Bush Slips -- Among Republicans

Mods -- I received this in an email from a member of a Yahoo discussion group I'm in and it had been forwarded to her -- there is no URL for it, but I think the stuff it reveals and discusses is important. I did a google to try to find the original, but I had no luck. Delete it if you must but I think it's important information.

> Bush Slips--Among Republicans
> 01/30/2004 @ 08:01am
> E-mail this Post
> The record-high turnout in the New Hampshire Democratic primary -- 219,787
> Granite State voters took Democratic ballots Tuesday, shattering the previous
> record of 170,000 in 1992 -- is being read as a signal that voters in one New
> England state, and most likely elsewhere, are enthusiastic about the prospect
> of picking a challenger for George W. Bush. And the turnout in the Democratic
> primary is not even the best indicator of the anti-Bush fervor in New
> Hampshire, a state that in 2000 gave four critical electoral votes to the man
> who secured the presidency by a razor-thin Electoral College margin of
> 271-267.
>
> Many New Hampshire primary participants decided to skip the formalities and
> simply vote against the president in Tuesday's Republican primary. Thousands
> of these Bush-bashing Republicans went so far as to write in the names of
> Democratic presidential contenders.
>
> Under New Hampshire law, only Democrats and independents were permitted to
> participate in Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary. That meant that
> Republicans who wanted to register their opposition to Bush had to do so in
> their own party's primary. A remarkable number of them did just that.
>
> One in seven Republican primary voters cast ballots for candidates other than
> Bush, holding the president to just 85 percent of the 62,927 ballots cast. In
> some parts of the state, such as southwest New Hampshire's Monadnock Region, a
> historic bastion of moderate Republicanism, Bush did even worse. In Swanzey,
> for instance, 37 percent of GOP primary voters rejected Bush. In nearby Surry,
> almost 29 percent of the people who took Republican ballots voted against the
> Republican president, while a number of other towns across the region saw
> anti-Bush votes of more than 20 percent in the GOP primary.
>
> Few of the anti-Bush votes went to the 13 unknown Republicans whose names
> appeared on GOP ballots along with the president's. Instead, top Democratic
> contenders reaped write-in votes.
>
> US Senator John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, who won the Democratic primary, came
> in second to Bush in the Republican contest, winning 3,009 votes. Kerry's name
> was written in on almost 5 percent of all GOP ballots. Who were these
> Republican renegades for Kerry? People like 61-year-old retired teacher David
> Anderson. A Vietnam veteran, Anderson told New Hampshire's Concord Monitor
> that he wrote in Kerry's name because the senator, also a veteran, understands
> the folly of carrying on a failed war. "I feel a commander, the president of
> the United States, ought to be a veteran," explained Anderson, who says his
> top priority is getting US troops out of Iraq.
>
> Kerry wasn't the only Democrat who appealed to Republicans. In third place on
> the Republican side of the ledger was former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who
> won 1,888 votes, more than 3 percent of the GOP total. Retired General Wesley
> Clark secured 1,467 Republican votes, while almost 2,000 additional Republican
> primary votes were cast for North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Connecticut
> Senator Joe Lieberman, Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich and the Rev. Al
> Sharpton.
>
> In all, 8,279 primary voters wrote in the names of Democratic challengers to
> Bush on their Republican ballots.
>
> That's a significant number. In the 2000 general election, Bush beat Democrat
> Al Gore in New Hampshire by just 7,212 votes. Had Gore won New Hampshire, he
> would have become president, regardless of how the disputed Florida recount
> was resolved.
>
> The prospect that Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters in New
> Hampshire, and nationally, might be developing doubts about whether Bush
> should be reelected is the ultimate nightmare for the Bush political team.
> White House political czar Karl Rove begins his calculations with an
> assumption that Republicans will be united in their support of the president's
> reelection. But the president's deficit-heavy fiscal policies, his support for
> free-trade initiatives that have undermined the country's manufacturing
> sector, and growing doubts about this Administration's military adventurism
> abroad appear to have irked not just Democrats and independents, but also a
> growing number of Republicans.
>
> The Bush White House is taking this slippage seriously. US Senator John
> McCain, R-Arizona, who beat Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire Republican primary,
> was dispatched to the Granite State before Tuesday's primary, in order to pump
> up the president's prospects, as were Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and
> New York Governor George Pataki. And Bush, himself, jetted into the state on
> Thursday, effectively acknowledging that state Republican Party chair Jane
> Millerick was right when she said, "What we have recognized is that New
> Hampshire is a swing state."
>
> But can the president pull independent-minded Republicans, and Republican-
> minded independents, back to him? That task could prove to be tougher than the
> job of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
>
> No one doubts that Democrats in New Hampshire, and elsewhere, are angry with
> the president. Indeed, if there was one message that has come through loud and
> clear during the first stages of the race for the Democratic nomination, it
> was that Democrats in the first-in-the-nation primary state -- like their
> peers in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa -- have proven to be
> less interested in ideological distinctions between Democratic contenders than
> they are in picking a candidate who will beat Bush.
>
> Exit polls conducted on Tuesday in New Hampshire did not merely sample the
> opinions of Democrats. They also questioned independent voters, who make up
> almost 40 percent of the New Hampshire electorate. A Democratic primary exit
> poll conducted for Associated Press and various television networks found that
> nine in ten independents were worried about the direction of the US economy.
> Eight in ten told the pollsters that some or all of the tax cuts pushed by the
> Bush administration should be canceled. Forty percent of the independents
> questioned in the poll said they were angry with Bush, while another 40
> percent said they were simply dissatisfied with the president.
>
> Bush aides are quick to dismiss the polling numbers.
>
> But how will they dismiss the results of the New Hampshire Republican primary,
> where every seventh voter cast a ballot for anyone-but-Bush?

.......not

and the historic numbers that turned out for the vote are indicative that Democrats are fired up -- you know we might just have a good chance to boot the guy -- at least if the votes are counted as cast.

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=1221

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