MORE WORDS OF WISDOM ON ELECTIONS from economist Steve Lansburg:

. . . if you really believe in democracy, and if the election is close, then it doesn’t much matter who wins. The theory of democracy (stripped down to bare essentials, and omitting all sorts of caveats that I could list but won’t) is that the guy who gets more votes is the better guy. Surely, then, it follows that the guy who gets only slightly more votes is only the slightly better guy. And if one guy’s only slightly better than the other, then a miscount is no great tragedy.

You might have a strong preference for one candidate over the other, but if you have an overriding preference for democracy (“Let the majority rule, even when I’m in the minority”), then you can stop worrying about miscounts. Surely there’s not much difference between a world where Bush gets 3 more votes than Kerry and a world where Kerry gets 3 more votes than Bush. If Bush is the rightful president in one of those worlds, he’s got to be darn close to rightful in the other.

Just something to consider.

THIS MAY BE the real lesson of the election.

UPDATE: Heh.

SOME REALITY-BASED BLOGGING for Democrats.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WINNERS is to be responsible for their vote. Now that Bush has won, to my frank surprise, I’ve been denied the pleasure of being in opposition, which is to say the pleasure of disclaiming responsibility for any stunts the president may get up to in the next four years.

What’s more, those of us who voted for Bush, warts and all, haven’t even the excuse that Kerry voters would have, which is to say declaring they had no idea he’d do that. Bush voters walked into his next term with eyes wide open. Even if we voted not so much for Bush as against Kerry, we still have to be willing to accept that if he screws up, we put him in a position to do so knowing exactly what he was like.

That gives us, I think, a special responsibility not to gloss over his policy flaws, but rather to hold him to account as much as possible, to make sure that we can be proud of our choice. That means getting on the phone to the white house, congressmen and senators to block bad legislation. That means being honest about his mistakes, rather than trying to gloss over them in order to make ourselves look better. It means, in short, thinking about what’s best for the country, rather than What’s Best for The Team.

That’s the responsibility of anyone who voted for the guy in office, whether he’s a Democrat or a Republican. It’s the responsibility of the people who voted against him, too, but they generally don’t need reminding. We’ve put all our eggs in one basket, guys–so in the words of Mark Twain, let’s watch that basket.

DON’T PACK YET: Disgruntled? Want to hide from the red staters in the Great White North? Canada says no.

A DEMOCRATIC FRIEND OF MINE JUST GOT A PHONE CALL from a Republican she doesn’t speak to that often, allegedly to “say hi” but transparently to gloat. This is my plea to Bush voters to give peace a chance. If we have any chance of ending the sniping and bitterness that characterise the current political scene, it’s going to start with Republicans being gracious winners. If you have to indulge your schadenfreude, do it silently by lurking on Democratic websites and reading hair-tearing left-wing editorials, not by alienating people with whom we’d like to eventually build a better America.

BITTER, ANGRY LOSERS: No, not the Democrats, but the real losers in this election — the Old Media, still angry that they couldn’t deliver their fifteen percent. I just heard E.J. Dionne on All Things Considered (audio not posted yet) delivering himself of an astonishing amount of anti-Bush venom. Dan Rather was reportedly dissing bloggers last night. And, of course, there are the rather churlish remarks of ABC’s Mark Halperin, declaring Bush a “lame duck” before his first term has even ended.

They know who the big losers were in this election. And we’re not talking Kerry/Edwards.

UPDATE: Well, at least it’s not James Wolcott’s “Good, Go Ahead, America, Choke on Your Own Vomit, You Deserve to Die.” I think that needs more tweaking, but I guess we should just be glad he’s not calling down killer hurricanes again.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Frank J.’s response to Halperin’s “lame duck” remark:

I think it’s safe now to admit that Bush stole the first election and served illegitimately. Thus he was elected for the first time for real yesterday. So, can Bush now run for real reelection in 2008?

Hmm. Based on what I’ve heard from Michael Moore about the 2000 election, I think Frank’s onto something. . . .

REPEAL JANE’S LAW: My esteemed temporary Insta-colleague Megan McArdle goes by the handle “Jane Galt” on her blog. I first discovered her when she coined Jane’s Law.

Jane’s Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

Now that we have a fresh start, of sorts, can we try to prove her wrong? She’s been right for as long as I’ve been paying attention to politics. But all things must someday come to an end.

PREDICTIONS FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS I don’t have many at this point, but try this one on for size: Republicans in New York and California will follow the lead of Democrats in Colorado, and propose initiatives to split the states’ electoral votes.

In the case of New York, California, and Texas, that would actually be good for the states, since each could easily put as many votes in play as any medium-sized battleground sate. It would attract a lot more attention their way. I don’t expect such a measure to pass in any of the three, but I imagine the Republicans will give it the old college try anyway.

TERRORIST DEATHWATCH: Yasser Arafat’s downward spiral continues.

I SEE SOMETHING VERY HEALTHY ON THE LEFT-WING BLOGS: commenters who are looking at themselves, rather than blaming Karl Rove, the supreme court, or [cough] conservative media bias for their loss. The most destructive trend of the last four years has been the left’s resort to ever-more-tenuous conspiracy theories to explain their political failures.

This is certainly not a unique vice of the left. Libertarians have it in spades. I’ve sat through aproximately 8 zillion heated conversations about how the reason libertarians don’t have more power is that the electoral system is stacked against us, when it’s crystal clear to me that the reason we don’t have more power is that a clear majority of Americans don’t agree with us. They like middle-class entitlements, drug laws, mortgage tax deductions, farm subsidies, and most of the rest of it. If we want to see our programmes enacted, it won’t help us to change the system (proportional representation is the usual magic bullet of choice for libertarians) if we don’t first change America — at which point we won’t need to change the system.

Though of course I’m not exactly rooting for it to happen, I firmly believe that the left can stage a convincing political comeback, if they’ll stop looking for a scapegoat and start looking for some new ideas. I think we may be witnessing the beginning of that change.

EXIT POLLS A number of people have emailed to point out that the samples in individual precincts are small. That’s true, but the overall sample is large, and it went awry on every level: in each state and in the national vote. Sure, it was a close race, but as far as I can tell, the errors all ran one way: towards Kerry. Rumour has it that the reason the networks were so slow to call the Carolinas is that the exit polls showed them going for Kerry, a nonsense result in light of the result, and even in light of previous polling.

Perhaps people were ashamed to tell exit pollsters they’d voted for Bush; I would have been leery of doing so in my polling place, which resembled a Kerry campaign rally. Or perhaps there’s some sort of systematic bias in the results, starting with the abnormal number of women sampled: are women more likely to respond? Did the exit polls oversample former swing districts, when increased turnout in “lock” districts seemed to be the key to the race? I don’t know, but I hope someone’s finding out.

EUGENE VOLOKH notes that “the 51-48 popular vote margin, while far from a blowout, is larger than the 1976 Carter-Ford margin, or the 1968 Nixon-Humphrey margin, plus of course the famously close 1960 and 2000 margins.”

LEFT-WING BLOGOSPHERE REACTIONS: John Kerry’s side of the blogosphere offers a diverse range of views of Bush’s victory.

Marc Cooper: Could there possibly have been an incumbent more easy to knock-off than George W. Bush? A real-life opposition party would have been insulted to be matched with a such an unworthy and frail rival. The Democrats, by contrast, got their lights punched out.

Tbogg: I look at the big map and all of the red in flyover country and I feel like I’ve been locked in a room with the slow learners.

Andrew Northrup: The national Democratic Party needs to shift to the right, culturally, in order to compete nationally. No choice. Wah wah wah, I’m going to go vote for Nader, wah wah. You should have voted this time.

Jeff Jarvis: Good for you, Kerry, for conceding. Thank you.

Daily Kos: [I]t’s clear the Democratic Party as currently constituted is on its deathbed. It needs reforms, and it needs them now. Quite frankly, the status quo simply won’t cut it. Howard Dean for DNC Chair.

Oliver Willis: We’re telling the world that we endorse the last four years, and give thumbs up to more evil. Sick.

Ezra Klein: I, like most of us, fell for the echo chamber. Daily Kos, MyDD, Steve Soto, Pandagon, and all the other blogs are run by good people with positive intentions, but if they’re you’re primary source for information, you’re outlook is perverted by an overwhelming amount of good news and a general disdain for the factual accuracy of bad news. It perverts your perspective and, because the sample group is so totally different than most of America, it begins to twist your political predictions and assumptions of what works…

Kevin Drum: MOST IMPORTANT EVENT….RECONSIDERED… I’ll plump for the Massachusett’s Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage. The result was nearly a dozen initiatives across the country to ban gay marriage and a perfect wedge issue for Republicans. For the second election in a row, it looks like the president was chosen by the courts.

Matthew Yglesias: With a majority of the popular vote and expanded margins in the House and Senate, we’re going to see Bush Unleashed — something that will probably be much crazier than what we’ve seen over the past four years.

Andrew Sullivan: George W. Bush is our president. He deserves a fresh start, a chance to prove himself again, and the constructive criticism of those of us who decided to back his opponent.

DID ANYONE ELSE NOTICE Dick Cheney claiming a “mandate” for Bush? That undoubtedly set off a lot of bells in liberal heads.

I too am worried about what Matthew Yglesias calls “Bush Unleashed“, at least so far as spending and social legislation goes. Democratic hopes that Bush would somehow be compelled to govern like a Democrat, for no clear reason that I can see, were always destined to be dashed, but the pickups in the house and Senate mean he’ll have a freer hand than I was expecting when I endorsed him.

On the other hand, there’s that gaping deficit, which will limit his freedom of action considerably, and entitlement reform is looming overhead. I think the biggest place where he’ll try to claim that “mandate” will be the supreme court, and I think he’ll probably succeed — the Democratic filibusters seem to me to be a successful tactic only because 99% of the public is unaware of them, which wouldn’t be true if it were a supreme court justice. Moreover, there’s likely to be severe illness on the court, with all the over-80 justices, and that may well mean a vacancy which will put heavy pressure on the Dems to pass whomever the president nominates. I’d guess Bush gets to put in at least two justices who are fairly conservative.

NICE BUSH SPEECH, TOO: I hope the conciliatory mood lasts. I listened on NPR, and was happy to hear the NPR folks saying that Bush’s popular vote majority erased any concerns about legitimacy from 2000.

UPDATE: I guess the conciliatory mood hasn’t reached the rest of the media, where ABC’s Mark Halperin has just called Bush a “lame duck.” Dude, at least wait until the first term has expired, okay?

CATCH UP: Marcus Cicero says the Democrats need to own the war, for their good as well as for ours. And before they can do that they need to “get their heads out of the pot smoke of the Sixties and get serious.”

NICE KERRY LINE: “In American elections there are no losers, because whether or not our candidates win or lose, the next morning we wake up as Americans.”

UPDATE: Very nice speech.