Thoughts on the Election

Myths Dispelled

As I stated prior to the election two myths being promulgated by pundits in the media and by the Democratic party operatives were proven to be myths. The obvious one was the theory that Bush needed to be much better in the final polls, because undecided voters (leaners) were likely to break for the challenger. As I have argued, past experience would indicate the change from the final poll can break either way, and there is no statistical pattern to this break.

The second myth, which would lead to the conclusion of a Kerry landslide, was that high voter turnout would benefit Democrats dramatically, proven to be a fallacy. Pundits have claimed that the Karl Rove “ground game” strategy was more effective than Democratic GOTV efforts, but this in only half the story. The myth that higher turnout will go toward Democratic candidates is based on two flawed assumptions: (a) that traditional Democratic leaning groups have low turnout (in part true, but that ignores that many traditional Republican leaning groups also have low turnout, and also misidentifying certain groups – young voters, low-income Whites – as Democratic leaning), (b) that nonvoters will have the same voting patterns as voters of similar demographics – in fact they often choose not to vote because they don’t see much difference between parties and candidates. Thus the effect of higher voter turnout depends upon the cause – in this case it seems that re-electing Bush motivated more 2000 non-voters than did electing Kerry/defeating Bush

Network Bias

It is clear that the networks, in particular CNN, have a certain bias, as evidenced by their calling of certain states earlier than others. I’m not alleging any conspiracy here (that they were trying to influence West Coast voters for instance), but merely implying they wanted to see certain results, and so they called those states that way. They may blame the exit polls for skewing their projections, but they also claimed “we wanted to make sure we were right”. Nonetheless, CNN had called Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota very early in the night, and called New Jersey as soon as the polls closed, while refusing to call Florida till 99% of the vote was in. They have yet to call either New Mexico or Iowa (as of 5 pm Wednesday) despite a Bush lead of greater than the Kerry lead in Wisconsin (in much smaller states), with all the precincts reporting.

Obama

Barack Obama has officially become the new media darling – the Crown Prince of the Democratic Party. His acceptance speech (despite being virtually guaranteed of victory) was televised on every network (only John Edwards three sentence speech received similar attention) and then he was interviewed by several cable networks (the only other multiple interviewee that I saw was Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who will be next governor of Ohio). Obama was a major new story for winning a primary in which his top opponent face a major scandal in the last weeks of the campaign and winning a general election win the original Republican nominee quit the race to be replaced by a nominee that the Illinois GOP not only didn’t support, but began to publicly attack. Obama was handed a Senate seat, then told how impressive his victory was. In a state where half of the Republican leadership is in prison, facing prison and publicly flogging divorcees, or busy moving to the left, Obama had a cakewalk. Nonetheless, if I were a Democratic Senator, I would push for Obama as minority leader and support him for the 2008 nomination over Hilary Clinton. He wouldn’t get a free ride to the presidency, but as long a the media refers to him only as “rising star of the Democratic party Barack Obama”, give him the red carpet treatment

Accuracy of exit polls

As everyone now is well aware, the exit polls were way off, and all systematically favoring Kerry. Now, not being a conspiracy theorist, I believe that the exit polls were biased for Kerry either because: only surveying early in the day (i.e. not getting working people who vote after work), over sampling women (54% whereas likely only 50% of actual vote), not sampling the right precincts, or higher Republican refusal to answer exit polls.

Upon further review, I am more skeptical of the reason for the bias. First off, there is logical reasons to suspect Republicans are more likely to refuse to answer polls the Democrats, and the other three sampling are absolutely inexcusable. Anyone with any knowledge of survey technique (and those running the exit polls should be experts) would realized that you have to survey at the right time and be sure that the sample represents actual voters. Those taking the exit polls would be well trained and there is no excuse for over sampling women, or surveying at the wrong times (picking the wrong precincts is possible, but doesn’t explain the seeming error in demographics).

Furthermore, Ken Mehlman (Bush’s campaign manager) was able to project with great accuracy the results in states far before the networks (even so accurately as to say the final margin in Ohio would be 130-140,000 as of 11:30 eastern time).

Finally, having seen Dick Morris (former Clinton strategist) on the O’Reilly Factor last night, I’m almost convinced something was at play here. Morris’ reasoning includes that (1) exit polls were biased for Kerry in the battleground states, not elsewhere; (2) preliminary exit poll findings were released to the media and campaigns very early (around 2 eastern) and that info was trickled out through the Internet and elsewhere; (3) exit polls are usually extremely accurate. While I’m not as sure on point three, the first two points imply a deliberate attempt to bias the poll in favor of a Kerry victory and then to release that info to influence voters.

Dick Morris:

"Somebody cooked those polls. It could have been the pollster, the network, or the Democratic Party flooding those polling places with specific voters. But there was a deliberate effort, in my judgment, to show Kerry farther ahead than he was in order to depress Bush turnout. I believe there ought to be a Congressional investigation."

I think that use of exit polls will be modified either by the networks, or by law.

Anger of Democrats

After the 2000 election, the Bush-Haters went on the warpath for four years (with the exception of about three months following September 11). It began with “he stole the election” and “illegitimate president” to “Bush lied, men died” to “fictitious president, fictitious war” and on and on. The rage of Democrats implied hating Bush and everything he did, whether or not they were in favor of it. The question is: with an election that wasn’t that close, no question of legitimacy, and a quick Kerry concession, will Democrats show the same rage for the next four years? Will Democrats in the Senate continue to filibuster judicial appointments? Will moveon.org and other radical groups continue to draw funding (if there isn’t another round of campaign finance reform)? Will the Bush-Haters grow tired, dissipate, or simply become irrelevant?