al Queda either. I'm talking about rational people who felt this was the best course of action to take.

If I'd made a prediction on the morning of the election, I would have guessed Bush would win the popular vote, but Kerry would eek out the electoral vote with an Ohio win.

I didn't trust the first exit polls (or any exit polls after that). I wanted to see the raw data. As the numbers started rolling in, it became pretty clear Bush was doing better than people thought he would. I thought the unemployed in Ohio would swing the election. . . but even they seemed to support Bush in the end.

I never, ever, understood the people who had Kerry winning 300+ electoral votes. I was prepared to eat my words sinse so many people were saying it, but it just didn't seem possible to me.

The people who had Kerry winning 300+ definately shut me up. I thought for sure I was way off thinking Bush stood a chance with some of the intellectual elite whooping up a Kerry victory. Jeez, I'm the one that's been screaming that we should not believe everything we see on TV, and then I fall for the same crap.

I just studied that county red/blue map and saw something interesting. Take a look at the number of red counties in Pennsylvania. I think Thomas Jefferson gave us a warning about this a long time ago.

Pennslvania ended up being closer than Ohio (120,000 vote diff). And, when you consider there are still a large number of military ballots coming in because of the Rendell extention, Bush might end up being 30,000-40,000 votes from a large electoral route. Wisconsin and New Hampshire were also within 1%.

In Bush's column, only New Mexico and Iowa had margins of victory less than 2%, and he would have won the presidency without either. The left is in danger of losing big states in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and even Michigan to the same heartland phenomina people have been talking about. On the right, the only big state within 3% was Ohio. Even Florida had a comfortable 5 point margin.

Again, to be clear, my above comments refer primarily to social policy, not necessarily economic policy. But if the left keeps turning more and more secular, they are in a position to lose states like Wisconsin, Penn, Minnesota and Michigan.

The point is they're not secular, but the Republicans are doing a good job of making people believe it is so. Kerry goes to church every week... how is that secular?

It's secular because their party will never dream of promoting someone that believes partial birth abortion should be outlawed (even though 70% of Americans think so), someone who is open about their faith impacting their policy, someone who wants the words "Under God" in the pledge, someone who doesn't have a problem with after-school religious clubs, someone who does not support affirmative action, someone who is pro-gun rights and someone who does not feel the courts should be imposing gay marriage on communities that do not agree with it. And, most importantly, someone with a consistent record on the above and willing to take stands on these issues in a public setting.

Right now, a majority of the US believes in everything stated above, yet you can't find one democrat that is fronted by the party that even takes a stance on just half of the above. The republican convention had Arnold and Rudy that don't toe the party line on abortion, gay marriage, and other social issues. They had McCain speak who doesn't toe the line on certain economic and social issues as well. Where was the pro-life speaker in the DNC convention? The anti-affirmative guy? The pro-gun guy? The pro death penalty speaker? These are all stances that a majority of Americans have, yet no one in the DNC leadership has. The democrats need more of John Breaux and Evan Byah and less of Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. Yet, I don't think we will see Breaux or Byah ever speaking at a DNC convention like we did with Arnold and Rudy on the right.