Election maps corrected for population density and proportions of votes cast.

[Chang Style Novice]

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

The country isn't nearly as "red" as some people seem to think. There was no landslide. There was no mandate.

[rogue]

Bush still won the popular vote by 5% points and the electoral college. Get over it.

[Chang Style Novice]

I never said he didn't. I said that's no landslide and no mandate.

These maps don't lie.

[BM2]

I saw the maps using the votes cast with the use of different methods. It makes me recall the five different methods of counting votes in 2000 in Florida, the Democrats still lost no matter how you counted or draw a map
One reason the democrats lost was due to who ran. Had they chose someone who was more in the center and if the party was more in the center, then more people could indentify with them. As a former Democrat myself, the party changed, not me. Look up Sen. Zell Miller's thoughts as to where the party is heading. Whining about maps and mandates is like p*ssing into the wind.
Let's see if they learn anything from this or chose to let Hilliary run Oh yeah, that will be a mandate

[Chang Style Novice]

I've never heard anything about Hillary running except from republican wet-dreamers.

Anyway, the dems aren't like the GOP - we have primary run-offs instead of annointments. We let everybody run.

[red5angel]

blah blah blah, this forum needed this thread like it needs a hole in the head, Talk about a superfulous discussion.

[Chang Style Novice]

The facts are always non-superfluous.

[red5angel]

The election is over. No one is arguing whether it's a landslide victory or not. I think some people were surprised that the margin was higher then it was but I don't see anyone creditable claiming there was a landslide victory.

[FuXnDajenariht]

so we're a big purple blob basically

[Icewater]

I think the 'mandate' came not just from the presidential election, but rather from the fact that the entire gov't swung right. Senate, House, Governors, and of course the Presidency are all now controlled by republicans.

[MasterKiller]

When you illegally redraw district lines to ensure you hold a majority, I don't think it can be called a mandate.

[Chang Style Novice]

Even so, a lot of hay has been made over the fact that GWB won more popular votes than any other presidential candidate in history. Well, so did John Kerry, with the obvious exception of GWB. The country is obviously deeply divided. The maps I link suggest that the division is largely an urban/rural one, rather than a coastal/flyover one, the way less accurate maps suggest.

[MasterKiller]

Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
Consortium News

Tuesday 09 November 2004

George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction - because of non-voters - Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.

By comparison, in 2000, Bush's Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.

Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide - statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote - and losing Florida's independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.

[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.a...ce=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pag.../00/index.html .]

Exit Poll Discrepancies

Similar surprising jumps in Bush's vote tallies across the country - especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent - have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.

Republican pollster **** Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states - Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa - was virtually inconceivable.

"Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering - as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe - Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris's conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves "more scrutiny and investigation." [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]

Erroneous Votes

Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.

In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.

Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it's impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.

If Bush's totals weren't artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.

Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.

For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater's performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.

What's remarkable about Bush's increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.

What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.

Bush's Gains

But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?

While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush's ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.

Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.

The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore's Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]

According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.

However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.

Registration Up

While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.

From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear - maximize Bush's support among social and economic conservatives - including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives - and turn them out by driving up Kerry's negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry's leadership credentials.

This strategy emerged from Rove's estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.

But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush's 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.

Altogether, Bush's new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush's performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.

[Icewater]

MK, I wouldn't bother much with conspiracy theory about election fraud. It's over. Bush won. Moveon.org

Hoever, I think the topic itself is valid. There was no landslide, and even in the cases of the lower seats the decisions were not landslides, but all were majorities. I would also like to see a chart showing the percentage of immigrant voters compared to the states that went democratic. Its well known that most of the world is more liberal that the US. I wonder how much of that went into winning states like NY and CA which have a crapload of immigrants and also hold 86 electorial college votes? Notice that the majority of states that went Dem were high population states. I would think that this would be a higher concentration of people that have a greater dependency on gov't than rural US where people rely more on business and community. Just some thoughts...

[Chang Style Novice]

Actually, it's rural areas where there is the most gov't aid in the form of farm subsidies and so on. Most of the wealth of the nation is generated in big cities.

http://www.nemw.org/fedspend3.htm