Okay, listen to this

[mmcirvin]

1. The early leaks of exit polls had bad sampling biases; CNN's final exit polls are a lot closer to the returns, except maybe in Nevada and New Mexico. Sorry, that's the way I'm seeing it. Kerry/Edwards shouldn't concede until the absentees and provos are counted in Ohio, but I don't see them getting a miracle and I don't see any obvious sign that the election was stolen. Republicans ran a really good, if hateful, GOTV campaign in Ohio and Florida, and Bush got a clear lead in the national popular vote; in the likely event that he wins it'll be because he got more votes than the other guy. Unfortunately this means that any meaningful electoral reform is probably going to have to come from the bottom up.

2. Screw bipartisanship. Democrats in Congress, etc. should use every clear and legal mechanism in their power to obstruct further obnoxious Republican initiatives (and they are essentially all obnoxious), even benignly named ones, and remind the country that whatever happens over the next four years belongs to the GOP. The tea leaves tell me that, in the age of Nancy Pelosi, this is exactly what they will do. The votes to start another impeachment circus aren't there, but they really ought to push forward on Abu Ghraib; there's no moral middle ground there.

3. I know a bunch of Bush supporters. They're not bad people; in general they're not stupid people. I would like them to watch closely over the next four years and consider if this was what they really wanted.

4. Leave the country if you want, I'm not gonna.

Comments

Re: Condolences, Matt.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks, by the way.

The conventional wisdom-- which seems to have even extended to vote-fraud schemes-- is that high turnout benefits Democrats and low turnout benefits Republicans, because socially marginal, poorer voters who are usually less likely to vote are a Democratic constituency. But this time the GOP seems to have turned it around mostly by mobilizing rural cultural conservatives. That was Karl Rove's big gamble, and it paid off.

As I said, the long-term downside is that these same people are also getting poorer and poorer. So far, they haven't heard anything that will convince them to make common cause with gays, abortionists, atheists and the like in order to vote for their economic interest (and I sadly suspect that for many of them, making common cause with black people may be the ultimate deal-breaker). We may have to see another generational shift before it happens.

Re: Condolences, Matt.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Though one thing that gives me hope is that black people, who are pretty culturally conservative on the whole, have already made a similar calculation.