In this post, I examined the national popular vote and concluded that, comparing of the increased number of Bush voters from 2000 (about 8.66 million) and the increased number of Kerry voters as compared to Gore voters in 2000 (about 4.56 million), one of two things had happened – either:
1. Bush had won the votes of 65.5% of “new voters,” defined as people who – regardless of whether they had voted in past elections – didn’t vote for either Bush or Gore in 2000; or
2. Bush had won less than 65.5% of such voters but had stolen away so many Gore voters (even over and above Nader voters who switched to Kerry) that he could approximate the same effect.
As more poll data comes in, I’m more convinced now by some of the commenters to the prior post who argued that it was more the latter than the former, and that the Gore voter switch is particularly pronounced when you consider the likelihood that most of Nader’s voters from 2000 went over to Kerry. (I heard someone on TV claim that exit polls showed Bush won 10% of Gore voters). This is a conclusion that should cause ABC’s The Note great embarrassment for its now-famous declaration, back on August 11, that “we still can’t find a single American who voted for Al Gore in 2000 who is planning to vote for George Bush in 2004.”
I calculated the 65.5% “marginal votes” figure by applying the following formula to the national popular vote:
((Bush 2004 votes) – (Bush 2000 votes))/(((Kerry 2004 votes) – (Gore 2000 votes)) + ((Bush 2004 votes) – (Bush 2000 votes)))
As noted, Bush won an additional 8.66 million Republican votes, whereas Kerry won something on the order of 4.56 million additional Democratic votes. I computed these figures by ignoring third-party candidates, figuring that people Kerry won over who had voted Nader last time are, in many ways, equivalent to bringing new people into the process, and by comparing the official FEC tabulations from 2000 and the latest running tallies so far. I would caution that the 2004 figures are still moving targets; returns are coming in daily. The 65.5% figure, for example, is down to 64.5% as of Friday, and may go up or down as more absentee and provisional ballots are tabulated in various states.
Anyway, I thought I’d take a state-by-state look to see where it was, precisely, that all of those 8.66 million new Bush voters came from. The numbers that follow were computed Friday, November 5, following the call of Iowa, the last contested state, for President Bush. It’s a particularly interesting question for me, as a New York City Republican listening to my fellow New Yorkers rage at what they saw as the provincialism of the red-staters who gave Bush his victory (See here and here for examples): where was it that all these extra Bush votes came from? What state led the charge to Bush?
New York
That’s right, New York. The single largest percentage of marginal voters swinging to Bush came among the benighted, provincial, knuckle-draggin’, Bible-thumpin’, troglodytes of the Empire State itself. New York was one of only three states in the Union (along with Rhode Island and Alabama) to see an increase in Bush votes and a decrease in Kerry votes as compared to Gore, and the only one in which the decrease was significant. Bush gained nearly 400,000 additional votes in New York while Kerry lost more than 120,000 – a swing of nearly half a million votes. That swing, by the way, all but eliminated Gore’s 540,000 advantage in the national popular vote all by itself. Before New Yorkers fume at Bush voters in the South and the Great Plains states they should look around at their neighbors and ask themselves how many of them have been strangely quiet about this election.
It wasn’t just New York, of course; the fourth-largest marginal swing was New Jersey, and Bush won over 80% of the marginal votes in Connecticut. Can you say, “September 11”? And, come to think of it – when you combine those states with the nearly 1 million new Bush votes in Florida – there may have been another factor at work in 2000, much noted in the media at the time and much ignored in the media this time: Joe-mentum. Without the presence of the first Jew on a national ticket, Kerry may not have had the same oomph in states with a large Jewish population (“Where have you gone, Joe Lieberman, your party turns its lonely eyes to you . . . “) Of course, these are basically Democratic states, so Bush still didn’t win them. But he won over a lot of people here in the past four years, and that showed in the final tallies.
I list the states in order of the percentage of the marginal vote won by Bush: