In hindsight, which Democrat would have done best?

Not all of them.

I think a lot of the undecided vote would have been swayed by the comeback factor.

I think Gore would have won with about the same Margin that GW won by...

DD

 

i agree with this. we had a HUGE freaking turnout. the Dems turned out their vote big time. it wasn't enough.

 

I'd have to disagree with you there. You really think a bunch of Bush voters would vote for Gore simply because he lost the last election? Why?

 

None of them had a chance unless they came out fully against gay marriage and stem cell research. If voters are going around saying the economy and the war and Iraq concerns them but they still voted for Bush because of his faith/values, then those issues didn't play at all with the voters who decided this thing. This election belonged to socially conservative christians. If I'm the republicans, my next candidate is going to be another evangelical christian.

For all this talk about people voting for "not Bush," I think most Kerry voters agreed with all or most of this platform. You can see here on this board though, that there are plenty of people who disagree with Bush's view on gay marriage and stem cell research who still voted for him and I've seen enough interviews of Evangelicals who put those issues ahead of Iraq and the economy. I hope somebody does a poll or a study on this, I just feel it in my gut, I know I'm right about this.

 

maybe more people are socially conservative than we previously thought. i mean, the media doesn't exactly trumpet a society that sees gay marriage get b**** slapped the way it did last Tuesday. majorities in Oregon?? and other states around the Union.

the day after the election, i saw some woman on the Today Show talking about how radical the right was. really??? i guess if you're far left, it is. but apparently the country doesn't think so. we have a huge margin at the midterm...a re-elected president, who was ripe to be beaten...and gains again in the house and senate to attest to that. we can spin that however...but apparently to a very large portion of the country, the democrats' message is irrelevant.

 

How about this instead?

maybe more people are homophobes than we thought.

 

Or maybe no.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2109275/

The Gay Marriage Myth
Terrorism, not values, drove Bush's re-election.
By Paul Freedman
Posted Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 1:16 PM PT

Did "moral values"—in particular, the anti-gay marriage measures on ballots in 11 states this week—drive President Bush's re-election? That's the early conventional wisdom as Democrats begin soul-searching and finger-pointing. These measures are alleged to have drawn Christian conservatives to the polls, many of whom failed to vote last time. The theory is intriguing, but the data don't support it. Gay marriage and values didn't decide this election. Terrorism did.

The morality theory rests on three claims. The first is that gay-marriage bans led to higher turnout, chiefly among Christian conservatives. The second is that Bush performed especially well where gay marriage was on the ballot. The third is that in general, moral issues decided the election.

The evidence that having a gay-marriage ban on the ballot increased voter turnout is spotty. Marriage-ban states did see higher turnout than states without such measures. They also saw higher increases in turnout compared with four years ago. But these differences are relatively small. Based on preliminary turnout estimates, 59.5 percent of the eligible voting population turned out in marriage-ban states, whereas 59.1 percent turned out elsewhere. This is a microscopic gap when compared to other factors. For example, turnout in battleground states was more than 7.5 points higher than it was in less-competitive states, and it increased much more over 2000 as well.

It's true that states with bans on the ballot voted for Bush at higher rates than other states. His vote share averaged 7 points higher in gay-marriage-banning states than in other states (57.9 vs. 50.9). But four years ago, when same-sex marriage was but a twinkle in the eye of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Bush's vote share was 7.3 points higher in these same states than in other states. In other words, by a statistically insignificant margin, putting gay marriage on the ballot actually reduced the degree to which Bush's vote share in the affected states exceeded his vote share elsewhere.

Why did states with gay-marriage ballot measures vote so heavily for Bush? Because such measures don't appear on state ballots randomly. Opponents of gay marriage concentrate their efforts in states that are most hospitable to a ban and are most likely to vote for Bush even without such a ballot measure. A state's history of voting for Bush is more likely to lead to an anti-gay-marriage measure on that state's ballot than the other way around.

Much has been made of the fact that "moral values" topped the list of voters' concerns, mentioned by more than a fifth (22 percent) of all exit-poll respondents as the "most important issue" of the election. It's true that by four percentage points, people in states where gay marriage was on the ballot were more likely than people elsewhere to mention moral issues as a top priority (25.0 vs. 20.9 percent). But again, the causality is unclear. Did people in these states mention moral issues because gay marriage was on the ballot? Or was it on the ballot in places where people were already more likely to be concerned about morality?

More to the point, the morality gap didn't decide the election. Voters who cited moral issues as most important did give their votes overwhelmingly to Bush (80 percent to 18 percent), and states where voters saw moral issues as important were more likely to be red ones. But these differences were no greater in 2004 than in 2000. If you're trying to explain why the president's vote share in 2004 is bigger than his vote share in 2000, values don't help.

If the morality gap doesn't explain Bush's re-election, what does? A good part of the answer lies in the terrorism gap. Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him. Terrorism was cited by 19 percent of voters as the most important issue, and these citizens gave their votes to the president by an even larger margin than morality voters: 86 percent for Bush, 14 percent for Kerry.

These differences hold up at the state level even when each state's past Bush vote is taken into account. When you control for that variable, a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect. Nor does putting an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot. So, if you want to understand why Bush was re-elected, stop obsessing about the morality gap and start looking at the terrorism gap.

Paul Freedman, associate professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, has recently completed a book on television campaign advertising.

 

Are we now trusting exit polls again?

 

that's certainly in line with the demagoguery i've seen from this. you know, if you don't agree with the left on issues you're either stupid or some other bad word.

 

And if you don't agree with the right, you are unpatriotic and anti-American.

It's a two way street.

 

completely agree!!! it's sick on both sides. we just saw it evidenced here with no worries' response though. if you disagree, you must be a homophobe. that's about as simplistic as it gets.

 

I'm not a homophobe. I don't have a problem with gay marraige. I voted for Bush.

Weird.

 

I think a lot of the undecided voters who voted Bush's way this election would have voted for a Southern democrat like Gore.

DD

 

al gore never carried himself as a southern democrat. he was not bill clinton. hell, he couldn't even carry tennessee.

 

So we can agree now.

All Republicans are homophobes and racists.

All Democrats are unpatriotic and anti-American.

Makes me damn proud that I am a registered independent!

 

exactly!!!! keep in mind, i've never heard smarty jones nor carlos beltran call anyone a homophobe or unpatriotic. i'm just sayin'.

 

Funny, but isn't polling data how you came to the conclusion that Bush was elected by homophobes? (22%...moral values...ring any bells?). And you took several additional and greater leaps of logic to arrive at that conclusion than the author cited took to reach his.

If that's your most substantial reply; if you choose to dismiss any and all viewpoints which don't directly correlate to your own; if you merely want to practice the fine art of stereotyping and demagoguery; and if you can't differentiate b/t the early exit polls leaked the night of the election, without any analysis & context, to a review of polling data done after the election by someone who happens to make his living in the (broader) field of politics, then there's really no point going forward with this discussion.

 

I don't think in the middle of crisis where the president was taking definitive action you were never going to defeat an incumbent. In this election, the war on terror was the pre-eminent issue and Bush is killing the bad guys. It would have been inconceivable not to re-elect FDR during WW2. Kerry's showing was remarkable. Heck, I still can't believe Clinton beat Bush the Elder after he won his war.

He did because he had a very simple message that people understood and identified with. We were in a recession, Clinton blamed it on the Republicans and said he would get the economy going by changing a strategy that didn't appear to be working
(economist still debate the cause and effect). Kerry could never boil his message down to a sound bite. I still don't know what his plan was.

I think a democratic candidate could win on the morals issue but it would take a different tact. You would have to appeal to the peoples sense of tolerance and fairness, pointing out that it is our tolerance, of race . color and creed that allows us to live together in peace and that intolerance is what has led other cultures into terrorism and civil warfare.

But to win in a diverse society you have to own the one common denominator , the one preemenent issue. And to own it, you have to have a clear simple message everyone understands. Who knows what that will be in 08.

 

Well if the issue is one where people are being denied their rights, it's kind of understandable. I mean would you say the exact same thing you just said to somebody in the 60's while they were fighting for civil rights? People back then and to this day use to Bible to say that blacks are supposed to be beneath whites (funny considering nobody in the Bible was white).


Maybe fighting for people's rights is the extreme, but it doesn't make it wrong. Nobody looks back at abolitionists as extremists. Nobody looks at MLK as an extremist. History smiles on them.

 

It will be interesting where our thinking on this is in fifteen to twenty years.

I do have some difficulty in accepting direct parallels with the civil rights movements of the 60's and 70's. Not quite convinced the injustices are the same.

Yet, gay marriage will come. It's already accepted in too many nations to ignore -- not just those godless socialist nations like Canada and the NEtherlands, but Spain and other countries too. Fifteen years ago, the very idea would have been reserved for the lunatic fringe...but now it's been seriously considered all over. Not sure that the dialogue is particulary helped by slapping labels about. ANd there certainly are social and economic considerations.

But it will be an interesting development.