How "W" Won...

I found this in the NY Times and believe it is worth posting here.

"HOW W WON"
BY JOHN PODHORETZ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW YORK POST HOW W WON
November 4, 2004 -- TWO things happened on Tuesday night: George W. Bush won the election decisively, and John Kerry and the Democrats lost the election decisively. That's what a close study of the final vote tally reveals. On Tuesday, 9 million more votes were cast than in 2000. On Tuesday, Bush received 8.3 million votes more than he did in 2000. If those 8.3 million Bush voters who weren't there for Dubya in 2000 all came from the big pool of new voters, then Democrats should start getting ready to pack it up and move to France. Why? Because a Republican president has increased his ballot total by 15 percent simply by creating new Republican voters who didn't exist before. This is potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. It will go into the next two national elections (in 2006 and 2008) with a Republican electorate 15 percent larger than it was four years ago. But look. It's highly unlikely that every new Bush voter came from the overall newvoter pool. It's safer to assume that new voters split the way the overall electorate split, 51-48 in favor of the president. Under this scenario, John Kerry deserves congratulations for receiving about 4.3 million votes that didn't exist when Al Gore ran for president four years ago. But before Democrats start sending Kerry congratulatory telegrams, they should consider this: Bush only got 4.7 million from the new-voter pool, then his historic total means he got another 3.6 million votes from people who voted Democratic in 2000.
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So if you figure the new voters broke 51-48 in favor of the president, you also have to figure that George W. bush took a whopping 7 percent of Gore's 2000 vote total away from the Democrats. Democrats can and should console themselves with the thought that they can get those voters back. If someone has pulled the Democratic lever before, there's reason to think they can go Democratic again under the right circumstances and with the right candidate. But to do that, Democrats will have to accept reality. And the reality is this: Democrats voted for Bush in large numbers because they like him. They admire him. They want him to be president. They don't think he's an idiot, a fascist, a warmonger, a religious fanatic, a kook, a liar, a cheat, a monster, a bad guy. They think he's done a good job. The Democratic Party has spent four years demonizing George W. Bush, and in part because of their stupid, useless, senseless negativism, Terry McAuliffe & Co. lost 4 million voters. Some strategists will surely argue that because the Democrats were so pointed in their attacks on Bush, they brought the 2.8 million people who voted for Ralph Nader back in the fold. There's some merit in that argument. But that still leaves the party with a net loss overall from 2000. And that, my friends, is the story of this election. George W. Bush won the election triumphantly because he made new voters. And John Kerry and the Democrats lost the election ignominiously in part because of the self-destructive hate and venom they spat at the president, which caused Democratic voters to flee in droves.
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E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
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If you want to be right, then DO RIGHT!