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    Cal » Blog Archive » clarifications and restatements
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    clarifications and restatements

    Response to “belated 2004 election analysis”

    davin Says:
    August 21st, 2006 at 11:30 pm

    I agree the Democrats need to find an inspiring candidate and not just choose someone by default because it’s their turn. (And certainly Kerry has not done much to make himself look better since the election.)

    However, aren’t the some of the numbers a little misleading? It’s not the case that the 2004 election was a reshuffling of the same 103 million voters from the previous election. 122 million people voted, or 19 million more. Kerry got 59 million votes, which is almost 6 million more than Gore and Nader combined in ‘00. Its just that Bush got 12 million more in ‘04 vs ‘00. Even in West Virginia Kerry > Gore + Nader in terms of pure number of votes. (Rhode Island is still sobering, though).

    Davin, I have to admit that I am very glad to have you bring this up. The section you mentioned was written too quickly and did not wind up representing what I really believed to be true. (I would take it out, but I always feel a little Orwellian when I consider doing that.)

    I think that the numbers I mentioned are significant. I think that Bush’s margin of victory from one election to the next is significant. However, I also think that the way I phrased things in that passage made it sound like I thought that there were millions of people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 and then changed their minds and voted for George Bush in 2004, something which is almost prima facie untrue. I mean, I am sure that there were some individual people who did exactly that, but the distance between the goals and values of the two men is so great that this seems unlikely to be true for more than a handful of people.

    What I think really lies behind the numbers is this: most people who voted for Nader in 2000 either did not vote at all in 2004 or voted reluctantly for John Kerry. George Bush’s electoral boost simply came from a number of swing voters who liked him better in 2004 than they did when he when he ran originally in 2000, and who were equally as unimpressed with Kerry as they had been with Gore.

    It was this loss of the middle that I tried to get at in the later portions of my piece, because I think that this is clearly the Democrats’ problem. They have lost much of the middle of the voting population within individual states (like New England), and they have lost entire states that lie in the middle of the American voting landscape (like West Virginia and Missouri). And no matter how you slice it, the performance of both major parties in West Virginia should frighten Democrats nationwide:

    Year, Dem, Rep

    1984 328,125 405,483

    1992 331,001 241,974
    1996 327,812 233,946
    2000 295,497 336,475
    2004 326,541 423,778

    Yes, Kerry got over 30,000 more votes than Gore did, and I’m sure he felt good about that. But George W had 181,000 more people vote for him than they did for his far more qualified father in ‘92, and that is frightening.

    The Dems losses in West Virginia in ‘72 and ‘84 were regrettable, but not cause for general alarm. McGovern was one of the least attractive candidates they ever had; Reagan was beloved and powerful.

    George Bush in 2004, however, had neither the gravitas nor the approval ratings of Reagan in ‘84, and he still got almost 20,000 more total votes. That is what scares me, and it scares me out of proportion to West Virginia’s five electoral votes.

    It scares me because I think that it is a microcosm of the nation as a whole. I think that the people of West Virginia are down-to-earth and capable of very discerning judgment when it comes to someone’s personality. I further think that Americans vote at least as much because of a candidate’s personality as they do his or her policies.

    I think they rejected Gore and Kerry because they felt them to be out of touch, wishy-washy, and not men of true character. Despite Bush’s obvious faults, he is clearly a man who will say what he believes regardless of how popular it is. It is that attitude that put Clinton, Carter, LBJ, and Kennedy in office, and it is that attitude that will put the next Democrat in office. My only hope is that it will be in 2008 and not 2016.

    This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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