by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, November 3, 2004 4:02 P.M. EST

Bye-ku for John Kerry

Served in Vietnam:
A grateful nation thanks him
And says, "That's enough"

(Earlier bye-kus Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Carol Moseley Braun, Yasuhiro Nakasone and Bob Graham.)

A Clean Win
So it wasn't another 2000 after all. Late this morning, John Kerry called President Bush to concede--less than 18 hours after the first polls closed. A few hours later, Kerry delivered a gracious if overlong concession speech.

Last night, after considering a challenge in Ohio, Kerry apparently slept on it and woke up to the realization that it would be futile. The official Ohio returns give the president a lead of more than 136,000 votes, or 2.49% of the vote--but without provisional ballots, those cast by voters whose registration is in doubt.

There were enough such ballots that they could theoretically have changed the outcome, but few enough that the likelihood of their having done so was minuscule. Blogger "Atilla" does the math and concludes that if there had been 250,000 valid provisional ballots, Kerry would have had to win 77.2% of them to take the lead; a more realistic (though probably still high) figure of 150,000 yields 95.3% as the requisite Kerry percentage. As Michael Barone noted in a 5 a.m. posting, when the president's lead was 10,000 votes fewer, "Provisional votes are not concentrated totally in central city Cleveland. They are cast, also, by Amish voters in Holmes and Coshocton Counties. They are not going to produce a 126,000-vote margin for Kerry, under any stretch of the imagination."

Kerry could have stretched out the count by days, and perhaps filed lawsuits if the count hadn't gone his way, but to do so would have been an act of supreme vanity and been terribly destructive to the Democratic Party. Unlike in 2000, Bush's lead in the pivotal state wasn't close. And Kerry could not have claimed the moral authority of having "won the popular vote," as Al Gore did. At this writing, Bush has 51.1% nationwide to Kerry's 48%. This makes Bush the first presidential nominee to achieve a popular-vote majority since his father in 1988.

Yet the Electoral College map looks nearly identical to 2000's, with Kerry winning the entire Northeast, the West Coast and Hawaii, and most of the Upper Midwest:

The president leads narrowly in Iowa and New Mexico--both states Al Gore carried--so he could end up with a 286-252 victory. New Hampshire switched from Bush to Kerry; the other 47 states and the District of Columbia went for the same party as in 2000. We've given the state-by-state results only a cursory look, but it appears as though Bush's improvement in the popular vote--from a margin of minus 0.5% to 3.1%--is owing largely to narrower margins of defeat in blue states.

Most news organizations--Fox News Channel and NBC are the main exceptions--held off from calling Ohio for Bush, out of either an excess of caution or, as blogger Jay Cost argues, political bias. In support of the bias theory, Cost notes that Kerry's margin of victory in Pennsylvania--both the number of votes and the percentage--was smaller than Bush's in Ohio, yet the networks called the Keystone State fairly early.

Bush's popular-vote total, more than 58 million, is the most ever for a presidential candidate, and is an improvement of at least eight million over his 2000 vote total. That means that if Karl Rove got his four million Evangelical Christians, Bush brought in at least an additional four million new voters or Gore voters. Exit polls show that 37% of voters identified themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans; in 2000, the figure was 39% Dems and 35% GOP.

This shift may reflect what we call "9/11 Republicans," Americans who used to vote Democratic but cannot abide the party's weakness on national security. The Jerusalem Post looks at a subset of this group:

The American Jewish Committee, in a tiny sampling of roughly 200 Jewish voters in five battleground states, found roughly 12 to 13 percent of Jews who voted for Al Gore in 2000 switched parties and cast their vote for President George W. Bush on Tuesday. . . .

Bush won 19% and Gore 80% of the Jewish vote in 2000, according to exit polling. An AJC survey of American Jewish voters in September found 69% would support Kerry and 24% Bush. AJC's Tuesday results suggested slightly stronger gains for Bush in the community.

Harris said that nearly all voters who switched from Gore to Bush "identified either Israel or terrorism (and) 9/11 as the first reason for their decision."

One promise that doesn't seem to have panned out for the GOP is a substantial increase in black support. The exit poll found Bush taking only 11% of the black vote, up a mere two percentage points since 2000.

Have You Seen Me?
Maybe Democrats should start advertising for voters on the sides of milk cartons. Poor Josh Marshall spent last night wondering what happened to all those youngsters who were supposed to come out for Kerry:

One thing that does seem very clear tonight--at least if what I'm hearing from the exits is true--is that the much-ballyhooed youth vote simply did not show up. Simple as that.

That is a remarkable turnabout from the expectations that had been growing over the last week. And Democrats weren't the only ones who bought into the idea. Public pollsters and even Republicans in the final days of the campaign were coming to believe it too. And that shaped expectations greatly.

Whatever happens tonight a lot of thought and study will go into just what happened. Was it a mirage? Was it a problem with the GOTV operation? It can't simply be the later. Even the best ground operation can only amplify a demographic trend or spike that has some deeper socio-political basis.

Gee, what might've happened to all the young voters? Well, consider this: You're not allowed to vote unless you've passed your 18th birthday. In order to have any birthdays at all, you have to have been born. And over the past 30 years or so, many Americans have ended up not being born.

About.com lists the number of abortions in the U.S. each year starting in 1973, "based on assumptions by the Alan Guttmacher Institute." If we add up the numbers from 1975-86, we come up with approximately 17.5 million missing eligible voters between 18 and 29 years old. Exit polls found that voters this age who were born went for Kerry over Bush, 54% to 45%, while Bush had a majority in all other age groups. If it's true that women who have abortions tend to be more liberal than those who don't, then the unborn 18- to 29-year-olds likely would have favored the Democrat even more heavily.

Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision mandating legal abortion nationwide, was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee. Perhaps somewhere old Tricky Dick is smiling at how his judicial legacy helped the Republicans.

All This and Coattails Too
As it turned out, there were nine key Senate races, all in states Bush won, with the late addition of Kentucky's Sen. Jim Bunning as a vulnerable incumbent. Republicans swept eight of them, losing only in Colorado, where Democrat Ken Salazar beat Pete Coors. The biggest prize was in South Dakota, where ex-Rep. John Thune knocked off Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Republicans also picked up seats in Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina and held them in Alaska, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Each party picked up an additional seat in a race that wasn't expected to be close: Democrat Barack Obama in Illinois and Republican Johnny Isakson in Georgia.

Result: The 109th Congress will feature a 55-45 GOP Senate majority, a net gain of four seats. Could this be the end of obstructionism? Daschle has done a very effective job of keeping his party unified to filibuster Republican legislation and especially judicial nominees. Ending a filibuster requires 60 votes, which means the GOP now need pick off only five Dems rather than nine. And Daschle's defeat may send a message to other red-state Democrats, of whom there are at least 14:

We can perhaps add Sens. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico (2006) and Tom Harkin of Iowa (2008), though if those states go for Bush, it will be by the slimmest of margins. In any case, it may prove a challenge to hold together 41 votes to sustain a filibuster--assuming that the new minority leader even wants to continue the Daschle approach.

MoveOn: Kiss of Death?
The far-left MoveOn PAC endorsed 27 candidates for House or Senate in yesterday's election. By our count, five won:

• Melissa Bean beat Rep. Phil Crane for Illinois's Eighth District.
• Sen. Patty Murray of Washington won re-election against Rep. George Nethercutt.
• John Salazar beat Greg Walcher for Colorado's Third District, an open seat.
• Ken Salazar beat Pete Coors for Colorado's open Senate seat.
• Allyson Schwartz beat Melissa Brown for Pennsylvania's 13th District, an open seat.

MoveOn-endorsed candidates are 5-22; to put it another way, only 18.5% of them won. Were we seeking public office, this is an endorsement we'd actively avoid.

Going Native
"In capitals across Europe, thousands of Americans partied the night away early Wednesday as they awaited results of the US presidential election, which was shaping up as expected to be a tight race," reports Agence France-Presse, in a dispatch filed before the results were clear:

"It's going to be Kerry for sure, for sure," said Patti Brown, a US businesswoman who has lived in Paris for 10 years who was enjoying the festive atmosphere at Harry's. . . .

In Berlin, hundreds of people gathered on Potsdamer Platz, a square in the center of the reunited German capital, to await poll results. "I think it's important for the world to see we are not all idiots and do care about the decisions our country is making," said Adam Chalk, a musician from New York living in Berlin who was playing at the giant bash. "It would be a catastrophe if Bush wins again."

In London's Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley reflects on Bush-hatred as an expression of European anti-Americanism:

He is hated because he is the embodiment of everything that the United States is, and Europe is not: not just enormously powerful, militarily and economically, but brashly confident and fervently patriotic. Where Europe is steeped in historical guilt and self-loathing--so immersed in its own unforgivable past that it is trying to fashion a constitution that actually prohibits national pride--America is profoundly proud of the success of its own miraculous achievement.

No wonder Adam Chalk feels right at home over there.

Gavin Gets a Wedgie
"U.S. voters overwhelmingly rejected gay marriage in 11 state ballots held in parallel with the election," Reuters reports:

Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Michigan, North Dakota, Arkansas, Montana, Utah and Oklahoma solidly backed state constitutional amendments to define marriage as a union between man and a woman.

Oregon, where more than 3,000 same-sex couples married in March, was backing a similar amendment by a smaller margin. Before that, more than 4,000 gay couples married in San Francisco. California's Supreme Court latter ruled that Mayor Gavin Newsom exceeded his authority in allowing the weddings.

"There was obviously an agenda by the cultural conservatives to make this a wedge issue in the campaign," Newsom told Reuters. "It failed to reach the intensity that they had hoped for. Nonetheless it is obviously indicative of the mood of the public."

Indicative, intense, whatever. But Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says it doesn't matter what the voters think: "We'll win some states and we'll lose some states, but eventually the Supreme Court is going to look at the Bill of Rights and isn't going to give a damn what's in any of these state constitutions." Maybe not, now that George W. Bush gets to appoint the next Supreme Court justice.

Meanwhile, the Washington Blade reports that "perhaps the most surprising news for gay observers of the presidential election is that exit polls show President Bush received the exact same percentage of gay votes--23 percent--as he did four years ago."

Bad Prediction Watch
For awhile now, we've been collecting predictions that would prove embarrassing when Bush won re-election. Here are a few of our favorites:

• "A clear theme in this administration's policy is that the United States neither needs nor particularly wants the good opinion of the states it dominates. It is indifferent to the legitimacy provided by the respect of other peoples. It is content to rest its claim to international leadership on the exercise of its power. That certainly is not what the electorate voted for two years ago. It is why Bush will almost certainly be a one-term president."--William Pfaff of the New York Times' Paris edition, Oct. 26, 2002
  
  
• "He has canceled elections in Iraq. He will probably cancel them in Afghanistan. Will George W. Bush put the kibosh on elections in the United States next year? . . . It's easy to come up with a scenario in which canceling the 2004 election could be made to appear reasonable. Imagine that, a few weeks before Election Day, 'dirty bombs' detonate simultaneously in New York and Washington. Government, media and political institutions and personnel lie ruined in smoking rubble and ash; hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered. The economy, already teetering on the precipice, is shoved into depression. How could we conduct elections under such conditions?"--anti-American columnist Ted Rall, July 17, 2003
  
  
• "Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent--and in recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins. If you look at key indicators beyond the neck-and-neck support for the two candidates in the polls--such as high turnout in the early Democratic primaries and the likelihood of a high turnout in November--it seems improbable that Bush will win big. More likely, it's going to be Kerry in a rout."--Chuck Todd of The Hotline, in The Washington Monthly, May 2004
  
  
• "I take it as a given that virtually no Gore voters from 2000 will pull the lever for Bush. But how many lightly-committed Bush voters from 2000 will hold him to account if they believe he gambled big and gambled unwisely with America's honor and safety, and came up short? I think more than a few. And since there were more Gore voters than Bush voters last time anyway, well . . ."--blogger Josh Marshall, June 29, 2004
  
  
• "One day last May, I assigned the election to John Kerry. I said it early, and often. As I looked more, I saw that it shouldn't even be close. I said that in this space more than once. Now I am so sure that I am not even going to bother to watch the results tonight. I am going to bed early, for I must rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue project. Besides, if I was up, so many people, upon seeing every word I said of this election coming true on television in front of them, would be kissing my hands and embarrassing me with outlandish praise."--Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, Nov. 2, 2004
  
  
• "Regular readers won't be in any doubt about who I want to win, though New York Times rules prevent me from giving any explicit endorsement. (Hint: it's the side that benefits from large turnout.)"--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, implicitly endorsing George W. Bush, Nov. 2, 2004
  
  
• "This is the best election night in history."--Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, Nov. 2, 2004, just before 8 p.m. EST
  
  
• "I know it's hard to believe there was once a time when even a politician would put the country first. But when Eisenhower urged Nixon to challenge the suspect election results in '60, he refused to put the nation through it. Nixon showed a lot of class. [pause] Did I just say that?" "What a difference a half century makes."--Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury, Nov. 3, 2004

Oh well, everyone makes mistakes. We actually thought Bush would carry Wisconsin.

What Do You Mean 'We,' Canuck?
While Americans were busy deciding the future of the world, our neighbors to the north were wrestling with an important human-rights issue, the CanWest News Service reports from Halifax:

A Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission panel spent a full day watching Lone Ranger episodes before deciding being called kemosabe did not demean a Mi'kmaq woman.

After its day of reruns and hearing several Mi'kmaq witnesses, the independent board of inquiry concluded the TV western treated native Americans in a "demeaning and disrespectful manner."

But, it said, the term "kemosabe"--Tonto's word for his white friend the Lone Ranger--did not really offend the Membertou, N.S., woman.

The board's conclusions were recently upheld by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal.

"Tonto is the Lone Ranger's partner and friend. He is clean cut and well-groomed and, although he speaks a form of broken English, he is neither dumb nor stupid," Justice David Chipman of the appeal court writes in an Oct. 6 summary of the board's ruling.

Who was that masked Mi'kmaq?

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• James Taranto: The best and worst of Election 2004.
• Claudia Rosett: Osama's latest videotape shows he's bin losin'.
• Gordon Marino: Meet the Yao Ming, basketball's great wall of China.