After Kerry's concession: initial thoughts

I'm surprised by the Bush win. 

But results as of 10:00AM West Coast time have Bush with 51% of the popular vote.  The election of 2000 was a Stolen Election like 1824.  But, unlike 1828, we didn't have a Jacksonian comeback.

There will be no end of postmortems.  Here's one from the Donkey Rising blog, focusing on the geographical results:  Exit Polls and Other Woes by Alan Abramowitz 11/03/04.

Why did Kerry lose the popular vote? Basically this was a rerun of 2000. Almost every state, and every big state, went the same way it did in 2000. It looks like the only switches were New Hampshire for Kerry and probably Iowa and New Mexico for Bush, although those are not certain (and, in fact, New Hampshire is also extremely close). But Kerry got killed in the South and that appears to have also dragged down several Democratic Senate candidates.

I think that Democrats need to think very hard about the lessons of this election, regardless of what happens in Ohio with the provisional ballots. We lost the popular vote and probably the election to a Republican incumbent with a horrible record. It is going to be very difficult to win a presidential election unless the Democratic candidate can do significantly better in the southern and border states. More thoughts to come later.

There will be some Democrats, and endless Republican helpful advice, saying this means the Democrats need to embrace the neo-Confederate cause in the South and find a way to sound just as intolerant as the GOP on various "social issues."

I haven't seen enough details of the various state results to have a good idea yet of what went differently than expected.  For one thing, the exit polls seem to have seriously undercounted the Bush votes last night.  Democratic optimism rested among other things on the fact that polls showed that Kerry was holding the Gore voters of 2000 and that Bush's below-50% approval rating indicated that undecideds were likely to "break for" Kerry.  They also assumed that younger voters would turn out in higher numbers.  I'll be curious to see how these demographic-segment results really turned out.  Josh Marshall notes of the youth vote:

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.

There will be endless criticisms of various technical elements of the campaign.  But it sure seems to me that Kerry ran a strong campaign, hit hard on Bush's most vulnerable issues and responded well to the Bush camp's sleaze-slinging.  The Democrats certainly managed to be very competitive in the fund-raising.

Given the situation with the war in Iraq, our other current foreign policy problems, and the extent to which Bush has relied on tremendous debt financing (after blowing after the projected budget surplus with tax cuts for the wealthy), it's very likely that many of those who supported Bush will come to regret their choice.  Back in 1972, Richard Nixon won 49 states and George McGovern only one (Massachusetts), Nixon also taking a large margin in the popular vote.  One year later, there was a poll asking people who they had voted for in 1972.  According to the poll, an overwhelming majority had voted for McGovern.

A lot of people may wind up having similar wishful revisions of their vote on Tuesday.

The long-awaited Fallujah offensive should begin any day now.  If you're draft age, it's time to start getting informed about your options.