At Fox News during the afternoon and early evening we assumed, based on the exit poll results, that Kerry was overwhelmingly likely to win. As I began to look at the actual election results, a different picture emerged. I looked at results in Florida and Ohio for small and medium-sized counties that had 100 percent or nearly that much of returns reported, and found that turnout was way up and Bush percentages were up from 2000 also. This was evidence that the Bush organizational activities and turnout drives had paid off. Pasco County, Fla.—a retirement haven just north of Tampa and St. Petersburg—had turnout up 40 percent and the Bush percentage rising from a 48 percent loss in 2000 to a 53.9 percent win in 2004. The Democrats' turnout efforts in heavily Democratic counties like Broward County, Fla., could not match that. Hence Florida went solidly for Bush in 2004, as it had for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, in 2002.
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The Democratic party must now decide whether it wants to be consumed by rage against purported unfair vote-counting or wants to try to win a majority of American voters in fair elections. It was perhaps understandable that Democrats felt they were robbed in 2000, when their nominee won a plurality of the popular vote and lost Florida by only the narrowest of margins. But the Democrats need to admit that the post-election audits of the votes by their friends in the national media could find no scenario in which Al Gore actually won more votes in Florida than George W. Bush. And this time Bush has a large national popular vote plurality—at this time a 3 million-vote popular vote plurality, with a 51 percent majority of popular votes for George W. Bush—and when Democrats in order to win must erase a 125,000-vote plurality for Bush in Ohio. In 2000 Democrats declined to contest New Hampshire's 7,211-vote plurality for Bush, even though New Hamsphire's four electoral votes would have given Gore 271 electoral votes and the presidency. A party that is consumed by rage at its defeat rather than one which is dedicated to interpret the popular will is not a party that can command popular support. The Democrats have lost the presidency, have lost seats in the Senate (including, apparently, despite the Indian reservations, the seat of Minority Leader Tom Daschle) and have lost seats in the House of Representatives needs to take a different approach. How long will it take the Democrats to learn that lesson? And will George W. Bush, in the meantime, use his Republican majorities to guide public policy in new and interestingly different directions?
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