So, Bush has won. No surprises there. The only shock was the margin, is this another case of the pollsters getting it wrong or the media trying to talk up the chances of a close race to get better ratings. Either way the whole thing has been a bit of a let down.
Why does the margin shock you? All the polls have accuracy of no better than plus or minus 3% to 4%… and that’s the error in each candidate’s percentage, so the accuracy of the margin in the polls is actually 6% to 8%! The margin in the popular vote was 3% — well within the margin of error of the polls and close enough that (although you probably won’t hear many pundits admitting this) it could possibly have gone the other way if the election were a week earlier or a week later, if the weather in Midwest had been bad and the weather in the Northeast had been better, etc. The popular margin was, in fact, smaller than the number of “undecided likely voters” according to the polls just a week or two ago. Furthermore, all of the battileground states ended up with low single digit margins… again well within the polls’ margins of error. The media knows that most people are not statitically literate and (unlike Kerry) they know that nuanced explanations of margins of error are lost on most of their audience, so you may not hear about it in a lot of detail but they did put the information out there for people to digest.
It all came down to one state’s electoral votes: Ohio, with a margin of 2.5%… again totally within the margin of error. This was, in fact, an extremely close race. It was completely determined by turnout. (The increase in turnout for each party compared to 2000 was larger than the delta between’s Gore’s popular vote victory in 2000 and Bush’s popular vote victory in 2004.)
The media called two things wrong: they botched the early exit polls (but it was little media — Drudge and other web-based media, primarily — not big media, that released the early exits), and they failed to anticipate that huge turnout might favor the GOP (which historically has not usually been the case, so it’s hard to blame the media for that). Apart from that, they had it pretty much right. They had the big three battleground states (Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio) identified, and they were pretty much all in agreement that whoever won two of the three would be the winner, and that’s exactly what happened.
-rich
I suppose I was shocked because we were being led to believe (in the UK at least) that the result was going to come down to similar margins as the 2000 election. It was the popular vote which is surprising in that context as I believe that Bush has gone from a 500,000 deficit to a 3 million surplus when all we are hearing over here is extremely negative press about him.
My point really was that the media (again I can only talk about the UK) seems to have completely misread the mood of “middle America”. As you say, the big mistake seems to be the prediction that if turnout increased, those new voters would be for Kerry rather than Bush.