November 3, 2004

Almost Everything

Nov. 2, 2004, was an almost complete triumph for the Republican Party at the national level and in Tennessee.

Nationally, George Bush won four more years in the White House. Mark it down. His lead among the already-counted votes is too high for John Kerry to overcome among the as-yet-uncounted "provisional" ballots. Bush leads in the Ohio vote count by more than 145,000 votes. There are about 190,000 votes not yet counted, including provisional ballots. Some of the provisionals will be tossed out for having been cast by someone ineligible to vote. Even if none are trashed - and look for the Kerry campaign to file a lawsuit calling for all provisionals to be counted - Kerry needs to win almost 90 percent of the ballots that haven't yet been counted. That's unlikely given he won less than half the rest of the Ohio vote.

Unless ACT and MoveOn and the DNC's GOTV and voter-fraud efforts included sending tens of thousands of non-eligible "voters" to cast provisional ballots...

Bush - who won the popular vote nationally by a comfortable margin - has been relected convincingly. He won more than half the popular vote, something even the popular President Clinton never did. The American people have spoken, and endorsed Bush. Time to call of the dogs, Sen. Kerry, and bow out gracefully.

Beyond the presidential race, the GOP gained seats in the House and Senate, knocking off Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in the process.

In Tennessee, the GOP will control the state Senate for the first time in 140 years, and gained one seat in the state House. The Tennessean reports:

It was a tough night for Tennessee Democrats, who saw their dominance in the Senate crumble under a Republican assault over abortion, gay marriage and the state income tax.

Update: The writer of the DailyLoss DailyKos blog is not happy. He's also no longer dealing in reality, calling the Ohio vote count "desperately close" when Bush leads it by tens of thousands of votes. The longer the Left views the election results with the same perspective as Kos, the more elections Republicans will win. Kos, take a memo: the Left's problem is not that it got out-marketed by the Right. The Left's problem is that its domestic agenda of higher taxes, gay marriage and socialized healthcare, and its foreign-policy agenda of appeasing terrorists and kowtowing to the UN and the French, simply does not appeal to many moderate Democrats.

Blogs to follow today and through whatever futile recount/court-challenge hell John Kerry decides to drag the country before lapsing into Al Gore-like psychosis, include PowerLine, which is absolutely right about Hugh Hewitt, and of course Hugh Hewitt, whose book If it's Not Close, They Can't Cheat provided the road map to GOP victory and remains a must-read even after all the votes are counted.

If you haven't purchased Hewitt's book, do so today - although parts of it are now dated, much of it is a civics lesson in how to win elections and build on the GOP's majority-party status.