Krauthammer, the "Pulitzer Prize-winning" mythical vote counter

by Jerome Armstrong, Sat Nov 13, 2004 at 10:37:48 AM EST

Doesn't anyone fact check before they post this tool in the Houston Chronicle?Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio.

This is more nonsense.

Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1 percent nationwide. In Ohio the increase was 1 percent -- less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.

Fiction? Here are the facts, according to the Ohio SOS.

Ohio Turnout for Bush

2000:	2,351,209 
2004:	2,796,147
Krauthammer is tossing around claims of "nonsense" while he is making a blatant fabrication upon which he builds a counter-thesis to the facts. Bush increased his vote total by 19% from 2000 to 2004 in Ohio.

Krauthammer says 1%, it's actually 19%

Krauthammer has got a tool agenda, damn the facts. Bush won with a homophobic mandate to make abortion illegal and oulaw gay marriage. He lost to Kerry by 4:1 margins on every legislative issue that matters. And now the tools want to lay the foundation for Bush's attempt to privatize social security and increase tax cuts for the wealthy. They don't have a mandate for that though, so send in the tools to recreate the numbers... No wonder the tools are also talking about getting rid of exit polling.

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15 Comments

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factcheck
AmauryN posted this article in a diary, here's their contacts to complain:

email: viewpoints@chron.com
fax: 713-362-3575

by Jerome Armstrong 2004-11-13 10:40AM | 0 recs
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Exit Polls
If we get rid of exit polls, and there's no election reform, I'm done with politics. There's no point when I don't have an ounce of confidence in the very foundation of our democratic process.

http://www.political-news.org

by news 2004-11-13 10:45AM | 0 recs
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Moving To The Center?
Yes, so glad to see they're moving to the center...  Shouldn't this have been done before the elections, in order to appeal to a broader constituent?

Hell, they wanted to be the party of homophobia, of paternalism, of fear mongering, of suppressing minority votes, of religious fundamentalism, of pollution, of denouncing science on the face of religion, ...

We should be helping them move further to the right.  Let's have an honest debate on gay marriage, on teaching creationism, etc.

by nkp 2004-11-13 11:42AM | 0 recs
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Re: Moving To The Center?
How are they moving to the center? two days after they won they started the ball rolling on social security privatization and tax "simplification".

Keith

by keith johnson 2004-11-13 04:58PM | 0 recs
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Re: Moving To The Center?
Well, the center is a relative thing, isn't it?  I mean, don't we all want an ownership society?  We should all have the chance to invest our own money, shouldn't we?

They will start to frame this debate as if social security was the most vile and totalitarian form of sicialism.  They'll probably start calling it socialized retirement, just like "socialized medicine."  There was also a memo sent out in the AARP (if you can believe it!!!) that told its officials to not use the word "privatization."  One of the previous marching orders for the right was to refer to global warming as "climate change."  You know, change is natural, just like the weather.  This whole debate will be carefully crafted, with the language being surgically drafted.

My point was that the republicans have used the religious fundamentalism as a tool to get them elected.  They don't want them to set the agenda.  They have to restrain them, or if they let them actually start controlling the ligislative direction, then it will start to repulse most of the moderate voters.

by nkp 2004-11-14 12:29AM | 0 recs
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Re: Moving To The Center?
These aren't the type of people who are going to be restrained. There is a flaw in their plan in that they assume there is some form of reasonableness that can be gained. How is that possible if you are trying to make earth ready for the rapture? They have been courting the religious right for 20 plus years now, at some point you've got to pay the devil it's pound of flesh. There is every sign that Christian conversatives believe that time is now.
by bruh21 2004-11-14 05:48AM | 0 recs
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Column was also printed in the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44082-2004Nov11.html
by vj 2004-11-13 11:55AM | 0 recs
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What Krauthamer Meant
I took a look at the numbers, and while he didn't explain himself very well, his numbers are correct in one sense. Here's what he meant to say...

Bush's PROPORTION OF THE TOTAL VOTE CAST increased by 3.2% nationally, from 47.8% to the obvious and overwhelming mandate (?) of 51.0%, so his net gain as a proportion of the total vote was up by 3.2%. In terms of raw numbers, he received 18.4% more votes than in 2000.

In Ohio, Bush's proportion of the total vote increased, as you indicated, 19.0% from 2000, but his proportion of all votes cast rose from 50.0% to 51.0% in Ohio, and increase of 1.0% which was less than his nationally-averaged increase.

FYI, Kerry's raw vote totals relative to Gore's increased by 10.4% nationally, but by 21.8% in Ohio! Kerry's proportion of all votes cast actually declined by 0.2% relative to Gore in 2000 nationally, but increased 2.1% in Ohio (from 46.4% to 48.5%). So Ohio was actually a good bit bluer in 2004 than in 2000 in a relative sense.

Bottom line, there's some credence to Krauthammer's argument but he doesn't describe his numbers very well.

by RecoveringRepublican 2004-11-13 12:10PM | 0 recs
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Re: What Krauthamer Meant
ah.  He puts vote, when he means vote percentage. We'll maybe he should do a follow-up where he describes why so many turned out for Bush, outside of the reason why we know they turned out.
by Jerome Armstrong 2004-11-13 12:31PM | 0 recs
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Re: What Krauthamer Meant
something that has bothered me about the "it wasn't really religious conservatives who put Bush over the top" argument: why isn't it possible that the reason we didn't dominate is that the religious conservatives came out in droves. Like everyone else, their vote went up; why not think that if they hadn't been riled up about teh social issues our vote would have grown much more than theirs?

Keith

by keith johnson 2004-11-13 04:55PM | 0 recs
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Another way to look at it
The left increased turn out, mainly from younger men who were afraid of the draft and apolitical types of all sorts who were tired of all the stupid shit Bush has been doing.

The right increased turn out, mainly from the religious right type for your usual anti-gay and anti-abortion reasons due to a very good PR campaign by Rove et al, which included the gay marriage initiatives.

These two were a wash, and almost perfectly canceled each other out.  Since the previous election was basically a tie, we are still more or less tied at this point.

The problem was the "9/11 changed everything" morons.  These were people of all types, who were weakly for Gore last time, who got scared into voting for Bush.  I knew these people were out there; I thought they were only very small numbers of them, most of which had the last name Miller (Zell/Dennis).  The election shows that I was wrong, and that there were about two million of them nationwide, resulting in a Bush win of 3.5 million (Dems starting at +500,000, take 2 million Gore voters and turn them into Bush 2004 voters, and you get +3.5 million.)

So, the net result is that the anti-gay marriage stuff helped Bush, but it wasn't enough alone to push him over the top.

by Geotpf 2004-11-13 08:53PM | 0 recs
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Re: Another way to look at it
This point highlights the "war president" factor and my personal opinion as to why a slim majority of voters opted for Bush - although many will admit that he hasn't handled the post-9/11 and related situations very well, two things at base are true: (1) Bush has been President since those events 3 years ago, including during subsequent events and developments, and at the same time (2) America is still here, most of us are still alive and living well (in a relative global sense), and the Earth hasn't spiralled into the Sun and killed us all.

On it's face this sounds ridiculous, but based on reflections and discussions I've had with people, the he-was-president-and-we're-not-all-dead-or-slaves argument, despite how poorly and incompetently things have been done, was actually a point for him. He is a known entity, and bad as that entity might be, we wouldn't want to put somebody else in there on the remote chance that things could conceivably be worse under a different administration.

He's been our only president during the terrorist attacks and the evolution of related subsequent events, and he may have sucked, but we're all here and living, and there is a slight possibility that somebody else in there might suck worse. And if his administration hasn't handled things as well as most would like, we don't know exactly how another administration would handle them, and given the state of things in other parts of the world, there is the possibility that someone else would do worse, so we stick with known mediocrity (at best) because of this basic fear that I think a lot of people have simmering on their brains' back burner.

And of course, Rove et al masterfully handled this basic prevailing perspective by appealing to people's fears, and pulled off a narrow victory.

Kerry might have done better with a little more appeal to the "things can get better if we find the courage to change" argument like the one Bill Clinton made at the Democratic convention in 1992.

by RecoveringRepublican 2004-11-14 08:21AM | 0 recs
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Kraut
What a dick.
by Bonddad 2004-11-13 02:43PM | 0 recs
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Speaking of Prize Winning...
... didn't he also win 2 Peabody Awards. Those are very presitgious awards, you know
;-)
by RecoveringRepublican 2004-11-14 08:25AM | 0 recs
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The neo-cons are nervous
The infighting over Arlen Specter, the mad-dash to distance themselves from religious fanatics, the attempt to down play "values" and trump-up taxes all point to the fact the the moderate Republicans are nervous.

Many of the neo-cons are actually defensive liberals. What are they defensive about? Well, in the sixties socialist and counter-culture extremists were pulling the ruling party Democrats away from adult government. They were more concerned with helping the poor than balancing the budget, they were unconcerned with the fight against communism in the Cold War, etc.

Many liberals were scared that the provocations of the left would provoke a fascist response in this country, or perhaps even undermine civilizations as we know it.

Thus they shifted to the right in order to counterbalance and preserve traditional liberal America. They have largely been successful.

Yet most of these people are Jews, so they have a historical awareness and they are literate. They remember things like WWII and Hitler and Vichy France. They know that the same dynamic that is behing "conservatism" is also behind fascism in a crisis. They know that the "red states" France and Germany and America supported fascism and hated Jews.

The bottom line is that if neo-cons fear the death of civilization from a red neck, moral majority fascism... they should actively fight them, not ally with them! If the liberals want to become a majority again they need to bring the neo-cons and the Reagan Democrats back into the fold.

Unfortunately the coalition cannot be created that can house all these factions together. The problem is that people don't know what they believe or how things should be governed. Change prevents people from forming solid opinions or consistant beliefs. Thus, the only center of gravity is the lure of "the old ways".

THe old ways aren't going to cut it, and that includes Social Security, Medicare, and the like. The opportunity exists for people to really find out just what they value, and God help you if your answer is some kind of government program.

by Paul Goodman 2004-11-14 10:12AM | 0 recs

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