Results! Election night'04 ... your armchair expert analysis

fbaezer

I got the 2 of you confused! Admire both your contributions immensely!

I don't argue with Nimh about the polls either. But to say that polling information was not being leaked and to say that the vast majority of it was not suggesting Kerry was doing very well is just dumb. Because it was and because it did. And it did it so consistently it is very difficult to believe it was not intentional. I don't care what the spreads were; only that Bush did better than the projections and that is a good thing.

It isn't fair to prejudge Bush or to presume to know his internal motivations.

I sense that many liberals believe that if they lose an election the winner owes them compromise, but of they win they have an irresistable mandate. This isn't due either.

America is no more divided today than it has been throuighout most of its history - a history that includes a bloody civil war and numerous bitterly fought elections. Despite this our republic still stands. The French, by contrast, had their revolution a decade later and, after a couple of subsequent bouts of monarchy and absolutism, have managed to run through five distinct republics, each with a new constitution - they are now on number six. Who is divided?

I like fbaezer too.

Good evening yall. johnboy is devastated by the outcome but resigned to the result. johnboy is also very sleepy, having stayed up some 6 hours past his normal bedtime watching this thing slip away.
I don't know if there is a post-mortem thread going on A2K yet, but here are a few thoughts. (1) The Dems will probably assemble a firing squad in a circle in the next few days/weeks; (2) No more liberals from NE; (3) No more senators whose voting records on complicated issues can be easily ridiculed;
(4) The Dems got blind-sided by the Moral Values issue-which I think of as their (my) attitude towards abortion and gay-rights, for example. Many Catholics, fundamentalist Protestants, blacks and Hispanics may support the policies of the Dems on other issues but...

I could go on to (5), (6) or (7) but that is enough for now.

Many thanks nimh, for sharing your interest in and knowledge of US politics. It's been very enjoyable. -johnboy-

mandate=fiat
In my experience Fiats seem to last no more than 5 years and then it's off to the junkyard. God speed President Bush.

fbaezer writes


If the majority of Americans didn't support Bush in many or most of his more radical ideas, Kerry would have won. In his acceptance speech, GWB did extend a hand of coopration to all those who didn't vote for him and repeated Kerry's desire to find some way for all sides to work together. He did this after his first election too. And the Dems attempted to cut him off at the knees. Cooperation has to work both ways. Bush has demonstrated he is willing to do that. So far the other side has not.

It has occurred to me though that Kerry's concession speech was very magnanimous and quite good. Had he spoken that way with conviction throughout the campaign, he might have won. He now says he plans to work as a senator for a better America. It occurs to me that he had all these great plans he was going to implement re Iraq, health care, the economy, etc. once he was elected president. The way to do most of it is through an action of Congress. Let's see how many of those plans he writes into and submits as bills.

Even more interesting will be to see how many bills of any democrat the republicans willl allowed to be submitted in this new congress.

Probably about as many as there were judicial nominations that were not obstructed in the Senate by Daschle.

Hey Larry nice to see you here, btw on the supremes nomination idea being obstructed, just how many were there, you know precentage wise, that were blocked by the dems, any idea?

<grin>

Don't know. Didn't really keep up with how many times a vote on any nominee was blocked but it seemed every time I turned on C-SPAN that was what was happening. Perhaps I will see the same with Dem attempts to introduce legislation.

I hear you loud and clear, statments offered without factual basis, interesting. good work Larry.

Here are some facts, in case Larry would like a review...
I just peeked & found that the Senate Judiciary Committee has a pretty good report...

from this http://judiciary.senate.gov/nominations.cfm website that anyone could look at, even a Republican.


I also found a surprisingly long list that named the more important

Confirmed Bush Judges

Carlos Bea
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 09/30/2003

Judge William Duane Benton
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 6/24/2004

Larry Block
Nominated to: Court of Federal Claims
Status of nomination: Confirmed 10/2/2002

Jay S. Bybee
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Status of nomination: Hearing 2/05/03; Confirmed

Judge Connie Callahan
Nominated to: US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 05/22/2003

Professor Paul G. Cassell
Nominated to: U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, 10th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 5/13/2002

Michael Chertoff
Nominated to: U.S Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 6/9/03

Steven Colloton
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 09/04/2003

Justice Deborah Cook
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 05/05/2003

Allyson Duncan
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 7/17/2003

Mike Fisher
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 12/09/2003

Judge Roger Gregory
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 7/20/2001

Raymond Gruender
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 5/20/2004

Peter W. Hall
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals , 2nd Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 6/24/2004

James Leon Holmes
Nominated to: Judge, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas
Status of nomination: Confirmed 7/6/2004

Jeffrey Howard
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 1st Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 4/23/2002

Professor Michael McConnell
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 11/15/2002

Michael W. Mosman
Nominated to: U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon
Status of nomination: Confirmed 09/25/2003

Judge Barrington Parker
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 10/11/2001

Judge Edward C. Prado
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 5/1/03

Professor William Riley
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 8/2/2001

John Roberts
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 5/8/2003

Judge Dennis Shedd
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 11/19/2002

Judge D. Brooks Smith
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 7/31/2002

Judge William H. Steele
Nominated to: Federal district court
Status of nomination: Confirmed 3/13/2003

Jeffrey Sutton
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 4/29/2003

Diane Sykes
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 06/24/2004

Timothy Tymkovich
Nominated to: Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 4/01/2003

Judge Franklin S. Van Antwerpen
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 5/20/2004

Judge Richard Wesley
Nominated to: U.S Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit
Status of nomination: Confirmed 6/11/03

Victor J. Wolski
Nominated to: United States Court of Federal Claims
Status of nomination: Confirmed 7/10/2003

Did I mention the number of times a particular nominee's up or down vote was blocked? No I didn't, because I did not know.

But I would not be at all surprised if it was not as many blocked votes (multiple blocks per nominee) as there were confirmations...211 was it?

Please. Go and check.

Good thing I never said that then, eh? I've even said "so you have a good point about leaking data thats still incomplete and unreliable", and everything.

<fails to repress the overwhelming urge to time and again ask Fox, in amazement more than annoyance, "do you actually read the posts you argue with?">

(Yes, its annoying that I cant repress such urges. But I'm still young. )


You assert that the "vast majority" of the leaked exit polling suggested "Kerry was doing very well", but you don't actually "care what the spreads were"? What are we talking about here? How else do you measure how much of a "runaway" victory they were predicting, as you remember it?

'K, unless some real expert wants to weigh in (fbaezer?) I'm gonna wrap this up in 10 points.

1. The preliminary raw exit polling data, that was leaked through eg Slate, had Kerry doing better than what the actual results turned out to be.

2. "Better" in the overwhelming majority of cases (I just cited the numbers above) meant that they had Kerry doing 1 or 2% better than what he turned out to get, and/or Bush 1 or 2% worse.

3. Being off by 1 or 2% per candidate meant that they suggested the wrong winner for a whole bunch of extremely close races. After all, if a race has the candidates within 2-3% of each other, a poll only needs to be off on the candidates by just the odd percent or two to already call it for the wrong guy.

4. The 1-2% by which the leaked preliminary data from the exit polls were off on the candidates are well within what a regular poll's margin of error would have been. (I dont have a clue what the MoE for these exit polls were.)

5. Polls always have a margin of error, it automatically results from the by nature limited scope of their samples - you can't cover the entire electorate. Reading a poll you should therefore always be aware there is some "statistical noise" that can impact the results of any poll either way.

6. (opinion) To assume that because an exit poll has the numbers off by a number thats well within your regular margin of error, it must have been tampered with, is absurd.

7. Lest we forget, when we're talking about how these data were off, we're talking of the leaked, preliminary "raw data" from the exit polls that emerged in the early evening. The actual, processed exit poll data that you can still look back up on the net now, has all the races I checked practically at the very numbers of the actual results.

8. The leaked, preliminary data that you heard "screaming" about Kerry victories was in fact mostly disseminated on the net. Drudge had them, Slate had them. The mainstream broadcast media outlets (MSM is the current term, I believe) were in fact extremely cautious in using them. They never once called Florida or Ohio for Kerry - and actually waited calling any of the controversial states until unusually late in the evening.

As Howard Kurtz notes, "Four years after their botched calls in Florida produced the longest night of humiliation in television history, network executives were determined to be far more cautious in predicting the state-by-state outcomes."

9. Slate did have a clear agenda when it decided to leak the preliminary exit poll data. However, it was not trying to spin pro-Kerry numbers in order to influence voters. It's on a crusade to undermine the secrecy network journalists surround these data with. It did the same in 2000, and it explained why here.

Slate concludes:



10. They're polls. And they're just polls. They're bound to be off somewhere within the margin of errors, and preliminary 'raw' data is all the more. Doesnt need to be some big conspiracy behind it. They just cant properly predict a race that's within two percentage points. But considering how the final exit poll data has every race almost exactly right, they do supply us with the most valuable data we have on the demographic breakdowns behind the elections.

I think that about covers it.

<grins at msolga's confusion and fbaezer's gracious reply, which in turn was unreasonably flattering to me ...>

Nah, nowhere near. You may be right about C-SPAN: a blocked nominee is going to get an hour of news reporting for every minute spent on an approved nominee; thats how it works. But in fact the overwhelming majority of nominees were passed, and the number of nominees that were blocked formed no greater proportion on the whole than those blocked by the Republicans in Congress under the Clinton administrations.

The Democratic filibusters of nominee's up for a floor vote were unprecedented except for one time in hjestory when the threat of a filbuster caused the nominee's name to be retracted.

Well I had a really neat spyder that lasted ten years (with lots of TLC)