Many thanks to guest poster Bill Gardner for his on-the-ground posts about the scene in Columbus. If the bug hits him and he decides to start blogging on his own, we’d be glad to give it some attention.

Just tying up a few loose ends as the US election fervour comes to an end … I bet nobody else was planning to audit this one so I might as well …

After all the brouhaha and kerfuffle over the Guardian‘s Clark County Project, it turns out that the citizens of Clark County voted exactly the same way as the rest of Ohio: 51% Bush, 48.5% Kerry. You might possibly argue that there was a slight “anti-Guardian effect” because last time round Clark was slightly more Democratic than the rest of Ohio (50-46 for Gore when the state was Bush by half a percentag point), but if you did, I think I’d say you were data-mining.

Update I promise I wrote that sentence before I saw someone had done it.

Via “Pandagon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/003885.html I see that Michelle Malkin “smugly presents us”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000792.htm with a map (from “USA Today”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm) showing the apparently overwhelming predominance of Bush-supporting counties in the United States. That’s the top panel in the figure below. Looks like the GOP is overwhelmingly dominant, eh? Well, no, of course. It takes about ten seconds on Google to find the bottom panel of the figure, which shows you about how many people live in each county. The comparison is instructive. Of course, there are still a bunch of well-populated areas that Bush carried, but we know that already because, you know, he won the election.

Note also that the USA Today map has quite a few missing observations, shaded in grey, presumably because the final results weren’t available when they drew the map. Missing observations seem predominantly to be counties with large urban populations. Most of these (like Cook County, IL, and Palm Beach County, FL!) should probably be colored blue, as a comparison with the “2000 results”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap2000.htm shows. CT readers are probably too sensible to fall for invidious comparisons like this to begin with, but it does seem that the likes of Michelle Malkin think that complete dominance of the Prairie Dog and cowpat vote is what really matters. She should check to see how “Leroy Chiao”:http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/astronaut_vote_041018.html voted — maybe the GOP can claim the Solar System vote, too.

*Update*: Thanks to some pointers in the comments, below the fold I’ve included two other figures. The first is a cartogram from the New York Times that scales the states by their electoral college votes, and the section is a terrific map from “Robert Vanderbei”:http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/ that gives a continuous rather than a binary representation of the county vote data, allowing us to see that “purple America” is more common than red or blue America.

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Judging from the comments to yesterday’s post on religion and politics, people seem to be quite interested in the topic. So I thought I’d post a pointer to this NYTimes article that discusses a paper by three economists about “Why Republicans and Democrats Divide on Religious Values”.[1]

fn1. I’d say more, but I have a flight to catch.

Since 9/11 American nationalists have not been shy to tell us about the marvellous things that the United States have brought to the world. And I agree with them. The US Constitution, the struggle against slavery, the struggle for civil rights, the greatest city in the world (New York), the blues, jazz, soul. I could go on and on. I might even, on a generous day, include Hollywood. I love those Americas, and I always will. I’d like to thank them for standing against the strident nationalists and George W. Bush.

— The thirteen original states that brought us the Constitution voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. [1]
— The states that didn’t secede and which fought against slavery voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.
— Black America which brought us in Martin Luther King, one of the greatest moral exemplars of modern times as well as the blues, jazz and soul voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.
— California, home of the modern motion picture industry, voted for Kerry.

These are the great American achievements: the United States’ lasting contribution to freedom, culture and progress. Sadly, that America, the America of which Americans have the most reason to be proud and foreigners have the most reason to admire, just lost. Again.

fn1. UPDATE This is ambiguous and, on one resolution of the ambiguity, false. Since some commenters are incapable of doing charitable disambiguation themselves, let me do it for them: an electoral college based on the original 13 states would have voted in Kerry by an landslide.

Most of the post-election discussion I’ve seen has focused on the impact of religion, and quite a few commentators have suggested that the Democrats need to shift their policies to appeal more to religiously-motivated voters. This approach would entail some fairly substantial compromises in the search for marginal votes.

If we’re the mood for pragmatic populism, there’s a policy option that might well have delivered the Democrats the election, without the risk of fracturing the Democratic base as an appeal to the religious right would have done. That option is protectionism, of the kind espoused during the campaign by Gephardt[1]. Gephardt had his electoral problems, but I think he could have carried Ohio and his home state of Missouri, as well as having a good chance in West Virginia and even Indiana. He might have lost some coastal states but overall he would have had a better chance of a majority in both the popular vote and the electoral college.

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While I’ve tried to be open to more optimistic possibilities, it’s far more likely that the second Bush Administration will be more of the same, and worse. The problem for the winners is that the consequences of the Administration’s policies, still debatable in 2004, will be grimly evident by 2008, and there will be no one but Republicans to take the blame. In purely partisan terms, as I argued several times before the election, this was a good one to lose.

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It has struck me that it is probably more cost-effective for me to make this point once, in a front page post on CT than to try to add it to every single comments thread in the Democrat blogosphere. OK, lads, it hurts to lose. But can I ask a couple of questions which seem to be unrelated to the topic of “whither the Democrats”, but which in fact are.

1. If a coin has a bias such that it comes up heads 52% of the time, how many flips of the coin would you need to make to be reasonably confident that it was not a fair coin? A) 1 B) 2 or C) a lot more.

2. If you flip a coin four times and it comes up heads, heads, tails, tails, then does it make even the slightest bit of sense at all to spend the next month thinking about what major structural changes need to be made to the coin if it is ever to come up heads again?

“William Bennett”:http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bennett200411031109.asp on the moral challenge facing America.

bq. Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal (“The Great Relearning,” as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it) — no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected.

Let’s leave Bennett’s well-known hypocrisy to one side – this proposal, (which I suspect has a lot of support among Bush supporters), tells us a lot about what’s wrong with modern US conservatives. Traditional conservatism (from Burke through Oakeshott) is deeply suspicious of projects that try to remake the values of a society, especially when their instruments are “politics and law.” It shares this bias with certain tendencies on the left (viz. James Scott’s Seeing Like a State). What Bennett and his cronies are proposing isn’t conservative in inspiration; it’s a radical experiment in social engineering. It doesn’t try to build on the values already present in a society, but instead to impose a set of mores by brute force. In short, it’s a cultural revolution. We already know that the new administration is likely to be bad news for “conscientious libertarians”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_10_31.html#005610 – it may turn out that it’s going to be equally unpleasant for conservatives (as opposed to ‘conservatives’).

Via “Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_10_31_dish_archive.html#109950616544439177.

Academics from Harvard University have conducted statistical tests on the output of voting machines and concluded that there is less than a 1% chance that their results could have been generated in any way other than massive voting fraud.

Of course, we shouldn’t get too excited about this right now. For one thing, their work has been called into question. And for another thing, they were talking about the Venezuelan referendum. But I’m certainly not above using cheap shock tactics to draw attention to a really interesting piece of statistical argumentation.

It’s one of those cases where there are points on both sides, and both sides have, extraordinarily, managed to treat each other with respect and not throw around “Devastating Critiques” of each other. I think that Mark Weisbrot has the best of it; his analysis of the audited “clean” sample shows the same result as the allegedly “dirty” sample. The only way that one could have got that result fraudulently would rely on a level of compromise of the Carter Centre’s random selection apparatus that seems very implausible.

But Rigobon and Hausman are correct to say that it is troubling, to say the least, that the audit sample shows a very different relationship between polling station size and the “Si” vote; I’ve been thinking about it off and on for a month and I can’t come up with any reason why that might be. If you’ve got some spare time on your hands (and if you’re a Democrat, you do), both papers are worth a read, if only to clear your palate after the crap that’s been thrown around at the Lancet study (btw, on that subject, I will post more, but in the meantime, nice one, Chris Lightfoot).

(PS: I misspell Rigobon’s name out of ignorance of how to create accents in HTML rather than any other kind)

[As I pulled up CT to post this, I see that Kieran just wrote about something similar. Not shockingly, we were trained in the same Sociology Dept.)

Nicholas Kristof in the NYTimes today makes the argument that “the Democratic Party’s first priority should be to reconnect with the American heartland”. He continues later by saying that “One of the Republican Party’s major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires.” Precisely. I am always shocked when I have conversations with people – doesn’t happen too often, but I try to do it when possible – who are clearly hurting the most by Bush’s politics, but who are nonetheless avid supporters.

Kristof goes on to address the issue of religion and politics in particular.

To appeal to middle America, Democratic leaders don’t need to carry guns to church services and shoot grizzlies on the way. But a starting point would be to shed their inhibitions about talking about faith, and to work more with religious groups.”

This is a point Amy Sullivan has been making throughout the year (and earlier). She has written tirelessly and convincingly about it numerous times in several venues.

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What were the most important issues for voters in the election? If you were reading the polls, and listening to the media chatter before the election, the answer would have seemed clear: Iraq or the War on Terror and the state of the economy. In news coverage of the campaign, in the Presidential debates and in the blogosphere blather, the election was fought on these issues. But from about 10pm last night onwards, and increasingly so this morning, commentators suddenly started talking about the importance of moral values in the campaign. It was all over the news this morning.

The “exit poll data”:http://us.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html show that 22% of the electorate thought that “moral values” was the most important issue in the election, and these voters went for Bush nearly 80% to 20%. The ratio is reversed for the 20% who thought that the Economy was the most important issue. In the case of Iraq and Terrorism, it’s interesting to see, first, that these are two separate options.[1] People who said “Iraq” (15%) went for Kerry 75% to 25%, while those who said “Terrorism” (19%) went for Bush 85% to 14%. But the main issue for voters was moral values and it seems to me that there was basically no sustained media analysis on this point prior to the election. I want to know why. Were the pollsters keeping quiet about it? Was it an error in their categorization? For instance, did they lump a bunch of things including moral values into an “Other” category early on and then just focus on the Economy vs Iraq/Terror trope for the campaign?

So it seems to me, in short, that “Amy Sullivan’s analysis”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0306.sullivan.html has been vindicated by the results. She first articulated it in June of 2003, well before it was clear who was going to win the Democratic nomination and “reiterated”:http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=252572&kaid=127&subid=170 it more than once recently. Right now the Democrats don’t have a plausible spiel on morality. I don’t mean that they’re less likely to be moral people, just that they don’t have a coherent way of talking to their own base — let alone the electorate — about what they stand for in religious terms. The fact that it _is_ just a spiel can be seen from the fact that — as Sullivan has also pointed out — the upper reaches of the Bush Administration are not exactly staffed with devout Christians and the President, unlike Kerry, hasn’t been to Church in years.

Late in the day, Kerry’s began to talk about his faith a lot more explicitly in his stump speech. It does seem like his campaign was starting to see the importance of the issue to voters. But I didn’t see this question getting the kind of coverage the data show it merited.

fn1. I want to know whether voters are just asked to say what their view is, or whether they’re presented with a laundry list of choices. I imagine it would have to be the former.

Gambier is a tiny town in rural Knox County, about 90 minutes northeast of Columbus. It’s where Kenyon College is and where my son cast his first vote. He tells me that there were only two machines for 1300 registered voters. There was an unprecedented turnout and one of the machines was frequently going out of service. Waits were up to 9 hours long.

Doubtlessly, needlessly long lines disenfranchised some Ohio voters. This is inexcusable. Does it help explain the apparent Bush victory? I doubt it.

What I saw on the street in Columbus was that the Republicans were better funded, better organized, and smarter about mobilizing their voters. I bet they also knew more about their people than the Democrats. The Democrats were polling, whereas the Republicans conducted a census. The Republicans were probably more successful in tailoring communications to individual voters and I’m sure they had a plan to get each one to the poll.

What will the Republicans do next with this machine? Rove and Norquist have been candid about plans for a political realignment. They are likely to have some success. Can the Democrats continue to block hard right judicial appointments? I also expect organized political pressure to bring the media into conformity.

“Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/11/pottery_barn_ru.html suggests that there’s a ray of hope for the Democratic party.

bq. But politically, it at least avoids a situation where Kerry would have borne the responsibility and blame for Iraq or for raising taxes. All accountability now rests with Bush and his party. Everything that’s been swept under the carpet until after the election will come creeping out. And the best use of all the resources of people, brains, money, and coordination that’s been built this year, in addition to developing a stronger base of ideas, is to find ways to hold Bush, DeLay et. al. absolutely accountable for their choices. I really believe that this will be like Nixon’s second term, and thus the seeds of a bigger long-term change than could have occurred just by Kerry winning the election.

I think he’s right – the emphasis over the next four years has to be on organizational groundwork, “the strong and slow boring of hard boards,” and holding the new administration responsible for its (likely) failings. As Schmitt says, the Democratic party has better organizational foundations, and less reliance on big donors than it has had in decades – if it can build on this, it has some prospects. However, I fear that a second Republican administration will do serious and perhaps fundamental damage to the fabric of the US political system. Both the aspirations of the current administration to an imperial presidency that is accountable to no-one, and the DeLay policy of systematically gerrymandering Congressional districts while denying the minority policy any voice in policymaking, mark serious setbacks to democracy, which are likely to be greatly reinforced over the next four years. It’s going to be very hard to roll this back.