Talk Elections

Wisconsin-the last polls seem to reach a consensus that it was in the bag for Bush

Florida-the last week saw wild swings for both candidates (+5 for Bush one day, +6 for Kerry the next) and I had predicted that the Sunshine State would be about +4 for Kerry

West Virginia-I predicted this would be about +3-4 for Bush but I never thought of a 12% margin there

I was just stunned that FL was so much for Bush. I went, "hey, how much did Jeb fix the machines" for the first few hours until settling down.

Iowa

I'd say West Virginia - not that Bush won but his margin of victory.

Wisconsin - Lots of people screwed up here because of too much trust in Gallup and not enough in Mason-Dixon. Mason-Dixon showed Kerry by 2 on October 29th, while Gallup showed Bush by 8 the next day. I called this one right, because Gallup had been especially weird lately and I trusted Mason-Dixon. But even Mason-Dixon has a MoE of 3%. A call of >40% Bush would have been more than reasonable. It just came down to who showed up on voting day. My final call of 49% Kerry was a direct hit.

Florida - I predicted Bush by 2. It's "close enough" to Bush by 3, but for a swing state, not very close. A bit of a surprise.

West Virginia - Big-ish surprise. I predicted Bush by 7. Polling was quiet the last few weeks. Now we know why.

My vote is personally Vermont, which was my biggest screw-up, with a 9 point discrepency in Bush's favour. Here was my error chart:

Kerry
9:
8:
7:
6: WV
5: ID, UT
4: AR, FL, MA, OK
3: AZ, NE, NE-3, NC, VA
2: AL, AK, DE, ND, WY
1: IL, IN, IA, MO, NH, OH, OR, SD, TX, NE-1, NE-2
0: CA, KS, KY, MI, NV, PA, SC, TN, WA, WI
1: MD, MT, NJ, NY
2: CO, CT, GA, NM
3: ME-1, MN, RI
4: LA
5: ME
6: HI, ME-2
7: MS
8:
9: VT
Bush

So I would vote Vermont (if that was possible) followed by Mississippi, even though the latter was for lack of polling information.

Of those, West Virginia.

WI
Kerry won on the stength of Election day registration, thus negating the polls that had Bush ahead.  Of course over half of Kerry's winning margin was due to fraudulent election day registrations in Millwaukee, as shown by the Millwaukee Sentinal investigations.

i was surprised that michigan was as close as it was.  i thought kerry would win there by a fairly comfortable margin.

im also somewhat surprised how 'well' bush did in nj, ct, and ri.

Michigan as close as it was and Minnesota going stronger to Kerry than I thought.

I had Michigan at around 54-45 Kerry and Minnesota as a dead heat.

Florida was most surprising.  I was expecting a dead heat.  I could see Bush winning, but not by five points.  Wisconsin I predicted correctly.  West Virginia I was extremely surprised by.  When they called West Virginia with just the exit poll, I was shocked.  Michigan I expected.  Minnesota I though Kerry would win by half a point.  Another surprising state was North Carolina.  I though Edwards would help bring the margin to eight or nine points.

Clearly West Virginia and Vermont, though I was also mildly surprised at Alabama's percentages, to mention a state that hadn't been mentioned here before.

To toot my own horn:

I don't ever trust any polling out of Wisconsin and go by the mean if anything.  Those damn German Catholics in Wisconsin are the true swing voters in this country and trying to predict them is a fool's errand.  So, I predicted that Kerry would win by about 0.1% because of Milwaukee hijinks.  Dead on.

In Florida, I only trust Mason-Dixon and still only trust Mason-Dixon.  They said +4, I predicted +5 because of the hurricane factor.  And I nailed it.  It could just have easily been +3 based on Mason-Dixon, so that wasn't a wrong guess to those who made it. 

Those who predicted ties were not able to separate the wheat from the chaff in Florida and in Florida polling, the chaff in polling always grows strongly and obscures the wheat.

I picked all 3 correctly i think.
but i voted WV

Iowa/New Mexico.  But of the choices, West Virginia.  I knew it would go for Bush, but by double digits?!  Ouch.

Iowa wasn't very surprising.  I had correctly predicted Iowa would be stronger for Bush and Wisconsin.  New Mexico, however, was surprising.  Early in the campaign, Kerry was leading by ten or some big number like that, but near the end Bush was leading in many polls by 5 or 6.  I expected Bush to take it easily.

That one county in Wyoming going Democrat was a surprise.

teton county didn't suprise me all that much.  It has a largew latte liberal population.  Bush did win it by about 13 in 2000, but Nader got 7% of the vote there.  The county also went to Clinton twice

West Virginia's margin was the most suprising

If you've been there, you wouldn't be surprised.

I was shocked by WV. Just... wow.

The margins in Minnesota, and, to a lesser extent, Pennsylvania.

The only two states I got wrong, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, didn't surprise me too much--although I was holding out hope well into the next day that we'd won Wisconsin (and I still sort of think we did, but that's another story).  I'd seen the Mason-Dixon polls, so I knew our position there was a bit vulnerable (in fact, here's my spot-on prediction from right after the Mason-Dixon Polls came out [11:30 pm, October 30]:

())

In fact, the lack of huge surprises was what was surprising.

I was surprised by the strength of Bush's win in the South: 62% Alabama (!); 560,000 vote plurality in GA, effectively wiping out Kerry's win in IL, a much bigger state; 1.1 million votes in LA--the only person since Reagan and Edwin Edwards to do that.

StatesRights was correct in looking at Bush's margin of victory in IN to see what kind of night Bush would have.

Nothing really stood out to me as *that* surprising, except maybe Wisconsin.  I thought it would go to Bush.

I wasn't suprised by West Virginia.  That's what happens when we nominate a dove who spends too much time complaining about Iraq and Bush's judicial nominees and other social liberal agenda issues than focusing on the economic needs of the poor and middle class and having a full, hawkish plan for national security.

The biggest shock to me was Fairfax County, VA. Unbelievable!

Teton county, WY LOWERED MY JAW FOR A WHILE.

On the state level i just wanted to Kerry to win Wisconsin. I have never campaigned so hard. I was happy the following morning despite the result. I never saw it as the most important election of our lifetime. I just saw it as i hope Kerry wins but if he doesnt he better not lose any democratic stronghold. I like the thought of saying to Republicans the last time you won Mn was 1972. Wi 1984, Or 1984.

So disappointment was Iowa - another 84 state that went.

OMG, I LIKE TO TELL DEMOCRATS THE LAST TIME THEY WON UTAH IDAHO AND WYOMING WAS 1964!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

Well the day a democrat wins Wyoming is the day when i'm playing with the devil!

You played with the devil in 1964?

Wisconsin, I saw all the Bush signs in the areas where he needed to win big but it didn't happen. :( Oh well what's over is over and he won. :)

West Virginia - not staying with Bush but the extent to which it swung against Kerry. He was just too liberal for that states tastes

Dave

Well I was quit glad the "Curse of the Dukakis" was off of Iowa. If it stays off is the only question for it now.

You have an interesting prediction map.

I didn't understand why of the 3 Dukakis states, 2 went stronger to Kerry and one flipped to Bush. My best guess is the few Nader '00 voters in the first 2 switched to Kerry, while Nader did less well in Iowa '00.

I agree with everyone else that Wisconsin was a surprise. I remember a poll on this site in Sept. or Oct. that had Bush with a 10 point lead.

Bad surprise: Bush doing noticably better in all of the Northeast except north New England. Terrorism/Security close to home was probably why. I had hoped that MA,CT and RI would have every county red like last time. Stupid Litchfield! The continued low turnout among my fellow young voters made me mad and depressed. Losing every single county in Oklahoma: ouch :(

Good Surprise: Dems doing better across the entire northern tier of the country, even in places like ND & ID (trend-wise, not actual results) And even in the south some good news: We won Fairfax, Mecklenburg (Charlotte, NC) and almost won Dallas!

I voted Wisconsin

None of them were surprising at all. Maybe New Mexico but not even that result made my head spin.

Oh that? Just a joke. It was meant to slightly mock all those who followed the polls to a tee and used a magnifying glass to make sure the numbers were right. I did not take it seriously. Twas but a merry jest! :)

The most disappointing was of course Ohio.

Dallas County is not Dallas.  Only a certain area of Dallas County actually forms the city of Dallas and the city of Dallas is blocked by suburban municipalities on all sides.  About 50% of the population resides in the city of Dallas (1.2 million), the rest are in suburbs (1.2 million).  The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area (key term) is roughly 5.2 million and includes the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth and its various and surrounding suburbs in Dallas County, Tarrant County, Collin County and Denton County.

The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area continues to produce roughly a 60%-40% Republican split in most Texas local and federal elections.  This election was no different.

The population of city of Dallas is stable, not growing or declining.  I would say demographically it's probably 1/3 black, 1/3rd white, 1/3 Hispanic (don't know for sure), but the blacks vote in extremely large numbers greater than the Hispanics, most of whom are not legal citizens.

There is no doubt in my mind that the city of Dallas voted strongly Democrat in 2004, as it has since 1988 at least, but as the City of Dallas only forms roughly only 1/20th of the Texas population and 1/10th of the actual vote, 1/5th of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area and 1/4 of the actual vote and probably roughly 1/2 of Dallas County and its vote, it only affects the Texas totals so much.

Yes I am familiar with the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area (or metroplex as I think they call it) and I know it had no impact on the Texas results as a whole. But since all of Dallas County almost voted Democrat, then even the suburbs such as Plano, Mesquite and Garland must have trended Democrat at least somewhat b/c these are county results, not city. If Dallas's population isn't growing as fast as the suburbs then since the trend was Democrat the change was also in the latter, not just downtown.

Rhode Island was the biggest surprise. Bush went from 32% to 39%, for what reason nobody knows.

I wasn't surprised by any state.  The 2004 election was pretty dull in that respect.

Of those? WV. I got only one state wrong, and a lot of funny stuff happened in Ohio.

I did pretty well actually.

The only state I just plain got wrong was Minnesota - I figured it was pretty darn close, it wasn't

Happy about Florida - I think I was just about the only person who from day one had Bush up 4-6 in Florida pretty much the whole way.

I got Iowa and Wisconsin "wrong" in that I called the wrong winner, but those weer just coin tosses that came up the wrong way. 

At the time, Florida.  I would have thought that Democrats would have done everything in their power to use the 2000 backlash to their advantage and turn the state blue (red on Atlas).  So I was stunned to see that Bush actually won the state by a much larger margin than he did the first time around. 

Yeah, I never understood how you came to such an obviously harebrained conclusion. ;)
From day one? Probably. It was becoming clear to me some months in, though. Much like Minnesota, really. In more ways than one - both states had freak result in 2000. Once the 2004 campaign was really shaping up, it should have been clear they'd be moving back towards normal.

I got Iowa, New Mexico and Ohio wrong in that matter, but that's because I rigged it to predict a Dem win. I might have just as well given all three plus Wisconsin to the Reps, those were the four states where either result would have been utterly unsurprising to me.

Most surprising to me was the size of Bush's victory in certain Southern states, notably Alabama, West Virginia and Oklahoma, and the size of the internal dynamics in California.

Iowa going for Bush and, Wiscousin going for Kerry.

I agree with this.  By all accounts, it should have been opposite or at least Wisconsin should have gone for Bush.  But not by more than Kerry won it.

Kerry probably didn't actually win Wisconsin.

Alcon...what happened to you?  You used to be a nice and sane guy.  Alas.

Anyway, FL was the big shock; I thought we had a decent shot there.

Florida.

What, you think that there wasn't fraud in Milwaukee?

Was it enough to make the difference? If so, was it not countered by Republican fraud?

I honestly don't know the answers to those questions, but if Wisconsin was stolen, I highly doubt the Republicans would have not challenged the results legally.

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/010427.php

I hadn't paid attention to it since a few days after the election.  It looks from what I can find now like it wasn't likely Wisconsin was stolen, but it was probably closer than actually reported, and there is certainly a chance it was stolen.

At the very least, Milwaukee County has some splainin' to do.

I say West Virginia.  Even with the majority of voter being registered Democrats and Bush not being all that popular in the nation, the networks were able to call WV without trouble.  I couldn't believe how quick it was.  I new it was all down hill from there... :(

Haha, no sh**t there. There was a small investigation a few weeks after the election and they found a couple hundred fake addresses that had registered the same day as the election. That practice needs to go, now.

Were the votes retracted?

Of course not.  They cannot link voters to their votes, thank God.

I was acctually really suprised with Pennsylvania. I thought Kerry was safe, very close margin. I also thought Bush would take Wisconsin.

Of those three - Florida - I had a feeling Bush would win, but not by that much - the Hurricane along I-54? either way that corridor was crucial.

I was shocked by the size of the WV margin I expected 8 maybe 9 but nothing even close to 12.

Wisconsin... well the Reps have WI we have OH... it's nice to share.

Iowa shocked me as did NM.

I will also add the mid-Atlantic in general.

Teton County isn't all that surprising, considering what kind of place Jackson is.  Although the sudden swing was still pretty wowing, it was just a noticeable effect of the leftward trend of ski resort areas over the last few years.