What the US voting public thinks

So Bush is president again. The number of emails and SMS's of commiserations I received were a measure of how many people knew how badly I would take this. Didn't see any asking me not to commit suicide, though.

I sorta held off writing about this immediately because (a) I was in a state of shock, (b) I was suffering from Root Beer withdrawl symptoms, and (c) I was seriously considering sending the US embassy congratulatory bouquets of bunga taik ayam and was looking for the largest possible truck I could get my hands on.

Well, in a democracy, the guy who gets more votes wins and Bush got more votes. Across the board. So it's exactly what they want. "They" being the people who voted for him. I get the impression that the people who didn't vote for him would have preferred a demented monkey on acid.

The exit polls make for some interesting reading. Incidentally, the exit polls were mostly leaning towards Kerry during the day, but the final polls were adjusted to be more 'accurate' after the counts had come in. This is why the Democrats were so positive early in the day - they thought they were winning based on the exit polls.

Anyway, the final, weighted polls give some indication of how the public were thinking. Bush made gains across the board. For just about every category they polled, a greater percentage voted for Bush than for the Democrat candidate in 2004 than in 2000. I think this is significant.

I took the exit polls and extrapolated them to nation-wide figures based on voter turnout (115,409,172 people) to get the numbers below.

NB: According to the BBC, sample size was 13,531. Margin of error for nation-wide polls is about plus/minus 1% (extrapolates to about 1.2 million people). Bush gained about 3.5 million votes more than Kerry overall. I'm guessing that any issue with a margin of more than 2 million votes will be important and more than 4 million votes would have been significant.

Interesting things to note:

• 11% of professed Democrats voted for Bush (about 4.7mil people) while only 6% who declared themselves Republican voted for Kerry (about 2.5mil). Huh? This is similar to the 2000 breakdown, but this makes no sense to me.


• 10% (more than 4 million) of those who voted for Gore in the last election voted for Bush this time around. About the same number who voted for Bush in the last election switched their vote to Kerry.


• Almost 80% had already decided who they would vote for a month before the election. This is not surprising. What was surprising (to me) was that most of them were for Bush. The Democrats already had an uphill battle before they started. They did make up some ground in the last month, but not enough.


• 53% approve of the job that Bush is doing. However, slightly more than 3 million people seemed to have disapproved of Bush's performance and yet voted for him, whereas about 5 million approved of his performance, but voted for Kerry. This one puzzles me too.


• About 6 million people voted for Bush even though they were against the decision to go to war against Iraq.


• Some who were 'angry' with the Bush administration still voted for him (about 800,000 people). Others who were 'dissatisfied' still voted for him too (about 4.8 million). On the flip side, about 3.8 million voted for Kerry even though they were 'satisfied' or 'enthusiastic' about the Bush administration.


• A huge 67% thought that Kerry 'attacked unfairly', but only 60% thought that Bush attacked unfairly. What?!!


• 56% thought that Kerry said what 'people wanted to hear' as opposed to 'what he thought'.


• About 6 million voted for Bush even though they thought same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry.


• 58% would trust Bush to handle terrorism, compared to 40% who would trust Kerry.
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• Finally, 49% feel that the US is "going in the right direction". Yeah, right.

Having looked at all these, I have to say that we have to take polls with a gigantic grain of salt. Do voters really understand the questions that they're being asked? Take a look below:

• They asked how people would vote if Ralph Nader wasn't running. Almost all who voted for Nader said that they would not have voted. That's not the strange bit; this is: According to the stats, about 60 people (out of the 13,000 or so who were polled) said that they would switch their vote from Kerry to Bush. About 140 people said they would have switched their vote from Bush to Kerry.

My conclusion? Between 1-2% of the US voting public are idiots and there are twice as many idiotic Bush voters as there are Kerry voters.