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November 1, 2004

Exeunt Democrats, Weeping, Stage Left

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

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Both Fox and NBC have now called the election for President Bush, and by a good enough margin to likely withstand the lawyers. It's pretty clear that the election will go to Bush unless there is some very weird collection of circumstances.

To determine why the Democrats lost, start with this post I made in July, 2003. The Democrats weren't beaten like rented mules, but they were assuredly beaten. My fear is that the margin won't have been large enough to engender soul-searching on foreign policy by the Democrats.

The Democrats failed to come up with a serious policy on the war, and no other issue was more pressing to the electorate than the war. (The economy was close in importance, because relentlessly negative media coverage made the economy look much worse than it actually is.) That fundamental unseriousness in a serious time is why a miniscule ad buy from SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth knocked the Kerry campaign for a loop. The only reason that Kerry was even close is because near the end of the campaign he began to actually sound hawkish (though not convincingly to me, or, apparently, to the nation at large.)

And my predictions? I was expecting Bush to take 369EV, based on a formulaic approach. The debates didn't go the way that I expected, which flipped a lot of races I had as narrowly for Bush, to narrowly for Kerry. I called the winner, but gave him too much margin. I predicted President Bush at 52-58% of the popular vote, and he took what currently looks to be about 51%. Oh, well; this is hardly my day job.

On the House and Senate, I predicted the Republicans would gain 5-10 and 2 respectively. This compares respectively to +5 to +9 in the House and +2 to +4 in the Senate currently. I'm content with this prediction; not bad for an amateur. I'll look again in the morning and see how things look, but I think I'll end up pretty close on the Congress.

There will be plenty of analysis all around, so I'll avoid that (other than the above) and instead focus on what I won't be missing now that this is over.

• "Selected, not elected", "illegitimate" and the other meaningless slogans the Democrats used to keep from admitting that they flat-out lost in 2000
• divisive "two Americas" rhetoric
• arguments over Viet Nam
• President Bush's National Guard service records
• any celebrities who actually manage to leave the country this time (they keep promising)
• Iran's nuclear program, which I trust President Bush to deal with forthwith
• Falluja - ditto
• arguments about deliberate disenfranchisement of blacks in Florida
• John Edwards' smile, the one that makes you think he's about to go for your throat
• Dan Rather's smug assurance - crap, that'll be back next week
• election lawyers, I hope

But I voted for Kerry, before I voted against him.

Actually, no I didn't.