You have to take the national exit polls with a grain of salt, but it appears that this poll weights out to the correct result, and if so, a few things jump off the page:
1. Bush won white voters 58-41. He won white males by 25 points and white women by 11. Now, I know white people aren’t exactly a cohesive group, and that there’s something vaguely distasteful, even, about speaking of a “white vote”. But if you’re not even competitive with a demographic that constitutes 77% of the electorate, you got problems. Similarly, 81% of the electorate consists of Christians, and while the poll doesn’t combine Protestant and Catholic, if my (rusty) algebra is correct, Christians voted for Bush by a margin of 57-42. At the cross-section of the two majority groups, 61% of the electorate is white Christians, and they broke 63-36 for Bush. Again, you can’t afford to lose by that kind of margin with a majority voting bloc.
2. 49% of voters trusted Bush and not Kerry to fight terrorism, and those voters broke for Bush 97-3, such a decisive margin as to suggest that this issue was a deal-breaker for nearly half of all voters. In short, all else aside, Kerry was about 99% defeated just by the lack of voter trust in him as a war leader. This is supported by the fact that voters who trusted both candidates on terrorism broke for Kerry 75-24, while voters who trusted both candidates on the economy broke for Bush 61-38.
One thought on “Exiting The Democrats”
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Just rough numbers based on yours:
if 61% went 63-36 for bush
then (a fact you left out)
the other 38 % went about 70-30 for Kerry
Again, that’s based on your numbers.
And it indicates that heck, you can’t afford to lose by that kind of margin with that substantial of a voting bloc, either.
Or put it this way — it was a race where the electorate was so divided, claims to unity don’t stand up.
Both sides failed to communicate their message outside of their base. Claims of “mandate” seem even more specious.
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Also this, Dems blew the election. When Limbaugh and his ilk hit it big –they made sure the message got to the masses. I think that if The Daily Show had been rerun on braodcast TV the following morning, it would have been a big step to the extra 2 million or so votes (including the 100,000 necessary in Ohio) that would have swung the election.
I think many Republican voters are nost so much voting “heartland” values, as reacting to isolation and an estrangement from being in on the game and from the better standard of living in many of the urban and suburban areas in states that voted for Kerry. Of course, Kerry being linked to an unpopular cause contributed to this. Without this mistake, and by running a campaign as a challenger rather than an incumbent-to-be, the Dems should have been able to appeal to basic self-interest of the Republican base that you descrive, at least in marginallly better numbers in targeted states.
C’est la vie. (That’s Austrian for I’ll trade you prohibitions: Foreign-born for third term. Califronia and the South in Play. )