Interesting Numbers
Karl Rove has submitted an article entitled “History Favors Republicans in 2010” that has some interesting numbers. When one looks at the statistics, the election was not the blowout that it appeared to be.
Political races are about candidates and issues. But election results, in the end, are about numbers. So now that the dust is settling on the 2008 presidential race, what do the numbers tell us?
First, the predicted huge turnout surge didn’t happen. The final tally is likely to show that fewer than 128.5 million people voted. That’s up marginally from 122 million in 2004. But 17 million more people voted in 2004 than in 2000 (three times the change from 2004 to 2008).
Second, a substantial victory was won by modest improvement in the Democratic share of the vote. Barack Obama received 2.1 points more in the popular vote than President Bush received in 2004, 3.1 points more than Vice President Al Gore in 2000, and 4.6 points more than John Kerry in 2004. In raw numbers, the latest tally shows that Mr. Obama received 66.1 million votes, about 7.1 million more than Mr. Kerry.
Four out of five of these additional votes came from minorities. Mr. Obama got nearly 3.3 million more votes from African-Americans than did Mr. Kerry; 2.9 million of them were from younger blacks aged 18-29. A quarter of Mr. Obama’s improvement among blacks — 811,000 votes — came from African-Americans who voted Republican in 2004. Mr. Obama also received 2.5 million more Hispanic votes than Mr. Kerry. Over a third of these votes — 719,000 — cast ballots for Republicans in 2004…
He then makes the case that 2010 can be a big year for Republicans if they get their act together. Although he did not mention it, when one adds the economic picture into the mix, by 2010 the electorate (with just a smidgen of education) might be begging for someone to get the Marxist off our necks. â—„Daveâ–º
