....LMB: "Last Election Post"....

November 08, 2004

So what the hell happened in this election? Let's break it down as best we can.

First of all, I want to point out the people who weren't allowed to vote. In many states, there are laws preventing ex-cons from voting. I have yet to heard a good explanation for this (aren't we always saying that someone who's gone to prison has "paid their debt to society"?), and it seems to have come out of the same sets of laws passed after the Civil War that were intended to prohibit African-Americans from voting (ah, voter suppression, as American as apple pie and cross-burning). Regardless of their intent, these laws do disproportionately deprive African-Americans of their voting rights: about 13% of African-American men can't vote, about 8% of all African-Americans can't vote. All told 4.7 million Americans can't vote because of these felony disenfranchisement laws.

Then we see another 40% of Americans who can legally vote but did not vote. I think this figure is extremely important to keep in mind, but most pundits aren't bothering to. They keep acting as though the results of the election accurately reflect the ideological mindset of the country. "51% of Americans support President Bush," they say. No they don't, jackass. You can only say with certainty that about 31% of Americans (who are eligible to vote) support President Bush (or possibly don't support him, but disliked John Kerry). Maybe 31% support him, maybe 71% support him. We don't know, because we know very little about the non-voting folks. So pundits, get your damn facts straight.

Now let's look at all this Red State/Blue State bullshit. It's become conventional wisdom that the country is geographically split by ideology, with "blue" Democratic coasts and a "red" Republican middle. You can understand why media folks want to hold on to this idea, it's very simple and appealing. And wrong, but hey, if everyone else is saying it, you're not going to get in trouble for saying the same thing, right?

Here's what I'm trying to say: check out the helpful maps here. Let's look at Texas. On the state map, it's solid red. When you look at the breakdown by county (scroll down, second map on the page), we see that a number of counties voted for John Kerry. And when we look at the voting percentages, we see that 38% of the voters favored Kerry. That's not a "red" state, that's a state with a lot of Democrats but even more Republicans. The media's lazy charade in which states are solid color blocks, borders on irresponsible.

[edit]

Here's what I'm talking about.

Instead of going straight red-blue, this map marks how strongly each county supported Bush or Kerry. Not much red, not much blue, lots and lots of purple.

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There, wanted to get those things out of the way. Now I can finally start talking about what I think happened this election.

The popular explanation of this election is that the Republicans mobilized religious conservatives to vote by putting Gay Marriage Ban referendums on many state ballots across the country. The evidence for this comes from exit polls in which 22% of respondents said that their number one concern when voting was "morality" (well, that and Karl Rove's public admissions that this was his strategy). First of all, I don't trust these polls. And second, saying that you're concerned with morals doesn't necessarily translate into "I wanted to vote down gay marriage."

That being said, it seems likely that these referendums did have an impact. At the very least, it made the voters in those areas think a bit more about their social values, and at most, turned the election into a referendum on whether or not that individual voter approves of homosexuality. And for the most part, Americans are very homophobic. This gay referendum tactic was also clever in that it played on the one inroad that Republicans have to ethnic minorities: religion. African-Americans and latinos are often devoted Christians, which often leads to conservative social values.

I think the biggest problem in analyzing the election is that commentators want to find a "magic bullet." They want to say that the nation loves Bush, or that Kerry should've used Strategy Z or that everyone just voted for Bush because they're scared of terrorism. Of course, people make their decisions based upon different criteria. Some people probably focus on candidates' policies and how it will effect that voter specifically, others will look at the best policies for society. Some will simply vote their party affiliation. Some will vote for the candidate they think seems most trustworthy. Some will vote for the person they think will make America look best. Some will vote for the person who they think will be the best leader. And of course, most people probably have not analyzed the way that they are making this decision, so you couldn't even ask them to find out. There is no one way to vote, but saying that won't get you a seat on the cable news talk shows.

It seems to me that the biggest predictor of a person's vote is whether they live in an urban area or a rural area. Check the second and third maps on this page to see that the rural areas (most of the United States) tend to have more Republican voters, while the urban areas (the coasts, the Northeast, and along the Mississippi River) tend to have more Democratic voters.

I'd say that if someone really wanted to understand the American political landscape, they'd first have to try to get a handle on the political views of non-voters. Not asking them "why didn't you vote?" as much as trying to see how they feel about various political issues. They could very well be strongly liberal or conservative, but just feel that voting doesn't make a difference. If you want to know what America thinks, you really need to tap into that mystery 40%.

After that, I think I'd try to interview folks in both rural and ubran areas, both Bush and Kerry voters, and try to get them to explain how they made their decisions. Then you could compare the responses of the urban and rural Democrats and the urban and rural Republicans and start looking for patterns.

But that's all the nice quasi-academic stuff. The core of this election was Bush himself. Bush ran on his public image rather than his record or his policies, and Kerry ran on a "Bush is doing it wrong" platform. I think your average Jo(e) would have, over the course of four years, gotten a clear image of Bush (whether that image is true or a fraud), and didn't think that Bush was doing things so badly that he should be thrown out (I think most Americans don't watch enough news to really fathom how badly Bush has fucked up the nation and world). I think that some voters are still afraid of terrorism and feel that Bush is a "strong leader" in the sense that if you were in a fort and were being attacked, that Bush would be a good guy to put in charge of the effort to fight back (this would be for people who bought into Bush's false image. I don't think he would fight the good fight in a fort siege, I think he'd be the guy who'd volunteer to go get another barrel of gun powder, and then hide in the storage room until the fighting stopped). Despite Kerry's military service, his image was never one of "good fort leader". He might be a good guy to run the fort before the attack began, but afterwards people would want the passionate fighter that Bush pretends to be.

Sadly, this election has made me fear that maybe there are so many Christian fundamentalists in this country that they can actually start acheving their goals of changing the government and culture to fit their own kooky interpretation of the Bible. I've usually been a very tolerant agnostic, but these election reults make me wonder if religion is my enemy.

And to everyone who voted for those No Gay Marriage propositions, fuck all y'all. You took your belief that some people are less human than others and made it law.