People who make a business of polling (like the Mystery Pollster) say over and over that exit polls are not to be used as predictors of the results, and it seems that the exit polls were especially unsuited for that purpose this time -- if you took them as predictors, they were wildly inaccurate in favor of Kerry.
As of this writing, it seems practically impossible for Kerry to get Ohio; therefore, Bush is re-elected.
Everyone should look at Meteor Blade's reflections this morning on DailyKos.com: "Don't mourn; organize!" It's time to take a hard, sober look at where we are and what to do about it.
One thing exit polls can do is suggest why people voted the way they did. It seems, from the analyses the TV gurus are making this morning, that the most important issue was "moral values," where Bush clearly triumphed, followed by economic issues (Kerry won there), Iraq (again, Kerry won or did very well, because there was a lot of dissatisfaction and disquiet about the Iraq situation), and terrorism (not so important as the other issues, apparently, but an issue Bush got a lot of mileage out of).
It seems clear that the Left (both inside and outside the DP) will be out of commission for quite a few years until it can figure out how to neutralize the "values" issues (conservative religion, homophobia (reduced but still active), "pro-life," etc.). There seems to be a very large and (for now) immobile part of the country that resents secular people, "latte drinkers," "liberals," etc. These folks yearn for emotional security and will pay any price they need to to ignore reality -- they have dug in their heels in support of a world-view that we leftists consider delusional. We need to understand this fact and figure out how to deal with it, or we will be outside in the political cold for a very long time.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much.
— Richard Rorty