Who Lost Ohio?

New York Times Magazine ^ | November 21, 2004 | MATT BAI

[Ditter]

I never get tired of reading articles like this!

[Savage Beast]

Oh the heartbreak of PEST!

But it's hard to feel sorry for people who give their support to the forces of decadence, immorality, and depravity, which is what the once-but-no-longer respectable Democrat Party has become.

[skinkinthegrass]

hehehe...But Ohio, like much of the country, was undergoing a demographic shift of historic proportions and Republicans were building their own kind of quiet but ruthlessly efficient turnout machine.

Yeah, Baby! *grin* They didn't know what hit them.

[Semper Paratus]

'I'm not going to write a $3,000 check to 'feed some people.'

They think nothing of asking us to write the check but when it's their money on the line...

[LS]

''For the life of me, I can't see how we could lose Ohio,'' Rosenthal had told me over lunch in Washington the previous week. ''The only way they win Ohio is to steal it like they did Florida four years ago.''

I love this. They so totally missed what happened that that gives me hope that we can keep doing this, althought I had thought they might change their approach.

The fact is, the Dems NEVER figured out the fraud of their own numbers: there were NEVER "new" DEM voters---they were Dem replacement voters who made up for lost urban and unemployed population. The "job loss" thing cut both ways. Unhappy unemployed people tend to LEAVE and therefore all the GOP voters were, in fact, new and all the Dem voters were substitutes for shrinking county rolls.

My first clue that Bush won OH was when I went to vote in Springboro, a new, suburban area of Dayton that is heavily Republican: at 7:30 there was a half-hour line. This had NEVER happened before, and although I chalked it up to "anecdotal" experience, when I got to GOP HQ, others from the 'burbs were telling me the same thing. Then, when I "flushed" a Kettering precinct at 11:00 (which is 50% Dem, 35% GOP and 15% IND) and more than half the Republicans had already voted, I knew we were hitting our targets. By 4:00 when I went back, 90% of the Republicans had already voted. So I knew we would be at 100% of our targets or above. I had faith that Rove and his organization knew the target numbers we needed, so I knew Bush won at 5:30 when I asked our D.C. Mafia kid who was running the GOTV drive, "How we doin'?" and he just nodded happily and said, "We're hitting all our numbers." That was all I needed to know.

Ultimately, the Dems just did not understand the numbers. Thank God that Mehlman, Rove, and people like Jay Cost did. Cost's number crunching kept me calm amidst all the "exit poll" turmoil, because I knew if we hit our targets, Bush won, period.

[albee]

"These folks are such freakin crybabies."

I love to hear the sound of WHINING on Election Eve!

[KwasiOwusu]

"For Democrats, this new phenomenon on Election Day "

Nothing "new" here guys.
The Democrats took a similar beating in 2002.
In fact under President Bush, the Democrats are getting used to losing every Election Day.

[LS]

Well, there is another thing about the unemployed that never gets mentioned: many of them LEAVE for jobs! So if you have, say, 100,000 unemployed, at least 30% of them will be gone within two years of their unemployment. Figure that another 10-15% will acquire work somewhere else in-state (perhaps non-union) and be less angry or grumpy than otherwise; and then of the remaining 50%, some of those will indeed blame the unions and the Dems for their own failures.

It is a fundamental strategic error for the party on the "outs" to assume that unemployed will vote in equal numbers for the party out of power.

[Dont Mention the War]

No one lost Ohio. Bush won Ohio, which was never Kerry's to lose.

Oh, I think ACT helped lose Kerry a lot of votes in battleground states all across the country. I received junk mail from them constantly, and it was filled with hate. Their entire mantra was "Get Bush," not "Elect Kerry."

[The Old Hoosier]

Fantastic article.

[miltonim]

lol

[Dont Mention the War]

November 18, 2004

Steve Bouchard, director of ACT Ohio, moments after learning that John Kerry had lost the state.

[eureka!]

.

[lowbridge]

It was around 1 in the morning when Brokaw painted Ohio red. ''It is now hard to see how George W. Bush is not re-elected president of the United States,'' the anchor intoned.

Must've pained Brokaw soemthing awful.

The volunteers who had been watching the numbers on a laptop refused to accept what was happening; they decided it was Brokaw's fault, because he had put Ohio into Bush's column, while CBS was still calling it even.

Standard operating procedure at CBS. Now matter how far ahead the Republican is, always call it even, or "too close to call".

[skinkinthegrass]

"Hey Tonto, we're in deep doodoo. We're surrounded by Indians.".."Speak for yourself, white man."

HA!HA!HA!...LOL! :))

[woofer]

Who lost Ohio?

Ohio was not lost. Ohio was WON! by the good guys, the dims' uber-menchen, the RIGHT stuff, real men (and ladies, of course), the defenders of our constitution against those that would mock and trample it on their merry way to self-gratification and free-wheelin' anarchy.

They really thought they were in the majority.

They really thought that if they did a good job of turning out the vote, that and their habitual fraud would take the election.

They thought, but they thought wrong. The DUmmies should have checked with me, first. I could've told them was that rumblin' noise was, up the track and around the bend.

[raybbr]

Steve Bouchard, director of ACT Ohio, moments after learning that John Kerry had lost the state.

Right where he belongs - among the waste generated by the democrats in Ohio.

[Dont Mention the War]

[miltonim]

How could there be such a thing as a stealth get-out-the-vote drive?

questions...questions...questions

[Dont Mention the War]

How could there be such a thing as a stealth get-out-the-vote drive?

Hint to the RATS: Just because the press refuses to cover something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.