Umm, still feeling smug here,** Bricker,** because the rebuttal to the PIPA report, rather than being a staggering blow to its validity, is more a minor nitpick blown up to huge proportions. Here’s the section that seems to be the key point in the rebuttal:
In other words, if **jshore’s **post is rephrased to read: “Bush supporters” rather than “Bush voters” it would be totally accurate. Nitpick, nitpick, nitpick. That’s why I’m feeling smug, Bricker – I’d be embarrassed to present something like this as an argument. But I’m not the one who’s doing it, you are. And that’s why I’m feeling smug. Frankly, continued silence would have been a lot more dignified.
That’s laughable. I’m trying to picture the scenario where the Republicans get kicked out of power because the US didn’t sign the Kyoto treaty, didn’t sign on to the International Criminal Court, or didn’t stop testing nuclear weapons. Yeah, those are key commitments about which Bush voters will be extremly upset if they remain unfullfilled. Didn’t we all see those huge Bush rallies with people waving signs saying: KYOTO NOW!! and BAN THE BOMB!! and WE NEED THE HAGUE!!
Yeah, but are you’re willing to believe that Bush got re-elected because the people were so enamored of his NASA funding proposals or were so excited by his social security privatization ideas or his ideas to essentially eliminate all taxation of investment income altogether and tax only wage income?
A lot of younger people probably like that. I know I do (although I didn’t vote for Bush ).
Possibly. Certainly more likely than a concern about signing the Kyoto Treaty.
I think you have to look at the exit polls to get some idea of why people voted the way they did: Moral values, the threat of terrorism, the economy.
I really don’t think most people vote for a president based so much on specific policy issues, but on whether or not they think the person will reflect their overall world-view. You don’t know what specific problems the country will encounter in the next four years, so you vote for the guy you think will guide the country in the best direction. Issue sepcific votes are more likely to be focussed on Senators and Congressmen.
Out of curiosity, I wrote a small Perl script to extract all the voting info from the election 2004 website on CNN, and, even though some people claim that you need a complicated model and a publication in a peer-reviewed journal before any numbers are posted, here are the results (in millions of votes), simply FYI:
President Senate House Governor Total Percent
Dem: 55.9 41.3 47.5 7.1 151.8 49.4%
Rep: 59.5 37.9 50.8 7.0 155.2 50.6%
And that has the same problem we talked about earlier. The Senate votes don’t represent a trend unless you want to believe that Alan Keyes and the IL race was typical of election races across the contry. And if you actually do believe that, then the Democrats have nothing to worry about and will generally win all future elections by a margin of 8-to-2.
What on earth are you talking about?
What trend did I claim?
Also, even if we don’t count the Keyes-Obama race, the Democrats still got
37.8 million votes versus 3.65 million votes for Republicans in Senate races.
So, I still don’t see the data supporting the claim “The Democratic Party is out of touch with American voters”
Are you seriously accusing me of thinking that Alan Keyes and the IL race was typical of election races across the country? I thought you had more debate-integrity.
Because you still don’t understand that compiling raw votes from individual senate races is meaningless. Its been explained several times in this thread. Appearently you don’t by those explainations. Nothing more really to be said about it really.
But what you and others fail to understand, xtisme, is that it ISN’T meaningless within the context of a broad, general statement like, “The Dems are out of touch with the American voter.” The American voter is ALL American voters, 49 percent of whom voted Democratic.
I look at it this way: George W. Bush barely kept his job. Barely. Compared to other incumbent Presidents that have won re-election in modern times, Bush’s support was remarkably underwhelming .
Yep. Bush’s support is practically non-existant. I’ll keep that in mind as the GOP-controlled House and GOP-controlled Senate pass legislation this term that will be signed by the GOP-controlled White House, and as the GOP-controlled Senate confirms judicial nominees proposed by the GOP-controlled White House.
Or… to put it another way: would the Democrats trade places with the GOP? In a heartbeat. Would the GOP trade places with the Democrats? Ummm… no.
I think this simple thought experiment answers the claim reasonably well.
On the national level, yes the GOP has made gains. But the Democrats have made gains with the state legislatures. There is now an exact tie in Democrats and Republicans state legislative seats nationwide: (3,657. And we’ve made gains in the number of legislatures we control.
That’s true. It’s also true (to a greater or lesser extent depending on how you count it) on lower levels like county commissioners and such. The difference? We’re on it.
There are lots of ways to spin the election results, so no one is going to convince anyone else. I could counter your claim with the fact that Bush is the first president in 18 years to get a plurality of the vote, or that Bush is the first president in a long time to win re-election while increasing the number of Senate and House seats in his party. You can come back with, “If 60,000 votes had switched in Ohio, we wouldn’t be having this conversation!” I can then come back and point out that Bush increased his margin in almost every state, including California and New York, over his 2000 results. I could also point out that Bush won despite Kerry having the overt support of the media, hollywood, academia, and foreign leaders. When you think about the rash of ‘late hits’, negative coverage in the media, terrorist attacks in Iraq, billionaires blowing tens of millions on ad campaigns against him, it’s amazing that Bush won with the results he had. He won in spite of the largest array of forces gathering to prevent the re-election of a president that I’ve ever seen.
I’m amazed Kerry got 48%, what with the American tendency against “changing horses in midstream” (the most ridiculous attitude ever, but one which I think is prevalant). I can’t think of any incumbent, war time President getting so close to be defeated.
The “forces” gathering against Bush? Please. Our “Heartland” voters distrust the media and Hollywood, and will vote against their wishes purely out of spite. The fact that he got as much as 48% should be counted in his favor.
I guess your idea of “overt support” is when the media is no longer Bush’s lap-dog, when the media actually is willing to point out that Bush is completely lying and distorting reality (even if they often still insist on doing it within a context of pointing out distortions on both sides when both sides aren’t distorting equally or as flagrantly).
Yeah, I guess anything less than the media being Bush’s unquestioning outlet for his distortion, half-truths, and propaganda more befitting of the former Soviet Union than a true democracy is considered the media giving Kerry their “overt support”.
Like with ABC news issuing direction and memos that it’s OK to give greater scrutiny to Bush’s claims than to Kerry’s, because in their judgement it was more important to critique Bush’s claims?
).