Virtual Results

The MoveOn.org primary is over, and to no one's real surprise, no single candidate won more than 50%. The top three candidates were:

1. Dean: 43.87%


2. Kucinich: 23.93%


3. Kerry 15.73%

The next closest was Edwards at 3.19%, which means all other candidates were in the single digits. What seems most remarkable about these results is how different they are from the "conventional wisdom" we've been hearing from radio pundits, Democratic and Republican party people, and other media sources. All of these people talk about Lieberman and Kerry as front-runners (and as Joe Conason noted the other day, Lieberman and Kerry do lead in the most recent nationwide opinion polls), yet Lieberman only garnered a paltry 1.92% of the MoveOn vote. The disparity between random opinion polls and the opinions of MoveOn's members almost certainly highlights the fact that those members are further to the left than the "average" American. However, the disparity also suggests the influence of the media on public opinion: The media have been saying Lieberman and Kerry are the leaders, the polls show them leading, the media say they're leading, the polls show them leading, etc. It's a self-fulfilling circle. So in my book, the MoveOn primary accomplished an important goal by showing the "average" voter (should he/she hear about it, anyway) that what the media is telling him/her and what he/she sees in the polls is misleading, at best.

The same Conason piece mentioned above also notes that the Wall Street Journal has recently been giving Howard Dean favorable coverage. Conason's take on that is that the WSJ thinks that if Dean wins the Democratic nomination, Yubbledew will easily win the election because Dean is too far left for most Americans. I think (and hope) that the WSJ is wrong. From my little corner of the world it looks like the strategy of being a "moderate" has failed Democrats (see, for example, elections 2000 and 2002). For example, why should we vote for a Lieberman, who seems to agree w/the Yubbledew Whitehouse on just about every issue, when we could just vote for Yubbledew? Why vote "Yubbledew-lite"? If that appeals to you, why not just vote for the real thing (in all its extremist horror)? That's why I think Dean would be a great pick for the Democratic nomination: He's clearly differentiating himself from the Republicans, and that's a lot more than can be said for many of the other Democratic candidates.

Finally, the MoveOn primary is a reminder of how important it is that we are able to trust election results. The debacle of Election 2000 has shaken many citizens' faith in our electoral system. Several months ago I noted that some people think the demise of exit polling and the rise of Republican-owned computerized voting machines have put the final nail in the coffin of democracy in the U.S. Although I'm optimistic that that's overstating the case, it seems important that we come up with a way to somehow verify the results of Election 2004 so that, regardless of the outcome, we'll all accept it a little more easily. The best way I can think of to do that is with some sort of non-partisan, non-profit nationwide exit polling. I imagine a nationwide network of registered volunteers who would conduct these exit polls and report their findings to some central authority. Preferably, the volunteers would be respected (and trusted and non-partisan) members of their communities—perhaps clergy, perhaps lawyers, perhaps ???? And the central "authority" would have to be an equally respected and non-partisan body—perhaps something like Vote-Smart.org. The registered pollsters would have to undergo some sort of training to make sure that the polling was done uniformly and as scientifically as possible. The point would be that if the results of the vote-count differed dramatically from the results of the exit polls, we'd have evidence of foul play.

Does this sound good to you? Any ideas on how to get this moving? Perhaps we could get bloggers to start the Foundation for Election Result Accuracy (FERA). Anyone?

Posted June 27, 2003 01:23 PM | election 2004