Michell Malkin talks about all the common “wisdom” about the election that turned out to be wrong. For one thing, remember all the talk about how a large voter turnout would guarantee the election for Kerry? We had record turnout and he lost.
It has long been conventional wisdom that nonvoters tend to be liberal, and that getting more people to the polls would be better for Democrats than for Republicans. As social scientists Gerald Wright and Jeanette Morehouse noted, the basis for this logic goes back at least to the formation of the New Deal coalition, where the Democratic Party was able to achieve majority status nationally by expanding its former base in the South to include the poor, unemployed and urban ethnic voters. The implicit assumption has been that modern nonvoters, like their New Deal counterparts, remain disproportionately poor, non-white and predisposed to vote for the Democrats.
But research on nonvoters back in 2000 showed that they split the same way as those who did vote.
Then there was all the angst and worry over electronic voting machines and their potential for either fraud or just plain breaking down. It all reminded me of the fears that the Y2K bug (remember that?) would initiate Armageddon on 1/1/2000. The e-voting worries fizzled the same way, too.
How about all the buzz about the youth vote? We were told there were record numbers of new voter registrations among the 18 to 24 set and that they were jazzed up about a mythical draft and by “Vote or Die” and similar silliness. Instead, they all stayed in their dorm rooms or coffee shops. And those did get out voted more for Bush than expected.
So what will the conventional “wisdom” blame for the Democrats massive losses?
Democrats in denial will now blame computers, the Swift Boat Veterans, the rain, the heat, surfing conditions, sinister bus schedules and conspiratorial bloggers for helping to “suppress” elusive nonvoters.
Probably that and more. But the reality is that most Americans don’t buy the “Hate America first”, liberal, immoral baloney that the Democrats are selling these days.
It seems that there is a New New Deal, in which party lines are increasingly blurred on the old issues, such as spending and the role and size of government. The new dividing lines seem to be increasingly social in nature as more Americans are concerned with morality, life, and what it means to be human. “Vote or Die” and “Hate America First” have become the last vestige of hot spittle in the throats of the angry left, who are ever watchful for anyone at all to blame.