I think a suitable period of mourning has elapsed now that I can get back to this forum to vent a little bit, but there's not much to say that hasn't already been said. Unlike last time, Bush at least got a majority, and of enough significance to dispel any conspiracy theories that have cropped up in one place or another. If Kerry had gotten that extra hundred or two hundred thousand votes he needed to win Ohio, then the shoe would have been on the other foot, and the Democrats would have won the White House with a minority of the electorate. Which would've been something, you must admit, nearly 150 years with no problems, then suddenly two elections back to back decided by the electoral college?



What's interesting is the relative narrowness of Bush's victory in the popular vote given the geographic distribution of the states he won versus Kerry. And yet even within most of Kerry's "blue" states (other than Massachusetts, thank you very much) he won most of them with strong margins in the cities (like Chicago and Philadelphia) while losing most of the countryside.



It makes me want to live in another part of the country (as opposed to those who just want to move to Canada, which is just silly), just to try to figure out what makes these people tick. Can it really be boiled down to being against gay marriage? Surely that's an oversimplification of why so many people in the south and the heartland and even the more rural areas of the west and northeast went so overwhelmingly into the "red" column? But since the candidates never showed up here and never advertised here, I can't say for sure, maybe Bush was running ads 24/7 about the horrors of gay marriage in the rest of the country. I didn't get that impression, though. Are people just clueless? Well, sure, a lot are, but that many? I guess I still have more faith in humanity than to conclude that.



I guess it's a bit unnerving to be handed such definitive evidence that a huge swath of the population doesn't think the way you do, given that the way you think doesn't seem all that unreasonable. I'm not one to push my views onto others, I just expect them to follow the facts to the same logical conclusions. It makes you question your own beliefs, certainly, that maybe they're on to something and you're missing the obvious. But so far, I don't see it. And now we've got four more years to ponder who was right. Let's hope it goes by quick.