Reply #67: And I keep adding that there is an emotional/political factor in the...

[Peace Patriot]

...big Democratic success in new voter registrations in 2004 that should be considered. It goes beyond the data but it is compelling. New voters don't arise out of a vacuum. They are prodded by highly motivated family, friends, co-workers and volunteers to register and vote for the first time. And a large majority of those family, friends, co-workers and volunteers were Democrats, who got others to register Democratic.

It is ludicrous to think that all that pro-Democratic activity--both by the former Dem/Gore voters who were prodding new voters, or the new voters themselves--was occurring in order to re-elect George Bush. Were people registering Democratic in droves, to vote for Bush? Were their family, friends, co-workers or volunteers prodding them to register Democratic, to vote for Bush?

It's nonsense. And we know, anecdotally as well, that there was very great enthusiasm on the Democratic side of this election, a huge volunteer GOTV effort, many young people involved (students, rappers, rockers) and Rock the Vote, big, spontaneous, enthusiastic crowds for Kerry/Edwards everywhere they went (compared to dismal, highly vetted, bussed-in Pod People for Bush), the highly motivated Dean people won over to the Kerry camp (ABB), the Nader voters won over to the Kerry camp (ABB), an enormous number of grass roots groups working together (and having smoked the peace pipe temporarily with the DNC), and numerous anecdotes of former Bush voters and Republicans voting for Kerry. (I have one myself--an entire condo complex full of elderly rich people in San Diego--all despised Bush and his war.)

It wouldn't surprise me at all if Kerry's margin of victory was 10% (as suggested above). --especially if you ADD IN an estimated number of voters who never got to vote due to massive and illegal suppression of Democratic voters by Republican election officials in Florida and Ohio (at least). Hundreds of thousands of Kerry votes don't even make it into those figures (the various exit polls and official results). (Dr. Michael Haut of the U.C. Berkeley Research Center found 130,000 to 330,000 phantom votes for Bush in FLA's 3 major Democratic counties--but how many KERRY votes were simultaneously suppressed in those Dem counties--by Jeb Bush's purge lists, etc.?)

I'm just saying that the data means something beyond the numbers. That new Dem reg figure tells us quite a lot about the 2004 election, including that repeat Gore voters (the already registered Dems) were so highly motivated about this election that they nagged and nagged and nagged their ne'er-do-well non-voting children (or parents), their family a-politicals, their opinionated co-workers who never vote, their neighbors who want to avoid jury duty, etc., etc., to register and vote THIS TIME, because this was THE most important election in U.S. history. (I don't know how often I heard that from people during the campaign.)

Data and anecdotal information, and intuition, agree.