2004 Presidential Election
President Bush won Colorado easily 53% to 46%.
We'll know in 11 days if the president was re-elected although chances are slim that John Kerry will win, according to the Denver Post [November 3, 2004, "Presidency in limbo"]. The graphic is a screenshot of the AP tally as of 6:00 a.m. MST. From the article, "Nationwide, with 97 percent of the nation's precincts reporting, some 112 million people had voted - up from 105 million in 2000. Bush was winning the popular vote by around 3.6 million, or 51 percent to Kerry's 48 percent."
Electoral-vote.com: "I'm a bit tired now, but I did type in the preliminary numbers and got the map up. More updates will follow today. The networks are reporting the score pretty well, so I will concentrate on how the pollsters did. As best I can tell at this point, Bush has 259 electoral votes and Kerry has 252. Iowa (7 EVs) and Ohio (20 Evs) are still undecided, but Bush is leading in both of them. There is a small chance that Kerry might lose Wisconsin (10 EVs) or Bush might lose New Mexico (5 EVs), but probably it comes down to Ohio, where somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 provisional ballots remain to be counted."
Andrew Sullivan: "I wanted Kerry to win. I believed he'd be more able to unite the country at home, more fiscally conservative, more socially inclusive, and better able to rally the world in a more focused war on terror. I still do. But a slim majority of Americans disagreed. And I'm a big believer in the deep wisdom of the American people. They voted in huge numbers, and they made a judgment. Not a huge and decisive victory by any means. But at least a victory that is unlikely to be challenged. The president and his aides deserve congratulations. And so, I think, does Senator Kerry, whose campaign exceeded the low expectations of many of us."
Lawrence Lessig: "Wrong, wrong, yet again, I was, we are, wrong. I was on an airplane last night, from SFO to London, so at least I didn[base ']t suffer the minute by minute awfulness of this result. But it's 5am PST, and we should remember some principles: When Bush 'lost' in 2000, we said it was because (1) he had lost the popular vote, and (2) he had short circuited the count in one state to win in the College. Bush has won the popular vote. And it would take a freak of nature to imagine the 220,000 provisional ballots would fall strongly enough to shift Ohio. He will win the College. He is our President - legitimately, and credibly. Our criticism of this administration must now focus narrowly and sharply: on the policies, not on the credibility of the man."
Blogs for Bush: "Four more years."
Update: From email from CNN.com, "John Kerry conceded the election to George W. Bush today."
Update: Opinions You Should Have: "In light of the poor showing of the critically important 18 to 29 year old group at the polls yesterday, Democrats and John Kerry was calling for America's youth to be 'totally grounded.' 'I'm not blaming them for my loss,' said Kerry. 'But I am taking away their car keys.'"
Update: TalkLeft: "TalkLeft will not support George Bush. We recognize that he is our President, but as our mission statement states, we will continue to expose the injustices in his Administration. TalkLeft believes George Bush has been a terrible President, perhaps the worst ever, and objects to virtually every policy he has implemented...Our criminal justice system is not fair. Innocent people are languishing in jails and on death row. Mandatory minimum sentences and the wrong-headed drug war are locking up thousands needlessly at great expense to the taxpayer. Our civil liberties are under siege as never before, largely due to Bush's appointment of John Ashcroft as our Attorney General." Ouch.
Update: Josh Marshall: "Before getting to comments on last night's election, I want to make a correction about last evening's comments about the youth vote, comments which were incomplete and partly misleading. Young voters showed up at a far higher level than they did four years ago. But everyone else did too. And so the proportion of the electorate made up by the youth vote did not increase. At least not dramatically -- look at the specific numbers for details. For the Democrats, this was clearly not a good thing. But that doesn't mean that young voters didn't turn out in record proportions."
Update: Josh Marshall: "Well, here we are. And this is the test for people who care about this kind of politics and these sorts of values -- making sure that what has been started is not allowed to falter. This isn't 1964 or 1972 or 1980. This wasn't a blow-out or a repudiation. It was close to a tie -- unfortunately, on the other guy's side. Let's not put our heads in the sand but let's also not get knocked of our game. Democrats need to think critically and seriously about why this didn't turn out 51% for Kerry or 55% for Kerry (and we'll get to those points in the future). But it would be a terrible mistake to stop thinking in terms of those ten years Simon (Rosenberg) described."
"Take time to feel the desolation and disappointment. But I remain confident that time is not on the side of the kind of values and politics that President Bush represents. It took conservatives two decades to build up the institutional muscle they have today. Though I was always nervous about the result, I thought we could win this election. But it was always naive to believe that that sort of institutional heft could be put together in 24 or 36 months."
"President Bush and the Republicans now control the entire national government, even more surely now than they have over the last four years. They do so on the basis of garnering the votes of 51% or 52% of the population. But they will use that power as though there were no opposition at all. That needs to be countered."
"Leave today for disappointment. Tomorrow, think over which of these various groups and organizations you think has made the best start toward what I've described above, go to their website, and give money or volunteer. After that, okay sure, take a few more days for disappointment, maybe a few more weeks. But this takes time. And you shouldn't lose heart. The same division in the country remains, the same stalemate. The other side just got the the ball a yard or two into our side of the field rather than the reverse. And we have to deal with the serious consequences of that. Tomorrow's the day to start."
Update: Andrew Sullivan: "A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR: That's Bill Bennett's conclusion. He won't be the only one. What we're seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. It is unsurprising, of course, given the uncertainty of today's world, the devastating attacks on our country, and the emergence of so many more liberal cultures in urban America. And it is completely legitimate in this country for such views to be represented in public policy, however much I disagree with them. But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options. That goes for things like decriminalization of marijuana, abortion rights, stem cell research and marriage rights. Forcing California and Mississippi into one model is a recipe for disaster. Federalism is now more important than ever. I just hope that Republican federalists understand this. I fear they don't."
Update: I have word from a couple of people that Coyote Gulch is not displaying correctly on Windows XP and Internet Explorer. I tried the Mac IE and it looks fine, as it does in Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape on the Mac. I don't have any way to view my weblog on a Windows machine. I'm sorry. I'll refrain from trying to wrap text around a large graphic from now on.
Update: Charles Pierce "When gay marriage trumps dead soldiers in Iraq, how do you run a race without dissolving into fantasy? I don't know this country's mind any more, let alone its heart."
Update: TalkLeft: "Drudge is reporting that Attorney General John Ashcroft will submit his resignation to Bush within a few days. If Rudy Giuliani is his replacement, I seriously will consider hanging it up. Enough is enough. Clarence Thomas as Chief Justice and Rudy as Attorney General....what's the point?"
Update: Andrew Sullivan: "STAT OF THE DAY: Gays: Kerry 77, Bush 23. Jews: Kerry 74, Bush 25. You can hear the ghost of Jim Baker now, can't you?"
Update: Noam Scheiber: "Per my piece from this morning and my previous post, here's an extremely telling piece of exit polling data from yesterday: Not only did Kerry win by an 86-13 margin among self-described liberals, he also won by a 55-45 margin among self-described moderates. So how'd Bush pull it off? He won 84-15 among self-described conservatives, and, more importantly, he made sure conservatives comprised a much bigger chunk of the electorate than they did in 2000. (Conservatives comprised about 34 percent of the electorate yesterday, versus 29 percent in 2000--a huge shift, raw numbers-wise.) Anyone anticipating a conciliatory second Bush term should stop and consider how much Bush owes his base."
"Some other surprising or telling exit-poll numbers: Moral values edged out the economy/jobs (22-20) as the most important issue on voters' minds--more evidence that Bush's base turned out big; more voters trusted Bush on the economy than Kerry; a higher percentage of voters thought Kerry's attacks were unfair than thought Bush's attacks were unfair (it's possible that the missing explosives issue Kerry flogged down the stretch figured into this); by a 56-44 margin voters said the bin Laden video tape was important (by which I'm assuming they meant an important factor in their decision)."
Update: Election night numbers from the Cortez Journal.
6:28:11 AM 
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