Posted on 11/06/2008 5:52:55 AM PST by xzins
COLUMBUS: Ohio's 2008 presidential election was memorable for what it wasn't: controversial, plagued by problems, record-setting, crucial to winning the White House.
After partisan bickering that set the stage for controversy, and the persistent memories of failures in 2004, the 2008 presidential election was extremely quiet in Ohio on Tuesday with few problems reported.
However, despite balmy weather with temperatures in the 70s, turnout looked likely to fall significantly below the 80 percent mark that had been projected. There was a chance it had not even hit the 72 percent mark reached in 2004, which set a record in Ohio for a presidential election. Turnout reports ranged as high as 86 percent in Perry County, while many counties hovered in the 60s and low 70s.
Despite having clinched President Bush's re-election in 2004, Ohio simply played a supporting role in 2008, as Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency with relative ease.
Still, the race for the Ohio's 20 electoral votes was tight. According to unofficial results, Obama won by about 200,400 votes out of 4.5 million cast. Bush had won Ohio by about 118,000 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast four years ago.
The campaigns of both Obama and Republican John McCain campaigns said they were satisfied with how things went across the state.
(Excerpt) Read more at ohio.com ...
it was frustrating, but at least in SW Ohio, turnout was high - except for Steve Chabot’s race.
I suspect that if McCain had voted against the bailout, that he would have won this election. But he panicked and mortgaged our future, like the rest of the RINOs. On ecomomics the only difference between Obama's economic plan and McCains, was that Obama had a plan.
Conservatives turned out, but some crossed over or just didn't vote for McCain. And, he has only himself to blame; his campaign was disorganized and lacked the efficiency and passion of the Bush 2004 effort.
I still thought McCain would win, and I know LS can tell you that they were thrilled with the heavy turnout in the GOP precincts of bellwether counties, until they started counting the votes. :) Then they saw McCain's chances evaporate with a large crossover vote.
Conservatives’ votes were depressed and suppressed. The media destroyed their will to vote. GW Bush got more national votes than Obama. Obviously McCain did not appeal to conservatives and he never tried to. He stuck a thumb in their (our) eye at all key milestones (e.g. immigration, cap & trade, drilling esp. in ANWAR, campaign finance “reform”, judges [Gang of 14], education, military strategery [always on Rumsfeld’s butt], etc etc.).
I voted, but McCain was just not a sure fire draw. Maybe Romney was but the media raped him over his religion. Maybe Huckabee was but the media would have trashed him too, just as they did Palin.
Well, Schumer made some odd comments earlier in the year, Fannie and Freddie were Dem to the core, and Soros, Buffet, Gates, Paulson were all Obamabots. It isn’t that they caused the bubble for this to happen, but they COULD have tried to control WHEN it popped. If they knew it was going to happen in the next 6 months...why not help it along?
MASSIVE shorting of financial companies sped this up, otherwise they could have hung in there longer. Just a matter of timing.
Nationally, McCain did not touch conservative issues in any real sense.
Abortion
Marriage
Guns
Vouchers
Self-sufficiency
Where were they?
More likely the tens of thousands of bogus and multiple time Acorn registrants either did not show up or only voted once.
Amen to your ideas. Look, I am from North Carolina. If I am the Senator Richar Burr, who will be running for reelection in 2010, he needs to get his butt off and start organizing at local levels. For god sake, we lost North Carolina because of just 3 counties. In most of this counties, there was not even a precinct chairman and the vote margins was 75% to 25%. If you are a democrat, you work on three counties and you win the whole state.
We need to do the reverse engineering. Get into these heavy democrat counties and reduce the margin by 15 to 20%. It is not rocket science.
The system we used favored the moderate. Too many conservatives had them splitting the vote, and when added with the winner-take-all system, that meant they slowly had to drop out.
Better a system of primary delegates apportioned proportionally state-by-state. They'd still be splitting the vote, but they wouldn't be getting so far behind, either.
A conservative caucus within the party would also help. They would endorse up to only 2 or 3 true conservative candidates per primary season.
Trust me, it will work out if conservative like Bobby Jindal gets into the primaries. When there is a real conservative, primaries will be over soon. People like him have huge organizational skills and work in building the party at local levels.
McCain’s entire history was too much like Obama’s. When the coal bankruptcy stuff hit, the libs were able to say, “McCain supports the same thing.” That was the story time and again: Coulter has an article on it today.
McCain was a liberal, and it was hard for him to get distinguished from Obama. And what did it get him: bupkis.
McCain didn’t vote against the bailout, because at heart he’s a liberal, and his first impulse was to use the government.
Duncan Hunter was a true conservative. He had zero organization and cash, but he wasn’t exactly a media-savvy communicator. A conservative caucus endorsement would mean that they had weighed those kinds of things prior to putting a candidate forward.
The truth is that McCain was merely and average communicator...especially in the debates in my opinion.
About 50% of the voters I saw were black. A lot of people probably early voted or absentee voted. If we are going to go after vote fraud, we need to concentrate on absentees and early voting.
From all the numbers I can gather:
Catholics flipped to Obama.
Conservatives stayed home. (Several groups: gave up, some fiscal soured by bail out, some just could not get excited for McCain even with the alternative - people {the normal ones} did not see Obama as bad as he is.)
Evangelicals showed in good numbers if you discount
Catholics - actually up some in spite of Catholic defections
Small increase in number of youth voters - no more than 1-2%
We need to have some kind of organization in the university campus. Just a mere presence will reduce the impact of liberal standing in the college. Students are very good in volunteering without pay. Catholics will come back when a candidate like Bobby is in the ticket.
Good summary. Thanks.
I’ll never understand Catholic voters. They make me pull my hair out.
I used to live in Putnam County....Continental. Great place. Mind boggling farms and agricultural economy.
I’m sure some McCain voters flipped to the down-ticket parties. I support the CP myself. I just didn’t vote for them this time. I thought McCain had a shot at pulling it off. Now, I realize that he didn’t really try, so I’d like to pull my vote back and give it to Chuck Baldwin. However, the bottom line is that this needs to be fixed the next time around. The organizing by McCain was lousy in Ohio. His message was off for Ohio.
All that said, I still deeply respect his service for our nation.
That was my impression too. A lot of very young rookies (I know their heart was in the right place) running things here in Colorado. It seemed chaotic.... I had to go 3 times to get yard signs, and then finally got them at the Palin rally.....even there I had to stand in line to buy them.
At this point its pretty obvious conservatives sat out this election. Not all of course, but enough... We didn’t GOTV.
Surprisingly, I’m beginning to wonder if Huckabee might have been our best choice if victory were the only consideration... followed by Thompson, rather than the other way around.
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