Kimstu, I always thought SDMB was about ‘fighting ignorance’. Its obvious the OP is, well, in need of some fighting (assuming he’s sincere). He’s also fairly new to SDMB by the fact he’s a guest (again, assuming). ALmost every response was ridiculing or sarcastic (as I said, dancing around the rules) instead of either ignoring the quesiton if it offends you or simply answering and maybe explaining WHY you think there are plenty of folks who think Bush won’t get elected. Get it?
-XT
Heck, I’m not voting for Kerry[sup]*[/sup] and I’ll bet Bush will lose. As der tag approaches, there will be more and more noise about history repeating itself and Bush being a one-termer, like his dad. Since Americans are suckers for historical patterns, Bush43 is likely going down, just for the symmetry of it.
[sup]*[/sup]Being Canadian, and all. My e-mail address is in my profile, by the way.
This phrase seems to be a recurring one with guests here. It means “waste tons of time reading kooky websites in the hope that you may be as gullible as me”.
No thanks.
BTW I’ve a horrible feeling he will win. But not for the reasons obliquely hinted at in the OP.
I think Bush will probably win (although I personally will be voting for Kerry), because even though the polls are close, Bush has an advantage if you look at the electoral votes (taking “undecided” states out of the picture.) So Kerry would have to win most of the undecideds to win the election, which, while not impossible, gives him a tougher hill to climb.
I my opinion, Bush’s victory will probably not be due to stupid conspiracy theories. (I am allowed to call theories stupid, right?)
Answered for your edification:
Yes, Got Taste, scores of millions of Americans genuinely (genuinely is akin to seriously I suppose) believe that Bush will be defeated by Kerry.
I don’t think that even the capture of UbL is enough at this point to cause the tide against Bush to ebb. It’s not a tide for Kerry so much as it is a tide against Bush.
Too many Americans realize how the Bush Admin is playing political monkey games with our national security and foreign policy. Too many americans realize how many persons of bad character the Bush Admin has put into sensitive positions.
The Bush Admin has fucked us as nation (and not in a good way).
While one can fool some of the people all of the time (these are who GWB said he was going to focus on*), you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Enough people have realized that Lady Liberty’s nether regions haven’t even been greased while the Bush Admin’s been banging her.
I think that you may be right that a sufficiently tragic event, like another 9-11 or another Pearl Harbor might be enough to disorient the electorate and produce a Bush victory. Many (not my humble self) would point to the recent Spanish election as an example of how an electorate can be so disoriented by such a horrific and tragic event as to vote for the greater of two evils. If they are right, then another large scale terrorist attack may be enough to propel GWB et al back into office and insure easy, fruitful times al Qaeda recruiters and their ilk.
Why not?
You do realize that the Bush Admin’s a far piece from traditional American Conservatism don’t you?
Not according to this LA Times site. (Yes, you have to register, but it’s fun playing with the map.)
Right now, not counting states (many of them battleground states) where the gap between the candidates is less than the margin of error, Kerry is leading in “safe” states 165-147.
Try out a few plausible scenarios and you’ll see Kerry wouldn’t even have to take Florida to win. And right now, he trails Bush by only one point in Florida.
Is it any wonder Condi, Colin and Rummy are updating their resumes?
According to this site – http://www.electoral-vote.com – which tracks the states by the latest polls and is updated every time a new poll in a given state comes in, Kerry now leads Bush by 307 electoral votes to 231. I have been monitoring this site for several weeks and have seen the figures change several times (a week ago Florida was classed as “Barely Bush” and now it’s classed as “Weak Kerry”), but always the total count favored Kerry. You can put your mouse pointer on any state and a box will pop up showing the date, source and results of the latest poll in that state.
I think that this is the AP story I saw that said Bush is ahead.
Do you (JonScribe and BrainGlutton) think it’s inaccurate? (I personally have no idea whether the AP, the LA Times, or www.electoral-vote.com is more likely to be accurate about something like this).
Listen, we’re talking polls here. And there are discrepancies among polls. That’s why I like the L.A. Time’s site, because it considers for the margin of error in awarding states to Kerry or Bush based on current polls.
Also, the source you site may not be inaccurate, but it is more than two weeks old.
The only polls that will count will be those we go to on Nov. 2, but for the purposes of this “debate,” as to whether anyone can imagine Bush losing, the current polls allow me to comfortably believe that yes, yes, he can lose.
It would seem your assumptions may be incorrect. Or maybe the time zones have caused him to disappear (since he cited two UK sites).
Bush will win with about 52 percent of the popular vote.
“How do you know, Evil One?”
It’s an educated guess based on the polarization of the electorate and the current climate. There are quite a few Bush supporters going about their daily lives without bashing Kerry at the top of their lungs. But come election day, they’ll head to the polls. Kerry is doing an excellent job being the “anti-Bush”…but I don’t think it’s enough to be “not that guy”. So far, Kerry hasn’t shown me anything that would make me think people will make an active choice to vote for him. The only ones making noise are the party hacks with a vested interest and those who are rabidly anti-Bush. Plus, there is plenty of “John Kerry war protester at large” fodder out there. If I were the Republicans, I would sit quietly while he does silly things like “report for duty” at the convention…and then bring out the guns about mid-October.
The “silent majority,” eh? No, I think they’ll stay home. That’s the decisive factor in this election: Bush has done too much to alienate his conservative base. Fiscal conservatives don’t like his deficits; isolationist conservatives don’t like the war; nativist conservatives don’t like his immigration policies; libertarian conservatives don’t like the USA PATRIOT Act, DHS, etc., etc.; and even religious conservatives are disappointed at how little Bush has actually delivered for them – it’s no harder to get an abortion now than it was in 2000, school prayer is no closer to being revived, and some of that “faith-based initiatives” money is going to mosques! A lot of conservatives of various kinds, if they can’t bring themselves to vote for Kerry, probably won’t vote at all. Or they’ll listen to Pat Buchanan, and vote for Ralph Nader!
Under the circumstances – i.e., Kerry being both a war hero and an anti-war hero – I expect that will pick him up a lot more votes than it loses him. That is, nobody who was against the Vietnam war back then is going to vote against Kerry now because of his military record, because his later anti-war actions outweigh that; and some people who were for the war back then will not vote against Kerry because of his war-protest record, because his earlier military record outweighs that. It’s a win-win situation.
Awesome link! Thanks!
I would really like to see that poll. Where, oh, where is the question posed and answered that “Georgie boy is an incompetant[sic] asshole who can be defeated in '04”? Sounds like a little bit of poster imbellishment there, if you ask me (or even if you don’t 
).
Remember, we’re fighting ignorance here, not propagating it!
As long as George is consistently using his mouth as a shoe, I think he’ll talk his way out of being reelected.
I believe it’s possible for Bush to lose. I think it’ll depend on who makes fewer political mistakes up to November - and both sides are making, or have made, disturbing numbers of them, so we’ll see what happens…
Or perhaps it’s lose-lose. Conservatives are rolling their eyes at Kerry basing an entire political campaign on four months of service nearly 30 years ago. If the Democrats didn’t have a guilty conscience about thier record on defense, he wouldn’t have to. “Pay no attention to that liberal behind the curtain! I am the great and powerful war hero!” You didn’t hear John McCain banging that drum when he was running…and his Vietnam “hero” resume is a lot longer than Kerrys. Plus, the “we committed atrocities” Senate testimony is leaving a bad taste in a lot of mouths.
From the left it gets a little muddier. Will they overlook the fact that he served and embrace his protesting as the “real” John Kerry? Perhaps.
Speaking as a Republican who’s going to vote, unenthusiastically, for Bush this November:
I have no idea who’s going to win. I’ve believed for over two years that the coming election is going to be as close and as nerve-racking as the last one. Almost all the red states from 2000 will stay red, almost all the blue states will stay blue, and a handful of key states (yes, including Florida again) will make all the difference.
At this point, anyone who’s sure who’s going to win is out of his mind!