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Nine More Days?
I don't know if I can take it. The election is only nine days away but I fear they're going to be the longest nine days of the whole darn odyssey. I'm not concerned about the polls so much, both because they're not really changing much and because they may not be measuring a pretty large number of newly-registered voters and cell phone users who could swing the election either way, although they're perhaps more likely to break for Kerry. Still, even if you're not hanging on the polls, there are little bits of news every day that could change the race. For example, how will Wolfpacks for Truth skew the results? ;-) Probably not much, since, according to a new survey, Bush supporters live in a fantasy world. The summary of that survey's results shows that Bush supporters stubbornly refuse to believe findings of the 9/11 Commission or dozens of other experts on issues related to Iraq and terrorism. According to Steven Kull (via Alternet), director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the survey, this is classic cognitive dissidence:So there you have it: Kerry supporters are more well-informed and have a more realistic view of the world than do Bush supporters. Isn't “faith-based” government a wonderful thing?“To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq,” Kull says. He added that this “cognitive dissonance” could also help explain other remarkable findings in the survey. The poll also found a major gap between Bush's stated positions on a number of international issues and what his supporters believe Bush's position to be. A strong majority of Bush supporters believe, for example that the president supports a range of international treaties and institutions that the White House has vocally and publicly opposed. In particular, majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assume that he supports multilateral approaches to various international issues, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (69 percent), the land mine treaty (72 percent), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (51 percent). In August, two-thirds of Bush supporters also believed that Bush supported the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although that figure dropped to a 53 percent majority in the PIPA poll, it's not much of a drop considering that Bush explicitly denounced the ICC in the first, most widely watched presidential debate in late September. In all of these cases, majorities of Bush supporters said they favored the positions that they imputed, incorrectly, to Bush. Large majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand, showed they knew both their candidate's and Bush's positions on the same issues.
Posted October 24, 2004 02:28 PM | election 2004
I don't know if I can take it either... I'm going insane sitting here, trying to write a damn memo on restrictive covenants. I'm going to be a nervous wreck by Election Day!
Posted by: Dave! at October 25, 2004 01:16 AM
I guess I'm glad I'm not the only one. And I didn't even get to the point of the title of this post, which is the very real possibility that we won't know the results of this election for days or weeks after Nov. 2 because of litigation. I really hope that won't happen, and of course I hope it doesn't happen because Kerry wins a majority too large to be challenged. With all those newly registered voters out there, it's possible.
Wouldn't it be ironic to have a big public campaign this week asking people to pray for a big Kerry win? And then if Kerry won he could claim to have a different kind of "faith-based" presidency. Maybe Shrum (or whoever is in charger in the Kerry campaign) shoulda thoughta that....
Posted by: ambimb at October 25, 2004 07:31 AM
i think the prayer campaign is a great idea. :)
but unfortunately, i also think you're wrong about the courts. this election will be in the judiciary for a while. hopefully not as long as last year, but it's unrealistic to think it'll be decided outside court. kerry has said himself that he has a team of 10,000 lawyers all over the country watching the polls.
Posted by: monica at October 26, 2004 11:29 PM
i am so nervous about this election. i was listening to the news talking about the 56,000!!! "missing" absentee ballots. hmmmm, jeb would you please give back the "missing" ballots? anyhow, i found myself crying. angry tears. tears i've been holding back for 4 years. no matter how the election turns out. i am willing to bet that we won't know the outcome for a good week. and we're trying to export the idea of fair elections?????
Posted by: jenny lynn at October 28, 2004 07:09 PM
