As the conventional wisdom settles in about the 2004 election, it is, as always, subject to challenge in many important ways.
Alan Abramowitz does some important spadework on this conventional wisdom in his slide show, “God, Guns and Gays: Testing the Conventional Wisdom About the 2004 Election“. I think you’ll enjoy it and find it a source of much useful (and some surprising) data.

There are two lines of analysis that are typically used to justify the claim that the 2004 election result was somehow stolen by the GOP. The first is various bits and pieces of “evidence”–the precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio with more votes than registered voters, the counties in Florida (Baker, Holmes) with huge Bush margins but big Democratic registration advantages, etc.–that supposedly indicate vote tampering. I find this evidence profoundly unconvincing and think Farhad Manjoo and others have it basically right: there’s not a lot of there there. Vote tampering does not appear to have happened on the scale necessary to affect this election.
The second line of analysis invokes the now-infamous early releases of the NEP exit poll data, which showed Kerry with a 3 point national lead, solidly ahead in Ohio and also leading in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. The reasoning, laid out most clearly in a paper, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy“, by Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, is that exit polls are very accurate surveys and highly unlikely to produce the results referred to above by chance if the real world results truly were +3 Bush, etc. Therefore, the reasoning goes, our measurement of the real world (the actual vote counts) must be wrong and the original exit poll results right. Conclusion: there’s something very funny going on with this election.
But there is a huge problem with this line of reasoning. The exit polls have always drawn samples that are off the real world results and have always had to be corrected (weighted) to eliminate bias, reflect new turnout patterns and, in the end, just flat-out conform to the election results. This year is no different (though it is possible that the magnitude of these corrections has been greater than normal).
Here is my understanding of how the exit poll samples are weighted, based on what I have been able to ferret out so far. (No doubt, I’m not getting it entirely right, but it’s damnably difficult to track down good information about this–exit pollsters have never made much effort to publicly explain and document their methods.)
1. Samples are weighted to correct for oversampling of precincts (for example, exit polls have historically selected minority precincts in some states at higher rates than other precincts) and for non-response bias (exit poll interviewers try to keep track of refusers by sex, race and age).
2. Samples are weighted to correct for changing turnout patterns in the current election, since the sample design is based on past turnout behavior.
3. Samples are, in end, simply weighted to correspond to the actual election results. This is done by first weighting exit poll results in sample precincts to the true precinct results, as they are known, and then weighting the overall sample to the overall election result, once it is known.
At what point are these various weighting procedures performed? That’s difficult to say because of the lack of public documentation of exit pollsters’ methods. But it appears to be the case that weighting of flavors one and two takes place at least partially during the day (and continuously through the day), while the third flavor naturally has to wait until actual election results start to become available.
So where were we in this extremely complicated weighting process when those first +3 Kerry exit polls hit the CNN website? Who knows? (And exit pollsters have not exactly clarified the issue since).
But it’s certainly clear that those data had not yet been weighted (or at least very much) to reflect the actual election outcome (again, part of standard exit poll procedure, not anything peculiar to this year). But how much had they been weighted to reflect the other factors (1. and 2.) mentioned above?
Possibly much of this weighting had already been done. If so, then the rest of the sample correction–that took their data from +3 Kerry to +3 Bush–was done by good old-fashioned weighting to the election outcome. Or perhaps it was some combination of additional weighting for factors 1. and 2. plus weighting to the election outcome.
Who knows? Again, exit pollsters don’t seem to be particularly eager to share this information. Nor do they seem particularly eager to clarify how common it has historically been for exit poll samples at that time on election day to be that far off from the actual election result.
The issue of historical comparisons is an important one. Part of what has led to the brouhaha over this year’s exit poll is people’s lack of knowledge about how exit polls have been conducted in the past.
Consider this. The unweighted–completely unweighted–data from the last four presidential elections before this year are as follows:
1988: Dukakis, 50.3; Bush, 49.7
1992: Clinton, 46; Bush, 33.2
1996: Clinton, 52.2; Dole, 37.5
2000: Gore, 48.5; Bush, 46.2
President Dukakis? Obviously, the unweighted data have always been highly problematic and–interestingly–have always shown a strong Democratic bias. Now these unweighted data from past years do not, admittedly, correspond to where we were in the weighting process on election night this year when the +3 Kerry poll hit the ‘net–those data had presumably already been weighted to some extent to correct for factors 1. and 2.–but it is still food for thought.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that exit poll samples this year, controlling for similar points in the weighting process, were more “off” than in past years. I can’t say at this point and I urge the NEP to make the appropriate historical comparisons available to answer the question. But, even if so, this is hardly evidence of skulduggery in the real world; much more likely it reflects the enormous–and perhaps increasing–difficulties of conducting surveys of this complexity in a rapidly changing country.
Of course, additional inaccuracy in the exit poll samples this year (if true) is not a development completely devoid of implications. It could mean that some of the specific results from the survey are less reliable than in the past. (I personally have my doubts about some of the numbers, like those for Hispanics.) But that’s a far cry from assuming an election has been somehow stolen or tainted.
My advice: calm down and concentrate on what’s really important–beating them next time.

In the last few day’s accusations of massive vote fraud, ballot theft and suppression of the Democratic vote during the 2004 elections have mushroomed to such a level that both the New York Times and the Washington Post have given the charges front page coverage.
Unfortunately, almost all the discussion of this issue has become focused on the specific question of whether a sufficient number of votes might have been stolen or suppressed to have changed the outcome of the election. In many cases, the unstated assumption seems to be that if such violations did not rise to the level where they changed the result then they can safely be ignored.
That’s the wrong way to look at this issue. What the vast majority of Democrats find most disturbing about 2004 is that Bush’s victory was based on a pervasive strategy of dishonesty–a dishonesty that included major distortions of Kerry’s record by the Bush campaign’s own television commercials, outright lies told by the Swift Boat Veterans, grotesque distortions circulated among rural or minority voters (such as the claim that Democrats would take away religious people’s bibles or that Martin Luther King was a Republican), flyers listing false reasons why voters should believe themselves disqualified, leaflets and phone calls falsely announcing changes in polling places and phony voter registration groups that collected and then destroyed voter registration forms.
Layered on top of this were techniques for suppressing the vote in Democratic areas that included last minute changes in polling places, use of felon lists known to be inaccurate and the provision of inadequate numbers of voting machines and ballots.
It is this entire pattern of appallingly anti-democratic behavior that should be at the center of the national discussion today, and not just the specific question of whether these kinds of activities–along with any direct theft or alteration of votes by electronic or punch card voting machines–could have risen to a level sufficient to reverse Bush’s victory.
Regarding the precise amount of voter fraud and suppression that actually occurred during the election, data are still trickling in. A widely quoted article by Harpers magazine writer Greg Palast pulled together a variety of issues to draw the conclusion that Kerry might actually have won the election. Follow-up articles in Salon and The Nation by Farhad Manjoo and David Corn, however, while entirely sympathetic to Democrats basic suspicions and complaints, reviewed Palast’s evidence and reached the opposite conclusion.
The debate is not over. Two web sites that continue to collect and evaluate reports from around the country are the Election Incident Reporting System and the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project.
But the most important thing for Democrats to remember about this debate is that they should not allow it to be reduced simply to the question of whether or not the election was “stolen”. What vast numbers of Democrats as well as many moderates and independent voters already believe and believe very strongly is that Bush’s victory was based on a campaign that was deeply, deeply dishonest and profoundly unfair.

An excellent piece by Harold Meyerson in Wednesday’s Washington Post emphasizes the vitally important fact that Democrats are not falling back into division and back-biting in the aftermath of the elections. Here are a few highlights:

Listen closely. That silence you hear is the sound of Democrats not recriminating.
We are, to be sure, post-morteming like nobody’s business. It could scarcely be otherwise after the most heartbreaking defeat just about any Democrat can recall. But this year, I sense, there is a little more consensus than conflict — and a lot more confusion than either — Democratic ranks about what went wrong and where we go from here.
To begin, there’s a genuine respect for John Kerry that will spare him from the kind of morning-after rage that many Democrats directed at Al Gore four years ago. Kerry, and Kerry alone (well, with some help from George Bush), put himself back into contention with his three debate performances. They did not win him the White House, but they won him a respite from the kind of backbiting for which we Dems are justly famous.
That’s not to say we don’t all have criticisms of Kerry’s campaign. It was too slow to respond to the summer’s character assassinations. Kerry’s plan for Iraq never sounded very plausible, but that’s chiefly because the administration has made such a hash of the war that there are no good alternative policies..Above all, Kerry was unable to sufficiently press the Democrats’ advantage on issues such as health care, education and jobs.
…
In large ways and small, campaign 2004 was marked by unprecedented Democratic unity. That’s one reason why the defeat feels so shattering: The whole team was on the field, working together as well as if not better than ever before.
For this reason among others, the Democrats’ postgame analysis has not yet assumed its accustomed form of a circular firing squad. Among Democrats I speak to from all corners of the party, the same points come up over and over again. The mobilization of the Democratic base that the party and the “527” groups threw themselves into this year remains essential, but it is plainly not a ticket to victory in itself. Democrats cannot go into the next presidential election with just a handful of states truly in play; they need to be competitive in more red states to keep the Republicans from concentrating their resources in Florida and Ohio and some borderline blue states.Above all, the fact that the only two successful Democratic presidential nominees since Lyndon Johnson were both governors of Southern states now looms hugely in Democratic calculations.

Read the whole article, it’s worth it.

In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote by about half a million votes. In 2004, Bush won the popular vote by 3.5 million votes. That’s a shift in Bush’s direction of 4 million net votes.
Where did this shift in margin–these 4 million votes–come from?
It is possible to answer this question by comparing Bush’s margin in individual states in 2000 with his margins in those same states in this election. This analysis shows the following:
1. About half of Bush’s gains came from the solid red states–those states that gave Bush a margin of 6 or more points in 2000. And about half of these gains in the solid red states (a quarter of Bush’s total gains) came in just four specific states: Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Georgia.
2. About a third of Bush’s gains came from the solid blue states–those states Gore carried by 6 points or more in 2000. (In these states, Bush gained by reducing his deficits relative to 2000). And about three-quarters of Bush’s gains in these solid blue states came from just three states: New York, New Jersey and California.
3. About a fifth of Bush’s gains came from the “purple states”–those states that were decided in 2000 by less than 6 points (which includes almost all of the 2004 swing states). And almost all of Bush’s gains in this group of states come from just two states: Florida and Tennessee.
Coming soon: analysis of the county-level vote.

By Alan Abramowitz
An analysis of the results of last week’s election indicates that the presence of gay marriage referenda on the ballot had no effect on the outcome of the presidential election at the state level.
There was a very strong correlation between President Bush’s share of the vote in 2000 and his share of the vote in 2004 across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The president consistently ran a few percentage points ahead of his showing in 2000, but he did not improve on his 2000 performance any more in states with gay marriage referenda than in other states. In 11 states with gay marriage referenda on the ballot, the president increased his share of the vote from an average of 55.4 percent in 2000 to an average of 58.0 percent in 2004–an improvement of 2.6 percentage points. However, in the rest of the country the president increased his share of the vote from an average of 48.1 percent in 2000 to an average of 51.0 percent in 2004–an improvement of 2.9 percentage points.

Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have an excellent article, “Popular Fiction” on The New Republic website today demolishing the absurd claim that Bush’s narrow election victory constitutes some sort of mandate for his conservative economic and social policies.
Here are some excerpts from the article:

No sooner had the red and blue ink dried on the maps of election commentators than triumphant Republicans began talking about their clear mandate for an ambitious domestic agenda. The people have spoken, Republicans proclaimed, and what they have said is that they favor the conservative agenda on taxes, Social Security, health care, gay marriage, and abortion. The administration, their humble servant, has a solemn duty to execute their wishes. And so President Bush has promised to move forward with ambitious but still only vaguely outlined plans for Social Security privatization, tax simplification, and restrictions on lawsuits. “I have political capital and I intend to spend it,” he declared.
….Although many pundits are saying that Bush trounced Kerry, the election was in fact exceedingly close by historical standards. In October, the American Political Science Association released the predictions of seven leading models of presidential elections. As an incumbent president running at a time of decent economic growth, Bush’s average predicted vote was around 54 percent, meaning he significantly underperformed historical expectations.
….[E]verything we know about American opinion suggests that Bush is out of step with the public on all the issues he is now putting at the top of his “to do” list. During the election campaign, polls found that most Americans continue to be highly skeptical of the Republican tax-cut agenda and convinced that they have not benefited from it. In the final debate, Bush had to resort to the fudge of pointing out that the majority of his tax cuts went to “low- and middle-income Americans”–and while they did, the majority of benefits from his tax cuts did not.
….Against the backdrop of September 11, the Republican strategy worked well enough to gain a narrow victory. Yet winning narrowly on a campaign of mud and fear, and a strategy of hard-nosed partisan gerrymandering, does not a popular mandate for the conservative policy agenda make. Republicans like to compare the current president with Ronald Reagan. But in 1980, Reagan made clearly specified tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign. And when he won a decisive victory, he could credibly claim a mandate to implement his pledge. That is simply not the case today.

I recommend you read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did.

By Alan Abramowitz
There has been considerable speculation since last Tuesday that President Bush’s victory in the presidential election was largely due to improved turnout and support for the president among strongly religious voters. This speculation has been reinforced by the finding in the national exit polls that 22 percent of voters cited “moral values” as the most important issue in the election and the adoption by overwhelming margins of constitutional amendments banning gay marriage in 11 states. But the evidence from the 2000 and 2004 national exit polls does not support this theory. First, there was almost no difference in reported frequency of church attendance between the voters in 2000 and the voters in 2004. Among voters in the 2000 election, 14 percent reported attending church services more than weekly, 28 percent reported attending every week, 14 percent reported attending a few times a month, 28 percent reported attending a few times a year, and 14 percent reported never attending services. Among voters in the 2004 election, 16 percent reported attending services more than weekly, 26 percent reported attending every week, 14 percent reported attending a few times a month, 28 percent reported attending a few times a year, and 15 percent reported never attending services. While the percentage attending more than weekly rose by 2 points, the percentage attending every week dropped by 2 points and the percentage never attending rose by 1 point.
More importantly, between 2000 and 2004, President Bush’s largest gains occurred among less religious voters, not among more religious voters. Among those attending services more than weekly and those attending every week, support for Bush rose by 1 percent, from 63 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2004. However, among those attending services a few times a month, support for Bush rose by 4 points, from 46 percent to 50 percent, among those attending only a few times a year, support for Bush rose by 3 points, from 42 percent to 45 percent, and among those never attending services, support for Bush rose by 4 points, from 32 percent to 36 percent.
Bottom line: the President made gains across the board among voters, regardless of their degree of religious commitment but he made his largest gains among less religious voters.

By Alan Abramowitz
For the past two days The New York Times, among other publications, has been reporting that this year’s voter turnout was higher than in any presidential election since 1968 and may even have exceeded the turnout in that election. Citing figures provided by Curtis Gans of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, the Times reported that 59.5 percent of the voting age population turned out this year. This would be a truly remarkable achievement, if it were true. Unfortunately, it isn’t. According to an October 24, 2004 press release from the U.S. Census Bureau, the current estimate of the voting age population of the United States is 217.8 million. Thus far, approximately 116 million votes have been tallied in the 2004 presidential election. That amounts to 53.3 percent of the current U.S. voting age population. In addition, an unknown number of late absentee and provisional ballots have not yet been counted. According to Mr. Gans, these could bring the final total of votes close to 120 million, although that seems overly optimistic.
Even if we accept this figure, however, that would only amount to 55 percent of the voting age population, not close to the level of turnout in the 1968 presidential election. Moreover, there are several reasons why it is highly unlikely that voter turnout in the United States will match the turnout levels of the 1960s any time in the near future. First, we have added 18-20 year-olds to the electorate and, even with an increase in turnout this year, the rate of turnout of this age group is far lower than that of those 21 and older. Second, the U.S. population today includes a much larger proportion of non-citizens who are ineligble to vote. During the 1960s, only about 2 percent of the voting age population consisted of non-citizens. Today, that figure is approximately 9 percent. When 2004 turnout is calculated as a proportion of the voting age citizen population, in fact, it was somewhere between 58 and 60 percent. But that is not what the Times and other media outlets have been reporting. The level of voter turnout in the 2004 election was very impressive compared with that of recent presidential elections, but as a proportion of the voting age population it was not nearly as high as that of the 1960s.

I collaborated on an article with John Judis and Marisa Katz, “30 Years War: How Bush Went Back to the 1970s“, which has just appeared in The New Republic. Here are some excerpt from the article, but I think you’ll be interested in reading the whole thing.

George W. Bush’s victory shows that the political strategy that conservative Republicans developed in the late 1970s is still viable. Bush won a large swath of states and voters that were once dependably Democratic by identifying Republicans as the party of social conservatism and national security. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rallied a powerful coalition of minorities and college-educated professionals based in postindustrial metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In the future, this coalition may triumph on its own. But, in this election, Democratic successes in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and West could not make up for Republican successes in the South, the border states, the Southwest, and the Great Plains. Fittingly, the election was decided in Ohio–a state that combines the metropolitan North and the small-town South.
…Bush recreated the Reagan-era coalition by combining Brooks Brothers and Wal-Mart, the upper class and the lower middle class. He won wealthy voters–those who make over $200,000–by 63 to 35 percent. But he also won voters who had not completed college by 53 to 47 percent. If minorities, who voted predominately for Kerry, are excluded, Bush’s margin among working voters was even higher. He reached these voters, who made up the bulk of his support, through opposition to gay marriage and abortion and through patriotic appeal as the commander-in-chief in a war against terrorism that seamlessly unites Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. According to the Los Angeles Times, Bush’s voters accorded the most importance to “moral/ethical values” and “terrorism/homeland security” in deciding their vote.
Kerry’s Democratic coalition, by contrast, was composed of low-income minorities and upscale, college-educated professionals–two groups that, not coincidentally, were the least likely to accept the president’s contention that the Iraq war was part of the war on terrorism. In national exit polls, Kerry got about 70 percent of the nonwhite vote. He tied Bush among voters with college degrees and bested him by 55 to 44 percent among voters who had engaged in postgraduate study. Kerry’s voters, as one might expect, cared most about jobs and the war in Iraq. Luckily for Bush, however, voters without degrees still outnumber those with them. In Colorado, Kerry won voters with college degrees by 50 to 48 percent and those with postgraduate study by 55 to 43 percent. But Bush, by winning voters without degrees by 58 to 41 percent, was able to carry the state fairly easily.
….Kerry won not just big cities, but most of the large metropolitan areas dominated by professionals and immigrants. Kerry did very well in the West, Northeast, and parts of the Midwest because of the growth of high-tech metro areas. Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, and New Hampshire are now solidly in the Democratic fold. Illinois, New York, and California have become as thoroughly Democratic as Massachusetts. But, outside these states, Kerry’s support among urban voters failed to carry the day. In North Carolina, Kerry actually did better than Al Gore in the state’s key metro areas–Gore lost Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County in 2000, but Kerry won it 52 to 48 percent. Nevertheless, Bush again won the state by about 13 percent, because he slaughtered Kerry outside Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, winning 64 percent in the Greensboro area, 60 percent in the rural, small-town east, and 59 percent in the mountain west.
…Bush was also fortunate in his opponent. John Kerry was an able debater, and his experience in Vietnam and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee partially neutralized arguments that would have been made against other Democrats like former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. But Kerry, an aloof New Englander, operated at a distinct disadvantage among white, working-class voters. Unlike Bill Clinton, he had trouble convincing voters that he “felt their pain.” In interviews conducted on the eve of the election, we asked white, working-class Bush supporters in Martinsburg, West Virginia, what they thought of Clinton. Even those who praised Bush for his “family values” said they had voted for Clinton and thought he was an “excellent president.” But it wasn’t Clinton’s politics they preferred; it was Clinton himself, despite the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Gore had exactly the same problem with these voters in 2000. The Democrats need to find a candidate that can talk to both PhDs and tractor-trailer drivers.
If they do this, the Democrats will be able to win presidential elections. Kerry, after all, came very close to winning this time despite his inadequacy as a candidate. Democrats showed that they can hold their own in states like Colorado (where Democrat Ken Salazar was elected to the Senate), Arizona, Nevada, and Virginia. In many of these states, demography is on the Democrats’ side. Colorado is going to become more like California and less like Utah or Montana, and Virginia is going to become more like New Jersey and less like South Carolina. The future of Ohio is Franklin County, not Butler County. Democrats also showed that they can compete in raising money without relying on corporate contributions and that the Internet is an important vehicle for organizing.