Posted on 10/30/2004 10:19:32 AM PDT by plushaye
More extremely good news. The Columbus Dispatch reported an analysis of registered voters in the higher populated Ohio counties. The last 3 paragraphs are extremely misleading concerning Cuyahoga county. This article reports Cuyahoga at 1.005 Mil registered voters. This is a net decrease from 2000.
That’s important so I’ll say it again. Cuyahoga county, the most Democratic county in state and Kerry’s hope of winning Ohio has lost 5,000 registered voters since the 2000 election!
All those stories about thousands of new registered voters are just so much BS. Hard raw data does not lie. Color Ohio red.
Meanwhile other parts of the state have boomed in terms of registered voters. Some of these counties trend Dem but most are conservative GOP counties. This is more evidence of GOP registration drives.
I have input the updated data from this story into my spreadsheet and included the screenshot. As you can see, if we do a perfect replay of the 2000 election, Bush loses 3k votes but still wins by a margin of 160k. But what about Blackwell’s prediction of 73% turnout? I inputted this into the last 3 columns of the spreadsheet. Boosting all OH counties by 10% turnout, Bush will net 78,000 new votes to add to his total and in a perfect replay all else being equal, he wins by over 250k votes in OH, not enough to be close.
This spreadsheet is actually conservative in my estimation because we take the county as a whole. When I dug deeper into Hamilton County I found that the decline was almost always Democratic precincts and the growth was in Republican areas. I have not checked this but there is every reason to believe that the growth in Summit, Stark, Lorain counties was disproportionate toward the Republican areas. That is not factored into the spreadsheet.
Kerry’s only hope of winning OH is that the economic issues trump everything else and convert enough middle of the road voters to outweigh the natural GOP base in OH. This is extremely tough to do because the worst parts of the economy in OH are in the NE which votes democratic heavily anyway. I do not see Kerry expanding his base there, the most he can do is make sure they vote. The smart money says that’s not nearly enough of a factor to override population shifts, Issue 1 and the tremendous GOP voter drive.
Color Ohio Red.
Bump
This is probaly why the Bush team is so comfortable about Ohio!!!
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