Political Correspondent I)ruid's Post-election Analysis
What a wild ride and extremely close race this election year has been. The day after, it is now apparent that the Republicans swept control of Washington, winning the Presidency, retaining control and picking up seats in the Senate, and doing the same in the House. While I was fairly confident that I knew what the outcome of this election season was going to be, I didn't expect it to be as pronounced as it was.
While watching the various news networks last night as the raw vote counts trickled in, I was struck by one single issue that was quite key to the outcome, which I had originally thought would not be much of a deciding factor in this election. Much of both candidate's campaigns were centered around Florida and Ohio as being the critical states that could hand either candidate the election. Florida ended up going decidedly for Bush fairly early and was not as big of a battle as many thought it would be, leaving Ohio to take center stage... Given the current vote counts as we see them today, it appears that if Ohio had gone for Kerry, he very well could have been our President for the next four years, even with Bush wining the popular vote by such a wide a margin as he did (3.8 million votes).
In the end, Bush took Ohio by close to 140,000 votes, which is roughly two percentage points and a large enough margin that the Kerry camp wisely decided it was not contestable (the margin for automatic recount in Ohio is 0.25%). The thing that I find most interesting is that I believe that had a certain ballot initiative not been on the ballot this election in Ohio, Kerry would have actually won Ohio by a small margin, perhaps half a percentage point. The ballot initiative I'm speaking of, which I personally think government should have no opinion on or hand in, happened to be one that really drew the christian and conservative crowds to the polls; Ohio's equivalent to the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed in Ohio by close to 2 to 1. Bringing out that large of a christian and conservative crowd in Ohio handed Bush the state by a wide enough margin to make any type of post-election litigation pointless. Even waiting for the remaining provisional ballots to be validated and counted would not allow Kerry (statistically) to make up the lead Bush had on him there, which would require something in the area of 90% of the provisional ballots being votes for Kerry.
What I originally thought during the campaigns as being the least influential issue of the campaign, the Defense of Marriage Act, in my opinion seems to have ended up being the single issue that handed Bush Ohio, and thus the election. It's amazing how sometimes what you least expect to have an impact comes back at the last second and blind-sides you. I could conclude this post with a rant about marriage, government, and the issues surrounding them, but I don't like discussing religion or politics very often, so I'll save that for another time.
While watching the various news networks last night as the raw vote counts trickled in, I was struck by one single issue that was quite key to the outcome, which I had originally thought would not be much of a deciding factor in this election. Much of both candidate's campaigns were centered around Florida and Ohio as being the critical states that could hand either candidate the election. Florida ended up going decidedly for Bush fairly early and was not as big of a battle as many thought it would be, leaving Ohio to take center stage... Given the current vote counts as we see them today, it appears that if Ohio had gone for Kerry, he very well could have been our President for the next four years, even with Bush wining the popular vote by such a wide a margin as he did (3.8 million votes).
In the end, Bush took Ohio by close to 140,000 votes, which is roughly two percentage points and a large enough margin that the Kerry camp wisely decided it was not contestable (the margin for automatic recount in Ohio is 0.25%). The thing that I find most interesting is that I believe that had a certain ballot initiative not been on the ballot this election in Ohio, Kerry would have actually won Ohio by a small margin, perhaps half a percentage point. The ballot initiative I'm speaking of, which I personally think government should have no opinion on or hand in, happened to be one that really drew the christian and conservative crowds to the polls; Ohio's equivalent to the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed in Ohio by close to 2 to 1. Bringing out that large of a christian and conservative crowd in Ohio handed Bush the state by a wide enough margin to make any type of post-election litigation pointless. Even waiting for the remaining provisional ballots to be validated and counted would not allow Kerry (statistically) to make up the lead Bush had on him there, which would require something in the area of 90% of the provisional ballots being votes for Kerry.
What I originally thought during the campaigns as being the least influential issue of the campaign, the Defense of Marriage Act, in my opinion seems to have ended up being the single issue that handed Bush Ohio, and thus the election. It's amazing how sometimes what you least expect to have an impact comes back at the last second and blind-sides you. I could conclude this post with a rant about marriage, government, and the issues surrounding them, but I don't like discussing religion or politics very often, so I'll save that for another time.