For all the talk about the base, here's why Kerry lost. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/president/ According to this, the independent vote was for Kerry, but only 49-48. ALL the opinion polls the last few weeks gave Kerry big edges among independents. Given that independents were 26% of the electorate, that means 13% of the electorate were independents for Bush, and 13% were independents for Kerry. Change that to 14-12 for Kerry, and Kerry is the president elect. 14-12 would mean Kerry would still have only gotten 54% of the independent vote, which was lower than he was in, to my recollection, just about every poll. (I'm talking about the two-way vote.) I'd be very curious as to why that happened. Who were the independents for Bush, and what motivated them. Maybe the undecideds broke hard for Bush. FYI, in Ohio, Kerry won independents 59-40. I don't have the time or interest to look around, but I wonder where he lost independents. Just for fun, I clicked on North Carolina, and Bush won independents 56-41. So maybe independents just tracked each state's overall numbers. Or maybe not. Look at Florida. The Florida numbers are, to me, very interesting. Bush won overall 52-47. Kerry won independents 57-41 (Nader 1.) But, Kerry won Dems by only 85-14!!! I wouldn't have expected that in Florida. 37% of voters self-identified as Dems, so 14% of that is over 5%!!! Twice the margin of victory (since it added to Bush's numbers AND subtracted from Kerry's.) IOW, if Dems had been as loyal as GOPs, Kerry woulda won Florida. Hell, cut their extra disloyalty in half, it would have been a tie. I've got to say, that surprises me, because I didn't perceive Florida as a state filled with "Reagan Democrats" (in NC we call them Jessecrats) like the rest of the South. And I thought that a reasonable number of GOPs would be snowbirds uncomfortable with Bush's hard-right conservativism, and Cubans unhappy with the travel ban. Sorry for digressing. Kerry lost because Bush ignored independent/moderate voters, and still got half of them. We can all argue about why, so let's get on with that in the rest of the thread. PS...Note that Gallup gets half-props; Dems and GOPs each made up 37% of the electorate. The last two elections, the Dems led by 5 and 4 points, and when Gallup did polls showing GOPs outnumbering Dems by 4-5 points, they were widely mocked.
At least they didn't vote for Nader, again. Independent or not, you lean on way or the other. Many times your issues cross both parties and you simply weigh then against each other.
Yeah, cool. Lets argue. I think the left spooked many independents. Elitist Hollywood endorsements, Michael Moore anti-american movie, Move-on.org and their radical agenda, the demonization of a president who may have made mistakes but was not seen by regular people as a bad guy. I argued at the time that the excesive protests by radicals in New York during the republican convention did more to help Bush with independents than anything that happened inside the convention. Any argument with all that?
My quick take on that: -- Hurricanes: Bush was there a lot, handing out disaster money (deservedly, that's not a slam), being sympathetic and presidential. -- New Latino voters: I believe half went to Bush nationwide. Who knows how they registered. --The Democratic "Values Gap": Pure speculation on my part --> A good chunk of lost votes came from traditionally Democratic communities of color who switched on religious/social issues.
I'd agree with #1 and disagree with #2. I just don't think the NY protests were all that crazy (a la the Battle of Seattle) plus 'Hey, it's New York--Whaddya expect?' You'd think that Reep delegate thug kicking a female protestor would cancel that out. But that probably only registered among the wonks and politico-freaks*. (*That would include all of us, in case anybody's wondering.)
Maybe I don't understand how many Americans are, even independents. OR maybe you don't. But the way I see it, Crimen y Castigo, is like this: If you and I see a protestor with an anti-Bush sign dressed up as a dick we laugh. But some lady sitting in front of her TV set in Iowa sees it and she gets horrified. And she associates the dick with Senator Kerry.
My wife and I were undecided up until I think the second debate in which Kerry gave a glimpse of his tax policy and from that point on we decided to both vote for Bush. Andy
I think what you're trying to say is that for most "independents," it's a pose and not an accurate label. I think you're probably right. Even so...49-48!?!?!?
I read an article in one of the south Florida papers (can't find it now) that said Bush did much better with the Jewish vote than he had last time. I'm guessing he beat Kerry, and beat him badly, with the "Single Issue - Israel" voters. Unexpected and disappointing, but not shocking.
What shocked me was the hispanic vote. I am hispanic, I hang out with lots of hispanics, we play soccer and stuff, and of course we argue about politics. And I didn't see it coming. I thought Bush might get a slight increase, but not as much as he did.
Point taken. (And penises are always funny.) And, true, I know not a lot about Independent numbers or demographics. But I might suggest that if you register Independent, you're automatically somewhat of an iconoclast, free-thinker, luddite or outside-the-mainstream at the least. So how shocking would that really be to such a person? But I don't mean to quibble. I do see the point: Dick on head=Not the best message.
The number of independents making over $200K is too small to explain how Bush essentially tied Kerry, despite Bush explicitly not caring about independents. Plus, to address both this post and asf's point about Michael Moore, what made this so stunning to me is that the polls consistently, and over a long period of time, had Kerry getting more of the independent vote than Bush. And even among independents, the "undecided" number was small. If those earlier polls were legit, man, Bush creamed Kerry among late-deciding independents. Just crushed him, along the line of self-identified Republicans. What I'm saying is, (and I admittedly didn't explain too well in my first post), I'm partly interested in why Kerry didn't beat Bush by 10% or more. But I'm also partly interested in how Kerry could have been always leading in polls among independents, and then have it be a tie on E-Day. EDIT: One other thing about the tax plan. It would have been a bold way to frame the issue, but Kerry (and Dems in general) really, really missed an opportunity by saying, look, Bush's tax cuts aren't really tax cuts. Non-military spending increased X percent under Bush and the Republican House. It's not a tax cut, it's a tax delay. It's like buying furniture under a "no-interest for 1 year" plan. You've still got to pay the bill, and if you don't pay it off in a year, you get socked for all that deferred interest. The President is gonna miss that payment schedule. My plan is an attempt to make the payment schedule.
I shall try to help. I think where the democrats are going seriously wrong is with the perception that they are "anti-religious". Now, of course if Falwell, et al have this perception, that's one thing. I mean, who cares? But there is a massive number of people in the red states who go to work everyday, go to PTA meetings, and go to church on Sunday morning. For many many reasons I suspect that these "religious-lites" are of the opinion that voting Democrat (not just voting for Kerry, but voting Democrat) is wrong. This is a large target audience that can be reached. Unfortunately, I believe the dems are "screwing the pooch" with these voters. Not because democrats are "anti-religious", but because of the perception that they are...
I doubt many of these people self-identify as independents. I mean, yeah, I know people like that. We call them Republicans.
Not so sure that's entirely the Dems fault... http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/24/politics/main645393.shtml And from these very boards... RNC Mailing: Kerry to Ban Bible & Promote Gay Marriage If Elected
And unfortunately for most serious protestors, the ones who get the TV time and show up in newspaper photos are the dicks, the streakers, the freaks with leather and whips. That can spook some regular people, especially in rural areas.
But the problem is that people eat up those 'no-interest for 1 year' plans. Just think of the number of Americans who every month make the minimum payment allowed by their credit card companies. Do you think they would buy your argument?
This "solution" would in no way have swayed me. In fact, it may have turned me off just as much. Had Kerry instead of talking about raising taxes laid out a simple plan for decreasing spending, then both my wife and I would have voted for Kerry. Our beef with Bush is not the cutting of taxes, it is the insane spending. Andy
I don't know if you'd be right about that. As long as Democrats equate your average church-goer with somebody who speaks in tongues, plays with snakes, owns all the "Left Behind" books -- in hard cover, and beats down gays for their Friday night entertainment, then yeah, they're going to have to wait a while to reverse what we saw Tuesday night, which was a lot worse than just the Presidential election. In other words, it's not that we're losing the Pentacostals, it's that we're also losing the Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians.
And dare I say that one reason is that we're losing many of those people is that we're too afraid to talk about morality -- even on issues where we do have the high ground.
Bingo. Bingo. Bingo. Instead, Kerry was talking about the insane spending still not being enough. "Underfunded" was his domestic debate version of Harkes and "brilliant."
Perhaps at the end of the day, they just counted votes better and worked harder to get those votes. Considering Bush's history with Atwater & Rove, it's an area that people should never have underestimated Bush or his machine. They better understood both the math and their base-be it on issues of terror, taxes or values. And as the last part of the article notes... ...it was always going to be a tough sell. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/politics/campaign/04reconstruct.html?pagewanted=1