Posted on 11/06/2004 10:55:57 PM PST by Cableguy
WINNERS
Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd. Reporters listened skeptically the week before the election when the Bush campaign's two leading strategists insisted they were comfortably ahead in Florida and were leading in Ohio, but it doesn't look like spin anymore. At a lunch with reporters five days before the election, Mr. Dowd correctly predicted that Mr. Bush would win the popular vote nationwide by three points.
Real estate agents in Manhattan, Malibu, Marin County and Tuscany. Assuming the Bushophobes keep their promises to go into exile, and the commission on a $2.5 million home is at least 4 percent, then . . .
Jonathan Rauch. The columnist for The National Journal predicted more than a year ago that Mr. Kerry would not become president because of Rauch's Law, a rule about a politician's shelf life that Mr. Rauch derived after crunching a century's worth of numbers.
"With only one exception since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt," he explained, "no one has been elected president who took more than 14 years to climb from his first major elective office to election as either president or vice president." The only exception was Lyndon B. Johnson, who took 23 years to go from congressman to vice president.
"Americans like fresh presidents: people with some experience, but not too much," Mr. Rauch wrote, and Mr. Kerry did not fit the bill. "Sorry, John," he said to the senator last year, noting that Mr. Kerry's 19 years in Congress meant that he was well past his "sell-by date."
Professional Bush-Bashers. They may weep for America, but their literary agents are calculating the royalties and chanting, "Four more years!"
Family Circle Readers. In the magazine's First Lady Cookie Cook-Off, readers voted for Laura Bush's chocolate chunk recipe over Teresa Heinz Kerry's pumpkin cookies, the fourth straight time they have picked the election winner since the contest began in 1992 (when Hillary Rodham Clinton baked cookies to atone for a disparaging remark about housewives).
Mrs. Heinz Kerry tried - in vain, apparently - to distance herself from the pumpkin recipe, which she said she had never seen, let alone tested. It was submitted by a staff member after Mrs. Heinz Kerry's original entry, an oatmeal-coconut cookie, was rejected by the magazine because it contained an ingredient, Lyle's Golden Syrup, not readily available in supermarkets.
The what-if's will doubtless haunt Kerry campaign officials for years to come. For want of a syrup . . .
Fox News. The first to call Ohio. As Brit Hume, a Fox News Channel anchorman, said the day before the election, when executives from the networks kept saying they did not want to be first in calling states: "Everyone's lying. We all want to be first."
Economic indicators. The rule about the consumer confidence index - if it is above 90 during the third quarter, the president has always been re-elected - held up once again. And Ray Fair, the Yale economist with a formula involving indices of inflation and economic growth, correctly forecast a Bush victory.
Non-exit pollsters. For all the talk about polls no longer being reliable, most of the election-eve polls showed Mr. Bush ahead. Two of them (the Pew Research Center and the New York Times/CBS polls) had the margin exactly right at three points.
Futures Traders. Throughout the summer, as the polls oscillated and journalists vacillated, the speculators betting money in the online political markets remained consistently bullish on Mr. Bush.
When the Iowa Electronic Markets closed on Monday, the traders expected Mr. Bush to get 50.5 percent of the vote, coming within about 1 point of his share the next day.
On the InTrade market based in Dublin, traders not only expected the Bush victory but also showed a preternatural ability to anticipate the outcomes in battleground states.
Hillary Clinton. The speculators at InTrade have already made her the favorite (John Edwards is a distant second) for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and they are giving the Democrats a better-than-even chance of regaining the White House.
LOSERS
John Zogby. In what he described as a "bungee jump," the pollster flatly predicted in May that Mr. Kerry would win the election. He went on maintaining through the summer that the race was "Kerry's to lose." Then, even though his own election-eve poll showed Mr. Bush a point ahead, Mr. Zogby took an even bigger plunge on Election Day.
Late Tuesday afternoon he predicted that Mr. Kerry would win Florida, Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico (none of which he did) and get at least 311 votes in the Electoral College, while Mr. Bush was assured of only 213. (Mr. Zogby modestly declined to forecast the remaining 14 electoral votes).
"I did something I shouldn't have," Mr. Zogby cheerfully confessed on Thursday. "I am a better pollster than predictor."
He said that his Election Day prediction was inspired not by the faulty exit polls but mainly by his own polling among young voters and field reports of high turnout among the young.
"I don't know that anyone was hospitalized over my prediction," he said. "If there are any orphans that are out there, from the bottom of my heart I apologize. We'll try to start up a fund."
The Swift Boat Veterans and the Band of Brothers. What will they do when they don't have each other to kick around?
George Soros. There are some things in life $27 million can't buy.
Exit pollsters and the pundits who trusted them.
The youth vote. The unprecedented get-out-the-vote campaigns turned out so many young Americans that their share of the electorate went from 17 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2004.
Bob Shrum. The Democrats' most coveted consultant toned down his trademark populism after the primaries, but he could not shake certain habits: one more Social Security scare, one more presidential candidate who did not make it to the White House. He's now 0 for 8.
The Incumbent Rule. Undecided voters always end up breaking against the incumbent, except when they don't.
Those "accurate predictors" of re-election prospects. The president's job approval rating was just 49 percent going into the election, and only 43 percent of Americans thought the country was on the right track, but somehow he still got 51 percent of the votes.
The Redskins Rule. If the Redskins do not win their last home game before the election, an incumbent president will lose. Thus it had been for seven decades.
So why did Mr. Bush win despite the Redskins' loss to the Green Bay Packers? Could it have been Mr. Kerry's referring to Lambeau Field as "Lambert Field"? Statistical diehards can hang on to the rule by adding a clause: except when the opposing candidate misidentifies the home stadium of the visiting team while campaigning in that state.
The entertainment industry. Except for country music singers ("Please show Mr. Gatlin to the Lincoln Bedroom"), activist entertainers emerged from the election with two problems to consider.
One is the possibility that their fervent endorsements might have cost Mr. Kerry the election (Mr. Bush loved rallying crowds in battleground states by denouncing Mr. Kerry's "Hollywood values"). The other problem - one that their managers were probably trying to mention between the flights of political rhetoric - is that these entertainers have now certifiably irritated more than half of American consumers of entertainment.
But then, like Jerry Lewis, they will always be huge in France.
"Professional Bush-Bashers. They may weep for America, but their literary agents are calculating the royalties and chanting, "Four more years!"
This is what I keep telling people, but few people get this concept. Guys like michael moore couldn't be more delighted by a bush win. They are working on new products as we speak. With Kerry in the White House the gravy train would be over.
Trial lawyers lost bigtime.
good post
Fantastic read! Thank you.
P. Diddy has a lot of youngsters to kill
What is it with the MSM and the Swift Boat Vets? The Vets are winners and still are heroes.
The MSM are losers in this whole fiasco.
Zogby should be ignored from now on. What a jerk he is.
The NY Times was both a loser and a winner. They lost be-
cause they were a part of the Kerry campaign. They won be-
cause they have W to chuck mud at for the next four years.
"I did something I shouldn't have," Mr. Zogby cheerfully confessed on Thursday. "I am a better pollster than predictor."
Wrong, Zogby is a biased pollster that tried to make his prediction come true. Too bad, he toasted yourself. He can join his brother, James Zogby, in the Arab American Institute that James founded.
The youth vote. The unprecedented get-out-the-vote campaigns turned out so many young Americans that their share of the electorate went from 17 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2004.
It's all our dumb youth's fault.
Right, if they want to believe that. Did you ever see a Kerry/Edwards register to vote booth? I have in California, and you only had to sign some kind of a name to get a cookie. And the maroons really thought that meant commitment.... who was going to get fired up for a dork Senator from Massachusetts that most people knew nothing about? And if they had known anything about Kerry, he would have received even less votes. I did like his wife, though, for comic value......
Kherry-flavoired Kool-aid drinkers one a new title:
BLUE-SER! (Rhymes with 'loser.')
He said that his Election Day prediction was inspired not by the faulty exit polls but mainly by his own polling among young voters and field reports of high turnout among the young.
"I don't know that anyone was hospitalized over my prediction," he said. "If there are any orphans that are out there, from the bottom of my heart I apologize. We'll try to start up a fund."
What an idiot. His predictions and polls were proven wrong, and they were made in no small part due to his bias against Bush, and he acts like it's no big deal. The only reason to listen to idiots like him is when they prove races right. Since he messed this one up so badly, I hope his name becomes mud. (And who would think that the Pew and the NYTimes/CBS polls would be the correct ones?)
The biggest loser of all was "old media". This election was the last hurrah for "old media" and the scumbags went to unprecedented lengths (forged documents, for example) to try to hold on by their fingertips to one last shred of relevancy by getting their boy Kerry elected.
Old media lost, and lost big. That noise you hear is old media's death rattle.
Thank God almighty we are free, free at last.
Yes, but what if he goes back to being a trial lawyer? Can the North Carolina medical services survive his mega-lawsuits? He'll pick a dumb enough jury to pitch his emotional spiels to, and there it goes again...
WOW. A good and balanced article on politics from the Times. Are all of their regular writers and editors on sick leave right now or something?
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