Josh's Weblog: An Interesting Night

An Interesting Night

I think Andy Card's statement this morning has the important detail:

We are convinced that President Bush has won re-election with at least 286 Electoral College votes.

And, the critical 58,362,962 to 54,844,299 popular vote:

And he also had a margin of more than 3.5 million popular votes.

And, to put to rest the Badnarik and Nader “spoiler” issue:

President Bush's decisive margin of victory makes this the first presidential election since 1988 in which the winner received a majority of the popular vote.

Even so, my dashboard shows three states as not confirmed. Ohio is the big one, but what we do have has Bush ahead there 51% to 49%. Iowa and New Mexico are %50 to 49% in favor of Bush.

While this is hardly over, I think the lawsuits and divisiveness will be missing from this round. Florida was won by a wide margin. Election procedures were improved in most areas. Now we are not arguing about hanging chads but rather we are now interested in provisional and absentee ballots.

In the state of Washington, however, things are not as good. At the moment Dino Rossi is less than a thousand votes ahead of his Democratic challenger. Bin Laden apologist Patty Murry handily beat Nethercutt for the Senate seat. Brian Baird beat the pro-gun Crowson in my district.

In the far more local races, Republicans Zarelli, Curtis and Orcutt appear to have won. The local C-Tran measure appears to have failed. Betty Sue Morris beat Mielke, but Marc Boldt beat Jeanne Harris. The local fire district didn't get it's tax increase and the Ridgefield local property tax measure for the schools lost badly.

Josh Poulson

Posted Wednesday, Nov 3 2004 07:06 AM