Since it’s not really possible to answer your question factually, I’ll move this to GD.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
In Florida everything is in the 80s. The temperatures, the ages, and the IQs.
I also heard (don’t know how true it is) that Jeb Bush did a good job getting things done for Florida after the hurricanes, and he was campaigning heavily for his brother (naturally).
I live in FL, and we all discussed this issue at work today…how in the world did Bush pick up 400,000 votes? There is no way that 400,000 Gore voters in 00 switched…and no way that the GOP found 400,000 more new votes than the Dems did. If Bush had won by 50,000, I could see that…but 400,000??? Exit polls showed independents breaking 58% in favor of Kerry too…we have no explanations for the size of victory (unless we put on a tin foil cap).
I see that the exit polls in Ohio were screwy too comparted to the final results…were any other states’ results like this, or is this a phenomenon shared by OH and FL?
Florida and Ohio both use electronic voting right? No paper trail either. If there was fraud, there’s no way to prove it. 
As much as I want to believe the election was rigged, I have a hard time buying that the software in the Diebold machines is intentionally corrupt for Republicans and nobody has squealed. The guy who is the CEO of Diebold isn’t writing the software; a large team of developers is. And they can’t write an algorithm to pad results without knowing that they’re writing an algorithm to pad results. They also don’t know which candidates appear in which spaces on the GUI - that’s gotta be something the end user (by which I mean the election officials, not the voters) inputs.
But if anybody can explain the way around those problems, I’ve brought my tinfoil hat and I’m ready to put it on.
Bingo.
Call that “nuance,” if you like, but it’ll never win.
Since we’re now in GD, I’ll opine that voters realised that the situation in Iraq isn’t as bad as it’s painted in the main-stream media. Remember that death and disaster is popular and do-gooding isn’t. Combine a jaded attitude to MSM (Dan Rather, anyone?) with a healthy blogosphere with the mil-blogs pointing out the good that America is doing in Iraq and people stop and think.
In the last couple of weeks I was able to see Kerry and Bush on TV and I felt that Kerry’s message was more positive than Bush’s - and thought he’d win the popular vote as a result - but I also agree that it wasn’t as focussed. Would I be wrong (again) in thinking that Kerry was trying to appeal more to women and Bush to men?
I see it as a few things, not all necessarily specific to Florida:
- The Republicans do a better job of marketing than the democrats. By this I mean that they do a better job of:[ul]
[li]Define the groups they need to convince.[/li][li]Define which issues the campaign is about. Framing the issues.[/li][li]Define their opposition.[/li][li]Get the message out to their core constiuencies. There are more than one.[/li][li]Simplifying their message and sticking to their talking points.[/ul][/li]2) Republicans are better at fighting dirty. I know the Democrats also fight dirty, but they always come off as petty and sometimes as ridiculous. The Republicans know how to target discontent in their target market. They’re also very good at bending the rules without breaking them. When the rules are broken there is a wall of plausible deniability. They even seem able to make the opposition look foolish for implicating the Republicans. - Republicans are better at Logistics. They are better at organzing and mobilizing their voters.
- Republicans are more centrally organized. What happened with them was not left to chance.
- Republicans are better at sublimating their individual issues in order to win the day. By this I mean that they have gotten good at quieting the fringes that might frighten the moderates or energize the competition, while quietly reassuring the far right wing that they won’t be forgotten.
- Republicans are better at strategy and tactics. They have a plan to win elections and grind at that plan.
- They have a hardcore, right wing spin machine in people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc., that people actually listen to. It’s a constant, thumping message that eventually hypnotizes.
Those are all general things that seem to hold true over the past 2-3 elections. Karl Rove has done a great job in these areas. In this particular election, a couple of other things really helped, which relate back to the prior items.
- Bush has more of a personal appeal to people here. Not so much in the cities, but in the rural or semirural areas. He talks like them. He’s not too damned smart, or at least doesn’t come across that way. He’s deeply religious. Ironically, he seems to the common guy he’d be a good guy to drink a beer with, former alcohol issues aside.
- It was a brilliant stroke to get the weasel Martinez as the Senate candidate. This brought out the conservative Cuban vote and energized them in a way that otherwise might not have. And he was a good proxy for Bush here, spewing hatred so that Bush wouldn’t have to dirty his hands. He ran a very dirty, hateful campaign that first defeated a career guy in McCollum, and then a fairly beloved figure in Castor. In both cases he went sleazy early and had them on the defensive the whole time.
- The hurricanes distracted attention from other issues. All politics is local, and community response to these disasters had people more likely to support incumbents.
May I suggest that that is a really bad way to phrase it.
Jeb’s approval ratings are extremely high, which couldn’t have hurt W.
That remains to be seen. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/:
There is proof that it is possible to tamper with those machines, and without leaving a trail. See http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger.
Forget algorithms.
11-1-04
John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted. He’s also losing big time in Colorado and Ohio; and he’s way down in Florida, though the votes won’t be totaled until Tuesday night.
Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that “spoil” votes—John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes* (more like three million -MB). . .
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/article.php?id=795
I think the result goes a long way to negating the “Bush stole the 2000 Florida vote” argument – the Dems. tried their best to stir up passion with this rallying cry over the past four years, playing it as (among other things) a race card, with frequent visits to black churches to hint darkly that the GOP had been, and would be, unfairly negating black votes. Fine, they made their arguments, they no doubt energized some of their base, and . . . it wasn’t enough. By trying to make 2004 a referendum on the “theft” of the Fla. vote in 2000, they set themselves up for retroactively legitimizing the 2000 results.
The reality is that Fla. is a diverse, and it is now impossible to deny, politically closely-divided, state. It contains blacks who can be swayed by race baiting, but may also be open to moral appeals against homosexual “marriage.” It contains Jewish condo commandos who vote heavily Democratic, but some of whom may well have peeled off the Dem. side to reward Bush for his Likud-like policies and for neutralizing an enemy of Israel. It contains Hispanics of varying political stripe. And it contains white Christian conservatives, sorry, “fundie morons,” who have the audacity to vote their consciences from time to time.
I’ve never believed the “Fla. was hijacked in 2000” line, and apparently neither do the majority of Floridians. My experience, having lived there, is that Fla. can be corrupt, but it is hardly the conservative businessmen who are taking time off from their jobs to vote six times with multiple IDs, or to vote in both N.Y. and Fla. as it turns out many snowbirds apparently have done, or to vote despite felony convictions.
Wasn’t restricted to Florida, of course, according to Greg Palast. (continued)
*Kerry won. Here’s the facts.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN’s exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio’s male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what’s going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” Unfortunately, they don’t ask the crucial, question, “Was your vote counted?” The voters don’t know.
Here’s why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, “An Election Spoiled Rotten,” November 1.]*
Florida’s population increased by a million people between 2000 and 2003, 6.5%. That’s a big unknown to throw into the equation.
My goodness, the sore losers are out in force and they’ve brought their tinfoil hats with them… :rolleyes:
But anyway, to answer the original poster: you’ve gotten your perception of President Bush AND of the American political situation via the popular media news. Many Americans simply don’t trust the popular media news anymore and don’t believe what they’ve been saying. People don’t believe the accusations made about the President because they no longer trust the press.
Moderator’s Note: Moody Bastard, I edited down the text you quoted from those articles in your two posts in this thread. Please review our policy on copyright issues; although you didn’t quite quote the whole article in either post, you were definitely on the high side.
Dude, it passed on the absentee ballot count. Now we’ll see how it turns out.