Not surprised about Bush losing ground in the university towns given that a lot of the politically active there seem to regard him as pretty much Satan incarnate. The Hispanic stuff is extremely interesting and is likely to grow more important as they continue to grow with respect to their porportion of the US population.

If you look at the red/blue county map of New Hampshire you will find signs of reversal since the 50s. I grew up about 1/4 of the way up the Conneticut river from Massachusetts and it was so Republican that my contrarian mother would vote a straight Democratic ticket just to spite all the straight Republican voters. Now that part of the state is blue. But the southeast - the outer suburbs of Boston - is red. I think these voters are refugees from 'taxachusetts' and are part of the Republican ring of new outer suburbs or third wave suburbs that David Brooks writes about.

The social conservatism of Hispanic communities will doom the "Stay the Course" strategy of the Democratic Party, or it will doom the Democratic Party itself.

"The social conservatism of black communities is no longer so quiescent, either," Jesse Jackson mused to himself as he boarded a plane for Florida ...

I've noticed that the Republican and Democrats have sort of slid around on the political sepctrum. I consider myself to be liberal and progressive, and I voted for folks like Governor Gray Davis in 1998 and Ralph Nader in 2000. I was active on progressive (unofficial Green Party) message boards and coffee groups here locally, mainly just bashing the oligarchy and the corrupt two-party system.

Well, September 11 comes along and everything changes. I think I stayed the same in my political views, but I started paying a lot more attention to foreign policy and politics in general. My views and the views of my fellow progressives went 180 degrees out of phase. I'm not even on speaking terms with two of my progessive friends in town and I've been banned from the liberal progressive message board I mentioned before.

I can't necessarily say the Republican Party is more progressive than the Democrat Party, but I can definitely say that President Bush is probably the most progressive President we've had since FDR. The so-called neo-con foreign policy is a classic liberal foreign policy, while my progessive friends take a stance very close to that of far right-wing and isolationists, though for different reasons. Heck, just look at the argument over Social Security. The President is opening the door to redistribute the most regressive tax on the American worker, and both Democrats and so-called liberal progessives alike seem to avoiding the discussion.

I voted for Bush in 2004 because I like his policies and the reactionary John Kerry was a frightening proposition, but I'm far from extending that to the Republican Party in general.

VD
The left supported the communist mass murder of 174 million people

North Vietnam murdered their people with a 5% quota of murder.

Mass murder like that won the support of Hanoi Jane and John Kerry

The USA opposed mass murder by the left, so the left hates the USA

Saddam was a baath Socialist (nazi roots) and the pan arab movment is a soviet/islam/nazi mix, so natually the left are in love with their leftist kindred

If you are not a communist, Lenin had a term to decribe those he found "usefull"

The left attack the US opposition to the idology of the mass grave the gulag and the iron boot as opposing "democracy", as in "democratic republic of"

Leftism is imposed with goverment thugs with guns, its the opposite of freedom

Bush's forein policy isnt "progressive", the "progressives always supported socialist butchers, and supported the creation of a socialist butchery or slave state here at home. Arafat was a creation of the KGB, naturally the left loved arafat as much as they hate the Jews.

leftist states are maintained by fear. fear of goverment thugs with guns. Leftist states disarm the citizens, so thay can impose more terror, by govt thugs with guns.

There are names for that ... slavery. evil, communism. Crimes agaist humanity.

And its the opposite of what America is about.

If bush has a "progressive" forien policy, then i guess Reagan was a "progressive" ? Thatcher and the Pope John Paul II was a "progressive" ? (they share the credit for toppling the USSR)

Look how the leftist media hates the Pope .. they hate him cause he would not abandon morality, and railed against immorailty, like killing babies amd the immorality of the USSR, the leftist utopia that mass murdered 61 Million of their own people.

I see a shift too, but its because the leftist lies dont work anymore, and the leftist crimes agaist humanity from the USSR to Baath Socialist Iraq are more well known.

The left have no false utopia to point to anymore, all the old ones they lauded are more properly known as examples of horror and crimes against humanity now.

John Kerry, who called the man who ordered the 5% death quota of murder of his own people the "George Washington of Vietnam" is only tolerated by the aprovers of the mass murder John Kerry Celebrated. and those that are still in the spell of leftist lies.

I think a shift is happening because the leftist utopias they cheered are all becomeing known as the hellholes they where and are, and the old lies dont work anymore.

Even the progrssive income tax is a product of the communist manifesto,, and is as anti-american and anti freedom as all the rest of the leftist evils that must be undone.

I don't see Bush's foreign policy as all that similar to Reagan's. Reagan's foreign policy was necessarily reactionary. Bush himself has repeatedly pointed out the differences between the Cold War policy of stability at any cost and the Bush Doctrine, which rewards nations enacting democratic and economic reforms while discontinuing welfare for tyrants.

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I'm going to call a halt to this particular digression, and insist that future comments stick to the subject of the post. As you can see, I've also stpped in to a couple of the comments above.

This is a discussion about changing voting patterns in the USA, the social make-up of each party, and the reasons for that.

Raymond, if you want to respond to this it had better be with evidence for the reasons behind voting switches, or anecdotes from people you know that relate to their voting behaviour. And unless it absolutely needs to be long, it had better be short.

Interesting statistic from the dead tree WSJ book review of Byron York's The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: 92% of contributions of $1 million or more went to Democrats in the last election.

I just looked over the "sewer socialism" article and was struck by an obvious contradiction.

Ds want more investments in start ups and a tax policy that doesn't favor invested capital.

Next thing you know they will be asking for socialism without socialists.

AMac, this is for you...

Well, I might as well step in the middle of this - but one HUGE unspoken thing about "analyzing election returns" that is problematic, is analyzing the discrepancy between the exist polls and the actual election results for the 2004 elections..

Christopher Hitchens has something to say about this.

Here is Brian Livingston, one of the smartest geeks around.

Here is the original Mitofsky report.. Warning - it's a large PDF file.

Here is the challenger's analysis and dismissal of Mitofsky.

For myself, I was finally, at least, relieved that George Bush had actually won an election (as opposed to 2000). But now, deep stirrings of unease.

I am hoping that Amac, as our resident statistician, would be able to post on this. While conservative I think he would follow the science, rather than the partisanship. At least, I would be open to hear his report.

NOTE: I realize that 80% of the comments of this will be partisan and obfuscatory, in one direction or the other. Still, I'm interested in the other 20%.

How about it Amac? Do you have the time or inclination to lend your rigorous intellect and alignment to the truth, wherever it may lead, to this?

Again, I would be interested in your opinion.

Hacking the vote!

Read a Republican's account about how a chimpanzee can be trained to alter votes! (Further down in the article.

Link here.

What about the War?

Don't the Ds know there is a war on?

JC (#12):

Thanks for your invitation. Alas, I don't have the time or the specialist skills (remember, I'm not a statistician). In fact, I still have a follow-on post to write about the Roberts Lancet article; that numerical analysis is done, and interesting, and unlikely to leave any side satisfied...

But here are some general comments.

• Saying that the true result is 95% likely to lie within a certain range is another way of saying that it's likely to be outside that range 1 time in 20. If there are 200 precincts whose results are being evaluated by this metric, 10 of them are likely to have wierd, suspicious, or phony-looking results, when viewed singly. That's a downside of a statistical viewpoint.
• The Ohio instances Hitchens describes all benefited Bush to the extent they are real. But, nationwide, there are plenty of potentially plausible examples that cut each way.
• Unfortunately, "election misconduct" comes in many flavors, and most can't be detected by statistical methods. Examples are ineligible people registering and voting, double voting, turning away valid voters, inconveniencing targeted groups of voters.
• As Instapundit has been saying for years, it's reckless to employ a voting system that lacks an audit trail. Here in Maryland, we just finished using Federal dollars to ditch optically-scanned ballots in favor of a Diebold touchscreen system, doing exactly that. Pieces of paper can be counted and recounted. Once it's all-electronic, all one can do is redo the arithmetic with the tallies that are presented.
• With the caveat that wrongdoers need not be smart, clever tampering with electronic voting will be hard to detect and harder to prove. Done right, fraud won't lead to antagonistic voters yelling for The Truth, or townships of 2,000 where 1,600 voted Bush, 300 voted Kerry, and 500 voted Alf Landon. Much better to, say, bury some probability function in the software, so that the first 20 Kerry votes are recorded as Kerry (machines vet properly), then 95% of following Kerry votes go Kerry with 5% diverted to Bush.
• What would allow us to know that such monkeying isn't happening? Trust in the checks and balances, in the corporate culture, in the integrety and skill of the people doing this work. But nothing would be as bracing as an audit trail--the idea that even if the scheme works, you'd run a real risk of getting caught.

All that said, fraud won't be an explanation for the general voting trends that the main post is discussing. Even if the election was won by deceit--which is to say, if one side's shady practices trumped the other's--and note, I'm not saying that's likely--overall, there is every reason to think that the vast majority of precincts reported the vote tallies honestly and competently. So the "perfect" data set (known only to God) would in all likelihood support the same analysis as do the actual, at-least-somewhat flawed returns.

M. Simon, is that a joke?

Or is it a real question?

Okay, thanks for the response. I understand you don't have the time, and I hear your point about the 1 out of 20.

Thanks for taking the time to post.

Best,

JC

Joe

Are you asserting the as the crimes of the left become well known, the history of the evil the left supported and the good that the left attacks, has nothing to do with voting patterns ?

That is a deliberate fraudulent denial of cause and effect.

The record is replete with converted leftists leaving the fold and joining is after figuring out everything they thought they fought for was based on lies and the intent of those that attacked us had ill malevolent intent.

I reject the idea that this factor is not a major player in the re-alignment

And i dont think my examples of that history and its cause and effects on perceptions of the body politic deserved deletion.

JC,

It is a real question.

The Dems are gaining traction by coming to terms with the 2nd Amdmt.

Will they be willing to gain more by coming to terms with the war and the pro-Democracy movement?

The most fraudulent American election of recent time was in 1960 when JFK got elected. Evidently Old Joe had not bought enough votes before election night. Well by the time the votes were all counted he had fixed that problem.

I especially liked the lost and found dept. in the Chicago Board of Elections.

M. Simon,

Well, 1st, you aren't actually addressing the issue. 2nd, even if Illinois would have gone to Nixon, Nixon would have lost the presidential election of 1960. This is probably the reason Nixon didn't contest the election. Look it up.

3rd, "have you heard there's a war on".

Yes, and we see how much time in Bush's Bamboozlepalooza tour, just how much time he is spending on the war. (Not to mention the cable news network's fixation with poor Terry Schiavo)

I'm less interested in this partisan back and forth, in this case, however. I'm more looking at referencing the data, and drawing the appropriate conclusions. (Basically, I pray to God my fears are unfounded.)

On the sample size, and percentage rate, this:

"Sample size. Most pre-election state and national polls involve only 400 to 1,200 participants. If the sample is truly random, these polls are said to have a 95% chance of being within 3 to 5 percentage points of the results you'd get by asking every actual voter. By contrast, exit polls on election day have many more participants.

Results on the ground. The 2004 U.S. exit poll involved 1,480 polling locations alone, plus surveying absentee voters. Of those voters who were approached when leaving the polls, about 53% agreed to answer the pollster's questions. Due to the much larger sample, exit polls often differ less than 1 percentage point from the official vote count."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but those numbers significantly reduce the chance of error.

JC (#21):

Your point is good, and gives me a chance to correct myself. I didn't mean that, because 1 in 20 precincts will be outside of a 95% probability boundary, that a precinct recording 1600 Bush / 300 Kerry / 500 Landon is therefore not suspicious. That would defy common sense.

Exit polls where the pollsters expect exit poll data to match published results within 1%, but where some precincts vary by 2%, 3%, or 4% could be an example of this.

I would think that exit pollsters believe in the validity of exit polling. In particular, they believe in their exit polls. Vote fraud vindicates exit polling: it's the recorded vote tallies that are wrong, not the polling data. But:

• Random processes will lead to some polls being less accurate than others.
• Nonrandom factors (systematic errors) come into play, and fraud is only one of these. For example, some voters for one candidate might feel animosity towards the "mainstream media," and might refuse to answer pollers' questions, or attempt to actively mislead them. In precincts where more voters act like that, exit data will diverge more from voting data.

So the "error" category includes "vote fraud," but isn't limited to it. Of course, these general considerations don't rule out tampering.

Raymond, cause and effect has had negative consequences for your side too.

Take for example the following causes,

Cause - Bush begins a war in Iraq based on lies, a war that most of the world opposes. He made war to enrich him and his buddies and to settle the old family score with Saddam.
Cause - Bush does little or nothing to improve the economic standing of the American people. Most of the benefits of his tax cut are directed at his wealthy supporters. He presided over the first net job loss since Hoover, but is so out of touch that he doesn't care.
Cause - Bush has been working to erode the Constitution and Bill of Rights - eroding our civil rights.

I could go on, but I think my point on Bush's record is clear. Now witness the effect.

Effect - I leave the right forever. I realize that their policies are built upon lies and hot air. I realize that I would rather eat a bullet sandwich than vote for Bush or any other Republican ever again. I realize that it won't be forigeners who won't be the death of us, it will be the right here at home who does that. I declare myself a political independant since there's somethings about Democrats I don't like. I write in my Dad for President, and my Mom in for Vice President.