On Thursday, I covered the downward revision of the NEP exit poll’s national Hispanic support for Bush from 44 percent to 40 percent. That swings their Hispanic vote estimate from 53-44 Kerry to 58-40 Kerry. Quite a change: that doubles Kerry’s margin among Hispanics from 9 to 18 points. And personally I believe that 40 percent figure is still a touch high and I certainly believe there are still an abundance of unanswered questions about this year’s Hispanic results, both original and revised.
Here are some additional materials about the Hispanic results and revisions that you may find helpful. Mark Blumenthal of Mystery Pollster has a post about the revised national Hispanic figures which goes into some detail on a few questions raised by the revision. And the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI), which did their own exit poll of Hispanics that indicated a 65-33 lead for Kerry, has a useful press release on the NEP revisions (national and TX) and summarizing their position on Hispanics and the 2004 election. Here’s a quotation from the Institute’s president, Antonio Gonzalez, on their position:

There is no doubt that some churning of numbers has occurred, meaning Republicans appear to have made significant gains in Texas and Arizona while Democrats appear to have made significant gains in Colorado and Florida. But the net effect among these respective gains is a canceling out of one another. Latino voter partisanship has remained consistent with roughly a 30 point democratic advantage in 2000 and 2004’s presidential elections.

WCVI also provides on their website an analysis of their exit poll data by St Mary’s University political scientist, Henry Flores, and an extensive powerpoint presentation on their poll’s findings.

Progressives and Democrats seeking spiritual and intellectual nourishmant in the wake of the elections are invited to a grand buffet over at The Nation Online, where 25 writers and activist share their recipes for Democratic victory in “Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Forum.” Contributors include Robert Coles, Eric Foner, Susannah Heschel, Noam Chomsky, Medea Benjamin, Dan Carter, Theda Skocpol, Jonathan Kozol and other cutting-edge luminaries. The writers address a range of hot topics, including coaltion-building, faith and politics, ballot reform, candidate development, winning the Latino vote, broadening moral awareness, mobilizing to end the war in Iraq and educational reform, to name just a few issues of current concern.
In addition to the forum, The current online edition of The Nation features interesting posts on political strategy by editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Robert Borosage, James K. Galbraith, Robert Scheer and David Corn.

The current online edition of The American Prospect includes required reading for wonks, pundits and Democrats concerned about preparing for the ’06 and ’08 elections. A quartet of articles “Facing Up: The Democrats Must Confront What Ails Them,” by Garance Franke-Ruta, Sarah Wildman, Sarah Blustain and Matthew Yglesias, offers insightful diagnoses and cures for Democratic political myopia with respect to middle class priorities, abortion, foreign policy and same-sex marriage.
TAP’s current issue also includes perceptive articles on strategy and a range of issues bearing on the Party’s future health by Alan Brinkley, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lizabeth Cohen, James Mann, Rick Perlstein, Anna Greenberg, Robert Kuttner, Harold Meyerson, Robert B. Reich, Jeff Faux, Robert Borosage and others.

Gallup has released a useful new report on abortion and public opinion. As the report notes, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. On the other hand, the public does not favor unrestricted access to abortion, though different questions return different answers on the level of restrictiveness the public actually favors (see my earlier analysis of abortion and public opinion).
The sensitivity of public opinion on abortion rights to quesetion wording suggests that the politics of the issue are particularly sensitive to how it is framed in political debate. As Alan Abramowitz observes:

I think that these results [from the Gallup poll], and similar results from other polls, help to explain how Republicans have been able to use the abortion issue to their advantage in recent elections by downplaying the idea of overturning Roe v. Wade while emphasizing support for restrictions on abortion such as the ban on “partial birth” abortions, parental consent, waiting periods, etc. Liberals are now associated with the idea of “abortion on demand” which is opposed by a majority of the public. As long as there doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger that Roe will be overturned, liberals are likely to remain on the defensive on the issue of abortion.

Food for thought….

Michael McDonald of George Mason University provides the latest turnout numbers and presidential results:

Total vote for President: 121,491,696
Turnout Rate: 59.6%
Bush 61,755,732 50.83%
Kerry 58,554,961 48.20%
Other 1,181,003 0.97%
Still waiting on 17 states to certify results, including California, New York, and of course, Ohio. Turnout might yet inch up a little higher and Bush may yet drop under 50.8% of the vote. New York is the only state to have a lower turnout rate than 2000.

Interesting! Could Bush’s lead drop to 2.5 percent or even (dare I think it?) below? Stay tuned….

According to a Scripps Howard News Service story today, Bush’s Hispanic support in the national NEP exit poll has now been revised down from 44 percent to 40 percent.
Word of this revision came from an NBC official, elections manager Ana Maria Arumi. According to the story, Arumi says that:

…the exit poll over sampled in South Florida where Republicans are strong among Cuban-Americans.
For the revised figures the networks combined 50 state exit polls, which reflected more than 70,000 interviews.

This is obviously a step in the right direction and I can’t help but feel some vindication from it, but it does not answer some key questions about this particular survey snafu and actually raises some additional ones.
1. If the initial figure was so far off, why was that? Could it really all be from oversampling in South Florida? But what about the huge overestimate of Bush’s Hispanic support in Texas which was just revised downward in the last few days? Isn’t whatever caused that overestimate likely to have been part of the problem too? Has that correction of the Texas data even been incorporated into this new estimate of the national figure?
2. And if the Texas data were so screwed up–as the exit poll authorities now appear to admit–how do we know that there weren’t other states that were also seriously messed up and are now being uncritically incorporated into this new state-based national estimate?
3. If it is necessary to combine all the state data to get a reasonable national estimate for this particular demographic group, what about other demographic groups? Should we also use state-based national estimates for them? If not, why not?
4. Who’s making the decisions here anyway? The Texas revision was announced by AP and credited to Mitofksy/Edison, but this revision is announced by NBC, an NBC official is the one making the claim about South Florida oversampling and the networks are described as the ones pooling the 50 state polls (see above) to get the national estimate. What on earth is going one here?
5. Whoever is, or is not, in charge, at some point there should be an explanation forthcoming of what exactly went wrong, how exactly it was fixed and why exactly it was deemed appropriate to fix it in that particular way. At this point, all we can do is guess at all these things, which reduces one’s faith that the fixes they are currently implementing are really the right ones and are (finally) producing correct figures.

A recent Democracy Corps analysis by Anna Greenberg and Jennifer Berktold shows that unmarried women, 23 percent of the electorate in 2004, are becomming a strongly pro-Democratic constituency. Greenberg and Berktold report that unmarried women cast 62 percent of their ballots for John Kerry (vs. 44 percent of married women’s ballots), and they tend to hold significantly more liberal views than married women on major issues such as Iraq, the economy and womens’ rights.

Or, more accurately, closer to where it was to begin with. I argued the other day that it was quite unlikely that Bush actually got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, as the national exit poll claimed, and that the 59 percent share given him by the Texas state exit poll was particularly fanciful.
Now we have this AP item, showing a drastic downward revision in the Texas figure for Bush’s Hispanic support:

In the Nov. 3 BC-ELN–Texas Glance and BC-TX Exit-Poll Excerpts, The Associated Press overstated President Bush (news – web sites)’s support among Texas Hispanics. Under a post-election adjustment by exit poll providers Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, 49 percent of Hispanics in the state voted for Bush, not a majority. The revised result does not differ to a statistically significant degree from Bush’s 43 percent support among Texas Hispanics in a 2000 exit poll.
The revised BC-TX-Exit-Poll Excerpts showed that 20 percent, not 23 percent, of all Texas voters were Hispanic. They voted 50 percent for Kerry and 49 percent for Bush, not 41-59 Kerry-Bush.

Quite a change and it affects not just the Texas Hispanic estimate, but the national one as well. As Steve Sailer correctly points out:

That reduction of 10 points in Texas would appear to knock almost 2 points off Bush’s national Hispanic share by itself (since the exit poll claimed that Texas accounted for 18% of America’s Hispanic voters), and the reduction in the Hispanic share of the Texas vote from 23% to 20% would reduce Bush’s national Hispanic share as well (because he still had more Hispanic support in Texas than nationally).

We shall see what further exit poll revisions do to the estimates of Bush’s Hispanic support. But my–and Sailer’s–estimate that Bush received around 39 percent, not 44 percent, of the Hispanic vote is looking better and better.

A Sunday Washington Post article titled “Was Nov. 2 a Realignment” contrasted Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman’s upbeat interpretation of the election’s significance for the Republicans with Ruy Teixeira’s more balanced appraisal.

“Something fundamental and significant happened in this election that creates an opportunity for” the Republicans to remake national politics over the long term, said Ken Mehlman, who managed Bush’s reelection campaign and was tapped by the president after the election to be the next chairman of the Republican National Committee. “The Republican Party is in a stronger position today than at any time since the Great Depression.”
Liberal political analyst Ruy Teixeira is among many analysts not buying it. Two years ago, he co-wrote a book predicting an emerging Democratic dominance of national politics. That certainly has not happened yet — but neither has the opposite, he believes. The electorate this year “tilted, but it didn’t tilt very much,” Teixeira said.
“If the war on terror is such a realigning issue, how come Bush only got 51 percent of the vote?” he asked. By Teixeira’s lights, the president took advantage of the natural power of incumbency, which is accentuated in wartime, and gave scant emphasis to his second-term policy agenda on such issues as overhauling Social Security, which polls show leaves many voters uneasy. “It’s hard to read [the results] in a serious way as a mandate for much of anything,” Teixeira said.

A Nov. 17th Rolling Stone magazine roundtable on the election included Ruy Teixeira along with Peter Hart and David Gergen in a roundtable discussion with Rolling Stone editor Jan Weiner. Here are a few excerpts from Ruy’s comments during the discussion.

We should keep a bit of perspective on this. The last three elections, the Democrats got, respectively, forty-nine, forty-eight and forty-eight percent of the vote. That’s not that far off a majority. I mean, you shift a point and a half of the vote and you’re just about there. They just need to figure out a way to put their natural constituencies, and growing constituencies, together with a more respectable performance among whites of moderate income. Democrats are not in the position that the Republicans were in after Goldwater was defeated in 1964…
One of the misperceptions about the election is that young people didn’t turn out. In fact, the number of voters under the age of thirty increased substantially. And they went for Kerry by nine points in an election in which the country as a whole went for the other side by three points. That’s the biggest difference between youth and the country as a whole that we’ve seen in the last four elections — even greater than in 1996, when Bill Clinton carried the youth by nineteen points and carried the country as a whole by eight points. I think there’s real potential there for the future.