The DavidCyrus Blog of Wisdom

W - T - F '04 ?!?!?!
Weren't we supposed to win this one?

Prior to the election, Florida seemed like a lock for Kerry. Even with Ohio in Bush's pocket, the full bright sun-shiny day in Florida meant high voter turnout, and we all agreed that that means a high Democratic voter turnout.

W-T-F Happened?

Kerry was supposed to gain an immediate 3000 votes compared to Gore in 2000, by using a non-butterfly ballot. Kerry was supposed to gain thousands of votes from newly registered students. Kerry was supposed to gain thousands of votes from repentant Nader fans. Polls just prior to the election predicted a Kerry win.

...and all this was to guarantee a Florida state win, 27 electoral votes, and the U.S. Presidency for John F. Kerry.

Upon simple analysis, the bottom line was that more Democrats voted for Bush than anybody expected. The youth vote (ages 18-29) went to Kerry, as did first-time voters, as did voters making less than $100,000 a year.

However, the percentage of Democrats voting for Bush was twice as high as the percentage of Republicans voted for Kerry. A larger percentage of Democrats voted for Bush in this election than in 2000.

You can check the poll data for yourself here.
I don't really have an understanding of why this happened. Perhaps the fear of terrorism scared people into believing that Bush was handling threats well, and convinced voters that we shouldn't change generals on the battlefield. It all seems so unbelievably backwards, like a Bizzaro universe. For example, voting for Bush correlated strongly positive with years of education!

The optimistic exit polls that started out on Tuesday morning aren't hard to explain. Democrats who came out to vote for Kerry came out early. The after-work crew then went strongly to Bush. Of course, the paranoid right-wingers are explaining this with a typical persecution complex (which makes no sense, considering the election outcome). Ann Coulter, for example, states that, "Only monkey business can explain the wildly pro-Kerry exit polls," and supports speculation that Democrats secretly discovered polling locations, and then shipped Democrats to those locations to skew the polls.

"...and it all would have worked perfectly!" sneered the evil Democrats, if only they (and Ann) had remembered that voters have to cast their votes in their home precincts, so shipping voters from one precinct to another gains nothing.