National Election 2004

I went to bed around 11 last night pretty sure that Bush would pull this thing off. I woke up and the election still isn't over yet, but I'm pretty sure Bush is the winner. Some thoughts:

• Kerry doesn't have the votes in Ohio to win. He would need to take an unbelievable percentage of the absentee and provisional ballots. There is no reason to believe the provisionals or absentees are going to skew heavily to either party. But he's not conceding, he's mobilizing the lawyers. As much as he talks about making all the votes count, about the only way he can win with the margin as it stands is if he gets some Republican votes thrown out somewhere. Hypocrit.
• Even so Bush has won the popular vote by a sizable margin. At least the Democrats I respect aren't flip flopping on the whole electoral college/popular vote dichotomy. Bush has won a plurality so the "selected not elected" rhetoric just isn't going to work this time around. I think a large part of this is because the red states tried to run up the score for Bush.
• Huge turnout didn't happen. It seems like the vote this year will be about what the vote in 2000 was, which isn't good considering how the country has grown.
• Turns out the Vote or Die campaign didn't work well so I hope P. Diddy has a lot of bullets. As a rule kids don't like being used or lied to. Rock the Vote playing on partisanship and Draft rumor fears was doing just that so kids stayed home as usual.
• The Democrats are organizing and blaming everyone but themselves. Typical. Its not our fault for being out of touch, its the Republican media machine. Lets ignore that the media votes heavily Democrat. Despite all the uniting America talk, the democrats really don't know how to be the minority party. They are a party of near-violent activism, not agenda molding compromise. They really need to take a page from the Reagan era congressional Republicans. If you want get your policy heard, vitriolic partisanship isn't going to get you anywhere. If you want the other party to hear Reason, you need to be reasonable. Hopefully the Democrats will realize this to the benefit of the whole country.

UPDATE: Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has similar thoughts.

UPDATE2: Kerry conceded. I think he realized he didn't have the votes and did the right thing. My respect for him just grew a little. Oh and have you considered lack of youth turnout might be due to absentee ballots?