Really enjoyed this article. It gets into details of the events in Ohio as they unfolded and presents an interesting model for future election predictions. I also think the advice he gives Democrats at the end is right on.
Thought the thread would enjoy it too.
Predictions, celebrations, and post mortems
Fred Hutchison
November 4, 2004
renewamerica.us
When one makes political predictions, one is riveted to the television until the wee hours of the morning to see how he fared. Here is a brief summation of how I scored on some general predictions. At the end of this essay will be a review of my regional predictions for the presidential election, how well I scored, and whether my culture war theory is correct.
General Predictions
Last Sunday, in my essay Columbus – Electoral Ground Zero I predicted that the Kerry campaign would be doomed if they did not carry Ohio. By about 10:00 PM election evening all three networks and the three major cable news were saying the same thing. It took them a while to realize that the exit polls showing a Kerry surge were wrong. We were told to expect a number of law suits, counter suits, and judicial decisions and counter decisions. I did not suspect it would happen before and during election day. I also did not expect the Republicans to win all the cases, as they eventually did. I predicted that if the count had less than a 2% difference between candidates, there would be a recount crisis.
What I did not expect is that although Bush had a robust 2% edge in Ohio (with 98% of the vote counted at 3:00 AM) that Kerry would play the part of Al (let every vote be counted) Gore and would refuse to concede. The Florida vote of 2000 only had a difference of a few hundred votes out of millions cast. Gore had reason to be stubborn. Kerry did not. He seemed to think that the 120,000 provisional votes and the absentee ballots could overcome Bush's 140,000 lead. This was fantasy of course. Most provisional votes are disqualified and Bush is likely to get more than his share of absentee ballots. The other fantasy was that the last batch of votes from Cleveland would go Kerry's way. That is the way elections used to go in Ohio, but not any more. Bush's lead kept increasing all evening. Late reporting rural counties went heavily for Bush.
The fallacies of hope were the late night phantoms that danced in Kerry's exhausted caffeine-drenched brain. The next morning as the light of day shone on Kerry's breakfast table he soberly grappled with hard realities. At 11:00 AM he graciously conceded. He went out of the race in high style. Three hundred years and fifty years of breeding is not for nothing. (Kerry's Boston Brahmin mother descends from John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630.) I will not miss John Edward's cloying, flirting, manipulative game, but I will miss Kerry's class. The man is utterly unfit for leadership but he has a way about him.
In my essay last Sunday I described the extraordinary energy in the Bush-Schwarzenegger rally in Columbus. I came to look upon Columbus, Ohio as ground zero in the election. I thought I may have been mistaken when Kerry pulled a little ahead in Franklin County (the county Columbus is in). Bush did better in the county in 2000. Then I realized what happened. Large numbers of Republicans have migrated to adjoining counties which have become the bedroom communities of Columbus. Bush did better in 2004 in the six counties which border upon Franklin County. The center of the Bush insurgency in Ohio is the seven counties of central Ohio. Columbus is the core of this "apple." Bush also did better in the rural exurbs, the second ring of counties out from Columbus, than he did in 2000. He did extremely well in the counties which surround Cincinnati which are the second core of Bush support in Ohio.
A Rainy Day Election
It rained all day election day and half the night. "Republican weather," I thought to myself. "The Democrats don't like to go out in the rain." The lines were long in Ohio, except when I went in mid afternoon, when there was almost no line. I heard stories of people waiting from two to ten hours to vote. "The stoic Republicans will wait, but the impatient Democrats will not." Based on what I now know the weather and length of lines probably did not make an appreciable difference. My political folklore is dated.
As my obsolete ideas were proven wrong, Democrats were thinking obsolete ideas which were also proven wrong. They thought they could spike their vote and win by getting out the black vote en mass. What they did not count upon is that the Republicans would do the same with the white Evangelical vote, which is larger than the black vote. Evangelicals are becoming almost as reliable a vote for Republicans as blacks are for Democrats. Both blacks and Evangelicals have a tendency to sit out an election if no one actively courts them and recruits them to vote. Some Evangelicals do not like to dirty their hands with worldly politics, overlooking Christ's call to discipleship including stewardship as citizen-voters. Evangelicals were easier to recruit this time because Issue One, The Ohio Marriage Protection Amendment was on the ballot. Issue One passed by about 60% to 40%. Democrats have not yet realized that it is political suicide for their party to support the gay agenda.
I watched the news for exit polls and they all seemed to be going Kerry's way. Something in my gut told me that there was something a little stupid or something a little too pat about these exit polls. Come to find out, the exit polls were almost entirely wrong. I do not suspect that Kerry's support was inflated on purpose. It was probably just another instance of liberals unconsciously manipulating the conversation to engineer politically correct verbal outcomes. Then they were stunned when they got the poll results and found out what the folks really think. The amazing thing is they keep getting amazed. Liberals seem to have lost the knack of learning from experience and learning from their mistakes. During the next round, some of the same people will get amazed all over again.
If you wanted to see the faces of stunned and depressed liberals you should have looked for Dan Rather on CBS last night, and for Judy Woodward on CNN. Judy was almost in tears when CNN projected Bush the winner in Florida. When anger crashes into a brick wall it collapses into depression. They lost another big one, the presidency again, four more senate seats and a batch of house seats. The retirement of several Supreme Court judges are at hand and there seats can be filled with conservative judges by President Bush.
The Omnipresent Mr. Blackwell
I drove downtown in the rain Tuesday night to the victory party for Issue One. I walked into the wrong meeting room at the Hyatt Regency. Scores of people were sitting before computer screens. It was the central Republican operations center, sort of a war room. Everyone was hunched over their computers in intense concentration.
Later, at the Issue One party I met Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. All the state-wide elected offices are held by Republicans. They are all moderate Republicans, except Blackwell. Blackwell is politically conservative, an Evangelical, and black. He took an interest in me when I told him that I write a column for the Alan Keyes web site. I spoke to him three times before he left the party and gave him my card which includes Keyes' web site address where my column appears.
It is surprising that Blackwell took time to visit our little party during election night because the supervision of elections is his constitutional duty. Issue One must be dear to his heart. Blackwell, who will be running for governor in 2006, has been called "The Katherine Harris of Ohio." Remember Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State of Florida during the 2000 election? During the Florida recount, the Democrats liked to blame everything on Katherine Harris. Many lawsuits were filed against Blackwell in the belief that Ohio might have a prolonged recount. Blackwell seems to have won them all. The man seems to take strong opposition in stride. With all he has on his mind, he took time to commiserate with me about Keyes' defeat in Illinois.
When I went home, I was switching between the cable news and network news channels for election returns. I saw Blackwell on Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and one of the networks. They all wanted to talk to the Katherine Harris of Ohio. Like a wise uncle, he calmed the harried newsmen and explained to the voters the road ahead and how the provisional ballots and absentee ballots are processed.
That evening there was no escaping the omnipresent Mr. Blackwell. Wherever I turned my eyes in public or on television, there was Blackwell. Even when Blackwell was giving a speech to our little party, I found myself staring into his face a few feet away like a deer trapped in the headlights. When the Christian radio celebrity Pastor Bob Burney, an old friend of mine, wanted to greet his friend Blackwell, I was awkwardly in the way and had to jump back to make way for Pastor Bob. When a photographer was taking a picture of the two men, I had to duck to the side like a boxer, to avoid having my face appear in the picture between the two men. Hey, I just wanted to eavesdrop a little, not to upstage the celebrities! The two men were talking about very interesting things, but sorry readers, my lips are sealed.
Testing My Theory: Confirmations, Contradictions, and Anomalies
On 10/7/04 I sent out my predictions for the presidential election based upon a novel theory of my own. I divided the country into eight regions. I gave each region a culture war score (CW) based on the percentage of the region's congressmen had voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The CW score was used to predict whether the region would be solid for Kerry or Bush, or would be a swing state. I predicted that the New England, North Atlantic, and West Coast states would be solid for Kerry, the Great Lakes states would be swing states, and that no other region would contain swing states. I predicted that Florida, Missouri, Iowa, and New Mexico would no longer be swing states. All would be Bush country. I counted Pennsylvania as part of the Great Lakes swing state based on its moderate CW score. I included Minnesota as a plains state based on its moderate to conservative CW score. I counted Nevada as a West coast state because of its liberal CW score.
I was approximately correct about Florida no longer being a swing state as it was in 2000. But the Bush victory margin was less in Florida than any other southeastern state. I thought the Bush vote would be higher based upon Florida's conservative CW score. I found that Minnesota does not vote like a plains state. It votes like a Great Lakes swing state. Pennsylvania is a transitional state. It votes more liberal than a Great Lakes state and more conservative than a Mid-Atlantic state. Indiana votes more like a southern state than a Great Lakes state. Illinois votes more liberal than a swing state to my surprise and contrary to its moderate CW score. Iowa votes like a swing state instead of a plains state. However, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin vote like true Great Lakes swing states as I predicted. Missouri is no longer a swing state as I predicted. It has joined the plains states. New Mexico is still a swing state in spite of its conservative CW score. Nevada is a swing state in spite of having a liberal CW score like a west coast state and its location in the conservative tier of mountain states. I am baffled by Nevada and New Mexico.
In sum, I hit the target with a bullseye for 42 states, or 85%. The rest were misses or partial misses. But I never mistook a clearly conservative state for a clearly liberal state or vice versa. My model helped me to correctly predict that if Kerry does not get Ohio he is doomed. Conclusion: My theory has faults. However, I am not ready to junk it yet. I promised several people that I would throw the theory in the trash can if either Florida or Missouri were still swing states as they were in 2000. Neither are still swing states! Both are Bush country, thanks in part to culture war influences.
My theory used the culture war and the Evangelical surge to explain everything. Other influences were at work. The democratic base eroded a bit. Some of the married women, the "security moms" shifted to Bush. It turns out that some of the security moms were also family values and morality moms. Some Hispanics shifted to Bush. Ten percent of blacks which voted for Gore last time shifted to Bush, which was less of a shift than I expected. Black recruitment to vote was not quite as big a deal as it was made out to be. Population shifted to the conservative rural exurbs and to conservative red states. Redistricting added Republican congressional seats and electoral votes in the Sunbelt red states. A national map of election returns by county is mostly red with a blue pimples. The blue pimples are the cities where Democrats live. Drive out of the city limits and you are suddenly in Bush country. The new homes you pass in the country are mostly Republicans who commute to their jobs in the city.
Suggestions to Democrats
My friends, you no longer have a national party. You have a regional party — a party mainly of the urban coasts and cities on the Great Lakes — and a party of stranded blue urban dots in a red world. You are identified in "fly over country" with liberalism, weakness on national defense and being on the wrong side of the culture war. That is why you have only had three terms in the white house since Lyndon Johnson retired and why you have lost both houses of congress and many governor's offices. You have just gone through yet another election disaster. You lost four Senate seats. Your liberal minority leader was defeated — because the people in the red plains state do not like politicians of the far left.
You can remain in the political wilderness or change. To be competitive again, you should return to the moderate domestic policy of Clinton and the military and foreign policy of Lieberman. Quit criticizing America first and quit saying we are the moral equivalent of our enemies. Cease your culture war against traditional values for that is political suicide for you. And stop hating and slandering your political enemies. If you do all these things, there is still a chance you can be a great national party once again. If you stop your ears to sensible advice, your party might go the way of the dodo bird and the Republican party will split in two to furnish the two American parties — the conservative party, and the moderate party. |
