The Election

Feelings I voted for Kerry, but I am pretty moderate. Already I have started convincing myself why Bush's reelection is not too bad. I think Roe v. Wade was a bad decision, abortion law should be left for the states to decide. Bush will have the opportunity to appoint a number of Supreme Court Justices, so we may finally see a shift. I also would have worried a lot about Kerry's foreign policy. His voting record is very liberal, and his stances over the last year have been opportunistic. Believing that he would be able to create a consistent, principled foreign policy would have been a leap of faith. My biggest fears about Bush is the escalating size of the national debt. With a completely Republican government, there could to be a lot of tax breaks that will both be economically inefficient and that will only boost the rich. I also worry about foreign policy. Bush needs to admit mistakes and join the reality based community. Lessons? There's been a lot of Democratic introspection about why the Dem's lost the election. I wonder if the Dem's really need to think that hard about it. Bush was an incumbent president running during a war time in a decent economy. According to Yale professor Ray Fair, Bush should have won by 57-43, based on how good the economy is. That his margin was less than this is probably due to his problems with the war in Iraq. I'm not sure if there is any lesson to this election other than incumbents usually win, and that Bush's bungling of Iraq was not quite enough to offset the boost he got from September 11th and Afghanistan. My Prediction It turns out I was wrong in my prediction. A few pundits have pointed to the end of the conventional wisdom that the undecideds break for the incumbent. My opinion is that this election saw such a dramatic rise in voter turnout that pretty much all models were thrown off. Even the Washington Redskins game predicted the wrong outcome. When I was making my prediction, I also forgot to take into account that Karl Rove was plotting a specific strategy of mobilizing the base. Thus Bush was likely to get a lot of the voters not measured by the polls too.