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'I can't think of a thing in Ohio that we could have done more to boost our vote,'' Steve Rosenthal told me three days after the election, as the trauma of the defeat began to subside

I posted it days before the election. Those 250,000 unioinized Ohio factory workers that had been layed off from 2000 to 2004 were Democratic voters. Their spouses were Democratic voters as well.

Do you know where those 500 thousand Ohio Democrats went? Did they show up at Kerry campaign events? Had there been 250 thousand out of work factory workers in ohio they would have been at Kerry campaign events. The national media would have interviewed them every night on National TV. Did you see any of them. You only heard they existed and could not wait to vote for Kerry.

Nearly all of those 250 thoudand permanent lay offs and their families moved south and west. They went to where the jobs were and they took their families with them. They were not in Ohio to vote for Kerry.

The huge Democratic efforts to add 250 thousand new Democratic voters in ohio only made up half the Democrat losses from 2000 to 2004. Adding new democratic votes did not add any net Democratic voters. The new Democratic registrations barely make up for the lost Democratic voters that moved away. Anyone who can read "House for Sale" signs could take a short drive and figure it out.

Meanwhile back at the Republican headquarters they too were adding new voters... some 85,000 of them. But the Republicans were not replacing voters that moved away. They were adding new voters. On top of that both parties did a much better job of getting out the vote.

What the Democrats failed to understand was the loss of 250 thousand Ohio Factory jobs cost the Democrats 500 thousand Ohio voters. They did worse than they did in 2000 because of that simple fact!!

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.

They also totally misjudged the Ohio economy. One of their mantras was about the "unemployed steel worker and his family." If they had had the sense to check, they would have seen that steel mills have been hiring for the last year and a half. Another mill just broke ground a few weeks ago- in Cleveland.

The other indicator is in the reporter's frequent reference to "shiny new townhouse communities and McMansions" and all the republicans who "stopped off to vote on their way home from work" and the "growing rings of new townhouses around the central cities."

Doesn't sound iike a state with depression era unemployment to me. The 'rats totally believed their own rhetoric, and paid for their arrogance in due course.