{"id":1267,"date":"2004-11-03T09:07:51","date_gmt":"2004-11-03T14:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2004\/11\/morning_after\/"},"modified":"2004-11-03T09:07:51","modified_gmt":"2004-11-03T14:07:51","slug":"morning_after","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2004\/11\/morning_after\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning After"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clearly things did not go yesterday the way I anticipated or hoped they would. In my defense, I’ll note that I’m not the only person scratching my head this morning. For example, John Zogby<\/a> ended up picking Kerry to pick up the same 311 electoral votes as I did. And he gets paid a lot more to do this kind of thing than I do. And even the early exit polls were apparently off.
\nSo what happened? A few things stick out in comparing the exit polling<\/a> to the 2000 returns:
\n(1) Women<\/u>: The gender gap shrunk as Bush picked 4% among females.
\n(2) Latinos<\/u>: Among Hispanics, a growing segment rumored to be trending to the Democrats, Bush actually picked up 7%.
\n(3) Young voters<\/u>: The “new” voter group, which favored Kerry, simply didn’t turn out as had been advertised. Only 11% of those sampled were first-time voters.
\n(4) Catholics<\/u>: Went for Bush over the Catholic candidate.
\n(5) Issues<\/u>: “Moral values” was deemed the most important issue by the largest percentage of voters, out pacing “terrorism” and the “economy.” Despite all the hoopla concerning 9\/11, the God, guns, and gays threesome still appears to drive many people at the polls.
\nWhat to make of this? Clearly, the Democratic party is in disarray. Not only did it fail to win against an incumbent with sub-50% approval ratings, but it sustained a huge blow in the Senate. Simply put, it wasn’t even competitive in a huge part of the country. That can’t continue. Even the things that the Democrats appeared to have working in their favor this year–the 527s and the Internet\/based get-out-the-vote activism–simply didn’t deliver at crunch time. In some ways it was reminiscent of the vanishing Deaniac movement in the primaries.
\nThe Republicans will undoubtedly declare this to be a huge mandate. But a mandate for what? The GOP succeeded in making this election a contest of image: the strong commander with resolve versus the weak flip-floppy liberal. Bush didn’t campaign on a detailed second term agenda. I’m sure the think tanks and special interests have stuff waiting in the pipeline, but it’s not what Bush ran on. It remains to be seen whether the Republicans will come out with their agenda immediately, or wait for another terrorist attack to ram stuff through.
\nAnother four years of incompetence isn’t a pleasant thought. I just hope the long-term damage to foreign relations, the supreme court, and environment won’t be too severe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clearly things did not go yesterday the way I anticipated or hoped they would. In my defense, I’ll note that I’m not the only person scratching my head this morning. For example, John Zogby ended up picking Kerry to pick up the same 311 electoral votes as I did. And he gets paid a lot […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1267","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}