CNN has a very interesting list based on exit polls of what kind of people voted for which candidate and why in the US election.

Personally I found the figures on the effect of education disturbing. Admittedly 55% of Postgrads voted Kerry, but 52% of university graduates voted Bush. What were they learning? Also revealing was the issues people thought were most important. Of those who said Iraq (15% of all voters), 73% went for Kerry, while those who said “terrorism” (19%) voted 86% for Bush but the biggest issue for the largest number of voters (22%) was ‘moral values’, and 80% of those voters voted Bush. Conversely, for those who thought the biggest issue was the economy and jobs (20%), 80% voted Kerry.

Certainly if you read some of the (understandably) “depressed”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/11/03/the_mourning_after.html and “very”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/03/kerry_concedes.html “angry”:http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=891 Democrats you could feel that there is now a culture war between the red and blue states (thanks to the idiotic electoral college and its all or nothing state-based counting mechanism). If you look at the electoral maps there seems to be a clear divide, but look at this:

from Jeff Culver via
Boing Boing. There are still plenty of Democrats in most of the “red” states – just not enough to swing the election this time around. My principal political worry is that this will encourage the Democrats to lurch into centrist populism instead of looking for appealling new ideas and genuinely charismatic leadership, but there will be plenty of time for healing and sober reflection in the next four years.

Update: “Robert J. Vanderbei” has produced a similar ‘purple’ map but “county by county”:http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/ instead of state by state with finer detail. “Informedpublic”:http://www.informedpublic.com/ has a “modest redistricting proposal”:http://www.informedpublic.com/redistrict.jpg.

Here is something that I learned about recently which is an example of the kind of information I would have thought would be important to discuss during the election debates – at least the information did get published (in the Washington Post). A recent report by the “Pew Hispanic Center”:http://www.pewhispanic.org/ revealed that:

As of 2002… the median Hispanic household had a net worth of $7,932 and the median black family had $5,998… The median white family, by contrast, had more than 10 times either amount — $88,651. Nearly a third of blacks and over a quarter of Hispanic households had zero or negative net worth in 2002, compared with 13 percent of whites.

I hadn’t realized that the cumulative effect of years of inequality was that severe. And of course it is getting worse:

In 2002, white families’ median net worth was up $13,169 from 1996. Hispanic households’ median worth stood at $7,932, $1,000 more than before the boom, but down from 1999. Black families had about $1,000 less than in 1996.

Needless to say four more years of Bush is not likely to help here. The full report is “here”:http://www.pewhispanic.org/site/docs/pdf/The%20Wealth%20of%20Hispanic%20Households.pdf but it is also worth reading the “Washington Post’s account”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40455-2004Oct17?language=printer for the human story behind the news.

Perhaps because I’m a European I would’ve been more interested to know the wealth differences between, say, the the median wealth of the middle class and the wealth of the lowest fifth of whatever race. The figures are around somewhere and I imagine they are broadly similar.

I suppose I should have posted this sooner to try to influence the results but I guess that anybody who actually cares about this one way or the other would have voted for Kerry anyway.

I was going to recommend last minute voters take a look at Presidential Guidester which I read about in Wired News but then I checked it out. It asks how important a variety of issues are to me but not what stance I take on them which to my mind makes it at least a useless and at worst a dangerous way to ‘help’ people make decisions. For example taxes are a very important issue to me – I would like to see them higher. Job creation is important to me, but I see free trade as the best way to ensure this happens. Gas prices are very important to me – I would like to see them raised dramatically (over time). The Presidential Guidester doesn’t offer me any way to even express those views so that I can see which candidate matches them. If I say taxes are important to me I assume that answer pushes me more towards the Republican point of view.

Some things I was expecting that don’t seem to have turned up:

1) Whatever happened to the ‘October surprise’ that both parties were rumoured to be cooking up? (I don’t count “Bin Laden’s pre-election address”:http://blog.octobersurprise.net/ – it is hard to see which candidate it would favour). There is so much ideologically-led error and just plain sleaze around the Bush administration I was waiting to see if the Dems were holding back on some of it to use at the last minute but if there was a ‘smoking gun’ they didn’t use it. Neither did the Republicans try to pull anything major after the swift boat veterans garbage.

2) Where was the serious issue-led debate? Iraq dominated but most of the discussion about that was on the now out-of-date question of whether the war should have been started rather than looking seriously at how things should be done differently to end it successfully. Where was the discussion of a wider middle east peace process? I guess it’s probably too much to ask politicians in an election campaign these days to grapple with these issues however…

3) Why is it the press continued to obsess about minor scandals like the faked (?) bush war record memo, and horse race/process stories and largely failed to force the politicians to face issues like the the social security crisis, the budget deficit and the ongoing healthcare crisis? Jon Stewart of the excellent “Daily Show”:http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/ seems to be one of the few high profile figures to complain about this but why do we need to rely on comedians to tell us democracy is in trouble?

update: I just listened to “this realaudio report”:http://www.thislife.org/ra/276hitt.ram from NPR’s “This American Life”:http://www.thislife.org/ about how senior Republicans have been caught blatantly trying to make sure Democrats don’t get registered to vote. (Democrats have done this too but it appears not to the same extent). Why didn’t we hear more about this stuff?

4) Where were the much-vaunted weblogs? It seems to me that they played a very similar role to that of the mainstream media – concentrating on minutiae, the process and the occaisional whacky conspiracy theory and completely failing to engage with the bigger picture. Admittedly most webloggers are normally not going to have the time to investigate issues like health care in depth but what they could do is draw journalist’s attention to the valuable work of academics and think tanks and even more importantly attempt to provide some of the colorful first person accounts of where things are going wrong with the US that might spur both journalists and the wider public to action. As far as I could tell political weblogs were just ways for activists and policy wonks to talk among themselves during this election (and to raise money).

To tell the truth these impressions are off the top of my head and not based on any kind of rigorous research. I don’t spend my day reading the American political weblogs or even watching American news (I mostly listen to NPR streamed online and even that was pretty poor!) but I would hope that if the media and the blogosphere had been doing a good job of serving democracy during this election I would have heard more about it. If you disagree with me and you can come up with some more positive examples I would love to hear about them.

Meanwhile if you’re American and in America don’t forget to vote (and please vote Kerry)!

It seems – contrary to suggestions made earlier by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com and “essays”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/sunstein.html (and by many others) – people using the Internet don’t tend to just get more political information that agrees with their previously-held beliefs – they are better informed about both sides than their offline counterparts – at least according to the latest report based on a large scale survey from the excellent “Pew Internet & American Life Project”:http://www.pewinternet.org/.

Before you say ‘well that is just because Internet users are on average better educated or of higher social status’ (as I admit I was tempted to do) they found:

Simply being an internet user, controlling for demographic factors such as gender and education, as well as the other factors already discussed, increases the likelihood that a person has heard more arguments about a candidate.

This seems quite persuasive to me but I doubt this argument will go away in a hurry!

The often-interesting Many to Many weblog posted about the reliability of Wikipedia and how it functions some time ago.

The Guardian’s “Simon Waldman”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1335837,00.html tackled this again more recently and found that although it was hard to introduce errors into the wikipedia, ‘Frozen North’ proved “it can be done”:http://www.frozennorth.org/C2011481421/E652809545/ if the errors are obscure enough. I think the much more important point was made by Ethan Zuckerman who “points out”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/09/27#a356 the fact that

most of the people who work on Wikipedia are white, male technocrats from the US and Europe.

and the Wikipedia will therefore probably never provide as broad a perspective on the world as something like the Encyclopaedia Brittannica does.

I don’t understand why none of the authors even the ones in the UK mentioned “H2G2”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/ the smaller and more lighthearted but quite interesting alternative model, which has more of a hierarchical structure but produces good work. I think it is also worth noting that the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica is “available for free online”:http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/ (albeit in a rather rough and ready form) and a more recent edition is available on CD-ROM for less than £20 these days.

Back in September I wanted to know how to find out “where the money comes from to fund US politicians”:https://blog.org/archives/001231.html and was surprised at how hard it seemed to be to get at the info. Fortunately (if a little late) the great guys at “SearchEngineWatch”:http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041028-604a just provided an excellent overview of a number of search facilities. Interestingly, “Google employees seem to lean overwhelmingly towards supporting Kerry”:http://insidegoogle.blogspot.com/2004/10/google-says-to-vote-google-employees.html (I knew they hired smart people…). Oddly though my own political contribution doesn’t seem to appear.

P.S. “Open Secrets”:http://www.opensecrets.org/ (‘your guide to the money in US elections’) which seemed not to respond when I looked in September is now back online.

P.P.S. I just came across a post over at the Berkman Centre about Cameron Marlow who has found a number of other “political hacks”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/home?wid=10&func=viewSubmission&sid=605 (in the sense of interesting uses of technology in the service of politics not to be confused with politicians’ spin doctors!) including a “text analysis of the presidential debates”:http://overstated.net/04/10/01-presidential-debate-analysis.

Michael Feldstein “suggests”:http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage/sub_page.cfm?section=3&list_item=25&page=1 that the tendency of bloggers to link to other bloggers, usually done as a way of crediting them with the idea, tends to smother discussion or debate: “The very same hyper-linking impulse that makes it easy to pass along an idea with a minimum of effort also makes it easy to appear as if I’m agreeing with the post I’ve referenced when, in fact, I’m just deferring to it.”

From an academic perspective I think Cass Sunstein “got there first”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/sunstein.html (though he was talking about Internet mediated discussion more generally). I know this is one of the things that bothers Habermas about the Internet (I asked him). Shanto Iyengar “disagrees”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/iyengar.html.

Thanks to Jeremy Wagstaff for the link

The most popular weblog, “boingboing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/26/boingboing_endorses_.html and (more tellingly) the second most popular conservative weblogger, “Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=qFFINfAm4eR7PMnY1tkQ2m%3D%3D have endorsed Kerry (though “Instapundit”:http://instapundit.com/archives/018671.php – the most popular right wing blog – does not look likely to do so). Keep an eye on “the official Kerry endorsements page”:http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/press_endorsements.html to see who in the US mass media endorses Kerry and see “here”:https://blog.org/archives/001247.html for more on what the rest of the world thinks of the election.

Update: Even the Economist has “endorsed Kerry”:http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?Story_ID=3329802 (albeit reluctantly).

After three necessarily tumultuous and transformative years, this is a time for consolidation, for discipline and for repairing America’s moral and practical authority. Furthermore, as Mr Bush has often said, there is a need in life for accountability. He has refused to impose it himself, and so voters should, in our view, impose it on him.

On a lighter note here is a mildly entertaining, well-executed Chomsky-ite propaganda cartoon video clip that just came to my attention – Pirates & Emperors. And I just learned if you haven’t yet seen Fahrenheit 9/11 it is being made available unofficially in several formats to download “by this guy”:http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000468.html among others (apparently Michael Moore would “like people to pirate the film”:http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/56254.html though of course since he almost certainly doesn’t own the rights this doesn’t make it legal). There’s a BitTorrent of it “here”:http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2848/Fahrenheit.911-avi.torrent (this is the most efficient way of downloading it though it needs “special software”:http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/).

Don’t forget if you are overseas there is (probably) still time to cast your overseas ballot (see “here”:http://www.aokerry.com/aok/2004/10/4_important_ann.html for more information about how from Americans Overseas for Kerry though of course the same instructions work whichever way you want to vote).