Quick!

Go to GD-P and tell me if that Kerry thing is true. Can't listen right now!

Was somebody listening to Ed Schultz.

It's hard to catch all this stuff. You can download his podcast though.

Ed Schultz says that Kerry said it was possible that the administration had infiltrated his campaign (I imagine this refers to the NSA story_.

But I wouldn't be surprised is he said that. I mean, it fits, right?

Did JK say something about it being *possible* to hack the voting machines in FL?

All the focus has been on Ohio, but I have had serious doubts about FL---nothing to do with BBV. The numbers seemed really suspicious to me. Right after the election, I looked at how Bush did in 2004 compared to 2000, it didn't look right. I can't recall it now, but I will look to see if I save any of it or can piece together my thoughts.

It's called some highway stretch. Everybody went looking at panhandle counties, which were in reality Dixiecrat votes. There was a huge stretch of counties in the middle of the state that were WAY off the beam, supposedly due to hispanics.

I remember going on and on about the Hispanic vote in Florida. Then there was that report about Hispanics voting in large numbers for Bush. The initial reports were debunked, especially one citing a crazy number for Texas (I think in the 60 or 70 percentage range) which was later revised down to 45%(?), In fact, reports across many demographic groups---young, Muslim, Jewish, African American (Ohio beat the nation among AA by about 5% points, hmmm?)---were later debunked or revised down. The only one that held come validity was among young urban woman that TayTay mentioned in a previous post, and even there it was a matter of the percentage related to the increase in turnout showed a decline in support (my interpretation). And the main thing is these are still based on tainted results.

44 Percent of Hispanics Voted for Bush?
By Ruy Teixeira, The Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation
Posted on November 24, 2004, Printed on December 21, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20606/
From the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation:

In this edition of Public Opinion Watch:
(covering polls and related articles from the weeks of Nov. 15-21, 2004)


Did Bush Really Get 44 Percent of the Hispanic Vote?


Have the Republicans Really Achieved Parity on Party Identification?


Does Bush Have a Mandate for His Conservative Agenda?

Did Bush Really Get 44 Percent of the Hispanic Vote?

I very strongly doubt it. This claim is based, first and foremost, on the finding in the National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, the nation's largest and by far most influential, exit poll. But that finding, if carefully scrutinized, seems highly implausible for a variety of reasons. I lay these out below and conclude that a more reasonable estimate for Bush's Hispanic support this year is around 39 percent.

Start with the Texas state exit poll. That poll shows Bush with an astonishing 59 percent of the Hispanic vote. That's an increase of 16 points in Bush's support over 2000 and a shift in margin of 29 points (from an 11-point deficit to an 18-point lead).

The poll also claims that this mega-shift happened at the same time that Bush's support was being compressed among whites. Bush's support, the exit poll claims, dropped by a point among Texas whites compared to 2000, at the same time as Kerry's support among Texas whites rose by four points compared to Gore's. So Texas's favorite son runs for re-election and widens his margin among white voters practically everywhere – except Texas, where he loses ground! But among Hispanics in Texas, he gets a massive 29-point shift in his favor?

This pattern just doesn't make sense. But where the Texas poll makes the least sense of all is when you try to match them up with the county-level voting returns. If Bush was pulling over 70 percent of the white vote and almost 60 percent of the Hispanic vote, how on earth did he lose any counties in Texas? Consider these (racial composition figures based on voting age population):

Brooks county: 90 percent Hispanic, 10 percent white – 68 to 32 percent Kerry.

Dimmit county: 83 percent Hispanic, 16 percent white, 1 percent black – 66 to 33 percent Kerry

Duval county: 86 percent Hispanic, 13 percent white, 1 percent black – 71 to 28 percent Kerry

El Paso county: 75 percent Hispanic, 20 percent white, 3 percent black – 56 to 43 percent Kerry

Hidalgo county: 85 percent Hispanic, 14 percent white – 55 to 45 percent Kerry

Jim Wells county: 73 percent Hispanic, 23 percent white – 54 to 46 percent Kerry

Maverick county: 94 percent Hispanic, 4 percent white – 59 to 40 Kerry

Starr county: 97 percent Hispanic, 2 percent white – 74 percent to 26 percent Kerry

Webb county: 94 percent Hispanic, 6 percent white – 57 percent to 43 percent Kerry

My, my, where could those 59 percent Bush-voting Hispanics be hiding in the great state of Texas? Perhaps in the big urban areas such as Harris county (Houston)? Well, let's see, if we figure Hispanics are at least a sixth of Harris county voters (probably more, but let's be conservative), then, by themselves, they would push up Bush's margin, compared to 2000, by five points if they really voted for him at the 59 percent rate (and it should be even higher – to balance the apparently way-under-59 percent Hispanics in these other Texas counties). But wait! Bush's margin actually contracted in Harris county by a point. Maybe black voters (18 percent of the Harris county voting-age population) moved the needle back the other way? Seems unlikely if we believe the Texas exit poll: it says Bush improved his margin among black voters by 19 points in 2004!

That just deepens the mystery. To account for the slight shift away from Bush in Harris county, we would then have to assume that Harris county whites reduced their margin for Bush by 12 points or more in 2004.

Similar exercises could be performed on other counties, but these examples should suffice to make the point: the 59 percent figure, as common sense would suggest, is clearly a gross overestimate of Texas Hispanics' support for Bush in 2004.

That puts the national exit poll figure for Hispanics off to a bad start. In 2000, Texas Hispanics were 10 percent of the national exit polls' Hispanic sample and this year they will likely be substantially more (the latest census population projection put Texas Hispanics at 19 percent of the nation's Hispanic voting-age population and the Texas exit poll has Hispanics at 23 percent of Texas voters this year, compared to just 10 percent in 2000). And we would expect Bush's support in the southern region of the national exit poll, which includes Texas, to be particularly skewed by the Texas figure. That it is, it's… 64 percent! Wait a minute – 64 percent? That's even higher than the Texas figure! Maybe it's the inclusion of Florida in the southern region sample? Nope, the Florida exit poll says Hispanics voted 56 percent for Bush, three points less than their Texas counterparts (amazing in and of itself!).

Only two other states in the southern region (Georgia and Oklahoma) have Hispanic breakouts available, so we can't directly find all the missing pro-Bush Hispanics. But, as the astute conservative analyst and number-cruncher, Steve Sailer, has calculated, if you take the given Hispanic Bush support rates for the four available states and figure the number of Hispanic Bush votes that implies from those four states, you can then estimate how many Hispanic Bush votes must have come from the non-broken-out states (given their percentage of overall voters in those states, which the NEP has released) to produce the number of southern Bush Hispanic votes indicated by the 64 percent support figure. Well, I suppose the Hispanics in those other states could have produced those missing votes – but only if they voted early and often: they would have had to support Bush at the rate of 190 percent! (Read Sailer's analysis in its entirety for all the details on these calculations.)

There are similar problems with the other regions of the national exit poll. In the west, the NEP says that Bush's Hispanic support rose by eleven points (from 28 to 39 percent). But the NEP California state exit poll says that Bush's Hispanic support in that state only rose by four points over 2000 (from 28 to 32 percent). Given that California Hispanic voters are over three-fifths of this entire region's Hispanic voters, that puts a heavy burden on the other states of the west to produce this eleven-point jump in support for Bush. Indeed, as Sailer has calculated, once you take into account the other released Bush support rates for Hispanics in western states, Hispanics in the remaining states in the west must have supported Bush at the rate of 167 percent to reconcile the released state figures with the western region figure.

Sailer's similar calculations for the midwest (123 percent Bush support among Hispanics in non-broken-out states) and the east (95 percent) show this problem affects all regions, albeit not as severely as the south and west.

Okay, so what's the explanation for this particular set of anomalies? That is, even accepting all the various state-level Hispanic figures as gospel, including the absurd Texas figure, why do we get these crazy mismatches between the state figures and the regional figures from the national poll?

It seems to me there are two logical possibilities. One is that the Hispanic respondents included in the national poll systematically differ from those included in the state poll. So, for example, if Texas Hispanics in the state poll support Bush at 59 percent, those Texas Hispanic respondents included in the national poll support him at, say, 67 percent. Or California Hispanic respondents in the national poll support Bush at 39 percent, not 32 percent. And so on.

That strikes me as less likely than the other possibility. We know the national exit poll took some pretty serious weighting to get it to match up with the actual election figures. This suggests that, for example, even Hispanics that were already sampled/weighted in the Texas exit poll to have a 59 percent support rate for Bush were probably further weighted toward Bush in the process of getting the national exit poll "corrected." The same logic would apply to the other states – Hispanic respondents from those states in the national poll got an additional push toward Bush that makes their Bush support rates higher than those measured at the state level.

If this has happened, it's worth noting that in the 2000 Voter News Service poll this problem does not appear to have occurred. If you take the Hispanic proportions of voters in each state in the 2000 poll and the Hispanic support rates for Bush in each of those states, you can calculate a state-based 2000 Bush support rate and compare it to the national rate. They are very close: the state-based rate is 34 percent and the national rate is 35 percent.

All this leaves us with a question: if 44 percent is the wrong level for Bush's support among Hispanics, what is the right level? Of course, we'll never really know for sure, but I am persuaded, by playing with the numbers and making some reasonable assumptions to correct the anomalies in the NEP that it is somewhere around 39 percent. That is also Sailer's conclusion and that of the National Council of La Raza, whose extremely useful review of 2004 poll and voting data on Hispanics I recommend to you.

If the 39 percent figure is about right, that would mean Bush improved his standing among Hispanics by four points – about his gain in support among voters overall. That makes sense to me and is certainly no cause for complacency among Democrats. But there is no reason to panic either: Bush made gains among Hispanics, as he did among most voter groups, but not a breakthrough.

Source used for this section:

Edison Media Research/Mitofsky International exit poll of 13,360 voters for National Election Pool, released November 2, 2004 (conducted November 2, 2004)

*****

Have the Republicans Really Achieved Parity on Party Identification?


According to the 2004 NEP exit poll, Democrats and Republicans were dead-even on party identification (37 percent to 37 percent) in the 2004 election, a four-point shift from the 39 percent to 35 percent Democratic advantage registered by NEP's predecessor, the Voter News Service, in the 2000 election.

Did a shift of this size really take place in partisan allegiances of the American electorate? Given how much the NEP poll apparently had to weight down Kerry voters and weight up Bush voters to conform to the election result, there are certainly reasons to be cautious about that poll's measurement of a characteristic so closely correlated with the presidential vote. It is also possible the NEP's measurement reflects less a change in underlying sentiment among the electorate and more a change in who showed up at the polls on election day.

It doesn't exactly settle the issue, but it's worth drawing people's attention to data on party identification trends recently released by the Annenberg Election Survey. According to these data, based on 45,000 interviews of registered voters (RVs) conducted from December 1999 through January 2001, Democratic identifiers led Republican identifiers by 33.7 percent to 29.9 percent, a 3.8 point Democratic advantage, essentially identifical in size to that measured by Voter News Service in the 2000 exit poll.

Annenberg also conducted about 68,000 interviews of RVs from October 2003 to mid-Novmber, 2004 and found only a slight diminution in the Democratic party identification advantage to 2.8 points (34.6 percent Democratic to 31.8 percent Republican). That's quite a different story than the one implied by 2004 NEP exit poll and, given the huge sample sizes in the Annenberg study, is certainly worthy of consideration.

Source used for this section:

Annenberg Election Survey poll of 67,777 registered voters in 2003-04 and 44,877 registered voters in 1999-2001, released November 19, 2004 (conducted by SRBI from December 14, 1999-January 19, 2001 and from October 7, 2003-November 16, 2004)

*****

Does Bush Have a Mandate for His Conservative Agenda?

Perhaps the silliest of the claims put forward about Bush's narrow victory on November 2 was that he had some sort of mandate to pursue his conservative policy ends. Nothing could be farther from the truth as demonstrated convincingly in this memo "What Mandate: A Report on the Joint National Post-Election Survey" by Stan Greenberg and Bob Borosage. As they point out in the memo:


A majority of voters backed the president, but they still thought the country was off track and preferred a different direction in America's relations with the world and on domestic social policy.... The public's priorities are wholly different than those the president put forth in the days after the election. That is particularly clear if one looks at fiscal and tax policies, health care, and Social Security privatization.

They conclude:


Progressives should feel confident in mobilizing opposition to these initiatives. If the president goes forward and the lines are drawn, voters will finally hear the differences on economic issues and strategy that they were looking for at the beginning of this campaign. If the argument is drawn clearly, the president and his allies will find themselves facing significant voter skepticism, and generating potential electoral vulnerability. The president's claim to an electoral mandate for his agenda misreads where the voters are.

Just so. But there are a lot of interesting findings in the memo, so check out the whole thing. My personal favorite: the finding that, while voters' first choice of a Bush campaign initiative for him to pursue in his second term is continuing the war on terrorism, their second choice is… nothing.

That about says it all.

Source used for this section:

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of 2,000 voters for Democracy Corps/Institute for America's Future, released November 5, 2004 (conducted November 2-3, 2004)

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation.


http://www.alternet.org/election04/20606



Given those relatively small gains, it seems unlikely that Bush could have jumped to 44% of the national Hispanic vote. The President polled just 16% in Philadelphia's overwhelmingly Hispanic 7th Ward, and he took just 12% of the vote in Chicago's 22nd Ward, which is 91% Latino. He did better in suburban areas but usually scored in the low 40s. Bush's greatest appeal was to rural Hispanics: He took 50% or more of the vote in several heavily Latino counties in South Texas and averaged 41% in the counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. And he carried a majority of the Hispanic vote in Florida, although his percentage declined in Cuban-American precincts in Little Havana and Hialeah.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_48/c3910069_mz013.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/2004-11-10-hispanic-voters_x.htm

Oh.My.God.

So, I'm at the mall, k?, and I just can't take it anymore, so I get in my car and turn on the radio, k? and there's THAT VOICE talking about the NSA wiretapping and monitoring of Americans and Diebold and machine hacking and Ohio and...
I just caught the end, but Oh My God.

I just love that man.

"Kerry is on Ed Shultz" thread, w a bunch of one line "Too Little too Late n/t" "Kerry does not motivate me n/t" etc

WorldCom in GD-P, plausible, IMO. I remember whe I heard about the whole Canada thing and wondering WTF. But the angle about creating the appearance that the calls were international is interesting. Then it mentions Kerry.

http://audio.wegoted.com/podcasting/122105SenatorKerry.mp3

Haven't even listened yet!!

:yourock:

And now I've listened to it, and am dying to hear what you think. My first impression is, Oh. My. God. I can see why they may have been going nuts in GD. He came this close to saying the election was stolen. As close as he could come, that is, given the facts currently known.

Holy shit.

He seemed to go out of his way to bring up the point about the Florida election official. (Yeah, baby.) I think this entire election fraud issue is a great big puzzle. You can't tell what it's going to look like until all of the pieces are put into place. Obviously, Sen. Kerry is still working on this one!

My thoughts? I heard very little range of emotion from the Senator today. What I heard was alternating angry, disgusted and pissed off. First, although I know ANWR is a very important issue for him, I think he believes the rules of the Senate are absolute, and he'll fight Stevens' bullshit end-around of the rules tooth and nail. I'm sure he was very happy about the outcome of the vote, but the issue was much larger. For someone who plays by the book, I'm not sure how the Senator works with some of these conniving bastards every day. I would never be able to do it.
As Big Ed said, there was so much news today, and so much ground to cover in the interviews, but the big three, playing games with defense bill and the senate rules, spygate, and the election stuff all seemed to come together to get the Senator spitting mad, IMO.
As for the election stuff, I was pretty shocked by it. To mention the Diebold problems, the Ohio lawsuits, Blackwell and machine hacking in the space of 60 seconds or so suggests to me that he's getting ready to start showing his hand. Maybe he has more evidence than we think from this Florida Diebold testing. "We can't leave voter integrity in proprietary hands." Isn't that what he said? Maybe he knows his campaign phones were tapped. Regardless, I think he's just had enough. I think he's pissed that we had from 2000 till 2004 to take care of these issues, and we didn't, and it cost us the election. And now, with all the scandal in Washington, and bush* lying at every turn (he did use the 'L' word today) it's become even worse. I think he had no idea until recenty how truly criminal this administration would turn out, and he's frustrated beyond the point where he can hold back. Recall what he said the other day about Corzine. Envious that he couldn't have that kind of opportunity. Very telling, IMO.
Since I tend to focus more on the intangible, emotional side of the story, the quote that stood out for me was when he said to Press re the bush* spin on investigations into wiretaps, "Who are they kidding? This has got to stop. This has just got to stop." The anger and disgust was palpable.
Oh, he's pissed.
OTOH, his e mail was very sweet. He's proud of us. That's so cool.

and suspicions. There are now things that can be discussed that couldn't be discussed before. The public has been forced to see just how arrogant the Republicans are and how drunk with power. The President of the United States has, arrogantly, admitted that he used the NSA to spy on American citizens on US soil. Wow! That is blatantly illegal.

Again, this opens a lot of doors. What else have these arrogant megalomaniacs, who plainly don't believe in the Rule of Law, been doing that is against the law. A lot of things that most media would not discuss can now begin to come out of the closet. But the argument has to be done right.

Election fraud is not about any one candidate. It is about the people of the United States and their good faith and confidence in the democratic systems that we have in place in this country. It's about us. It's about that precious right to vote and have that vote be counted. Generations of Americans have fought and died for that right. This is what Rosa Parks so courageously fought for in her struggles. This is about America and about who we are as a nation. So you go carefully and slowly on this one and make the case that our elections must be tamper-proof and above suspicion because that is what the American people demand. And you use the idea that arrogance breeds contempt to question whether or not the present Republican Party knows and understands that.

The door has now been opened to a lot of discussions. This is because the Bush Admin has been caught in one lie and one arrogant action too many. Now let's see if anyone else in the Dem Party seriously begins to discuss the idea of tamper-proof elections and stands up for the sacrosanct right to vote.

That said, damn JK kicked butt today. I am just loving my greatly, deeply, muchly, hugely and wholeheartedly esteemed Junior Senator today. Thanks Sentah! Boy am I ever proud of ya! :loveya: :loveya: :loveya: :loveya: :loveya: :loveya: :loveya: Yuhz done good there today.

he did say far more than he's said before - though didn't Teresa say something similar about machines months ago.

Kerry:

He (Bush) is not on legal ground. (spying)

He doens't believe in saying "oops, we made a mistake!

Even the othr day, when he said mistakes were made, somebody ask what mistakes, and he couldn't find one.

The whole election fraud thing fascinating: still a lot of questions to be answer, lawsuits in Ohio, Florida election official refusing to use Diebold machines, etc.






Ed plays Flipper theme song to Bush quotes.

OMG! :wow:

Talked about the Patriot Act, NSA spying, possible hacking of voting machines.

Eddie said the word 'infiltrated', not Kerry. But Kerry didn't say it wasn't true.


Here's the link: http://audio.wegoted.com/podcasting/122105SenatorKerry.mp3

Kerry sounded so determined and confident. There was something in his voice today that was "different."

He sounded so assured...

Not that he usually doesn't sound confident, but today was really special.

I'm so proud of him!

A day late but loved hearing what he had to say. So glad that he addressed the 2004 election and the very likely tampering by Diebold thugs. Not sure where you all heard the reference to the possible infiltration of his campaign... tho I don't doubt it happened.

This is what people need to hear... I would have liked to hear more about the Ohio lawsuit - wish he had talked more about that. But, I will take this as a great start.

:bounce: