MICKEY KAUS: “Let the vicious backbiting begin.”

THE WASHINGTON BLADE:

Perhaps the most surprising news for gay observers of the presidential election is that exit polls show President Bush received the exact same percentage of gay votes — 23 percent — as he did four years ago. This despite the president’s vocal support for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marraige.

Interesting.

“END THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ.” So reads a large chalking on Bascom Hill, visible from my UW Law School window. I’ve often wondered at the lack of peace rallies in Madison, Wisconsin. If Iraq is like Vietnam to a lot of people, why haven’t we seen anti-war demonstrations? Well, somebody is trying to get one going today at 1 p.m. in Library Mall. Presumably, it’s an attempt to channel the energy left over from the Kerry defeat in the presidential election. I’ll stop by the rally and report back later.

UPDATE: That’s 1 p.m. on Saturday, so I’ll have to get back to you later than I’d thought. Sorry. I hope I haven’t been misunderstanding things all day. I did not get enough sleep. Did you?

RODGER MORROW: “First President Bush was misunderestimated.

Now he has been unredefeated.”

WILLIAM SALETAN:

George W. Bush is going to win re-election. Yeah, the lawyers will haggle about Ohio. But this time, Democrats don’t have the popular vote on their side. Bush does.

He also offers advice to the Democrats for next time. Kerry, it seems was too nuanced:

Bush is a very simple man. You may think that makes him a bad president, as I do, but lots of people don’t—and there are more of them than there are of us. If you don’t believe me, take a look at those numbers on your TV screen. . . .

Bush ended his sentences when you expected him to say more; Kerry went on and on, adding one prepositional phrase after another, until nobody could remember what he was talking about. Now Bush has two big states that mean everything, and Kerry has a bunch of little ones that add up to nothing.

Saletan’s halfway there, I’d say. There’s a bit of condescension here, but I do think he’s right that Edwards would have been a stronger candidate this time, and would run well in 2008. If, that is, he avoids being tarred as a sore loser this time around.

MY GUARDIAN COLUMN on the election is up — though their subtitle rather misses the point.

UPDATE: Ah, they’ve fixed it now.

MEDIA BIAS IN CALLING THE STATES? Generic Confusion notes: “All close Kerry states are listed as Kerry pickups. All close Bush states are listed as undecided.”

Yes, why is Wisconsin called for Kerry already? Only 99.3% of the vote is in with 1,466,963 (49.3%) for Bush and 1,480,256 (49.8%) for Kerry. I did notice on TV this morning that Fox hadn’t called Wisconsin yet. The NYT also hasn’t called Wisconsin. There is a .5 percentage point difference in Wisconsin with .7% of the vote still to count. In Ohio, which is getting so much attention, the percent counted is listed as 100 and Bush has 51.0% over Kerry’s 48.5%. That’s a 2.5% point lead. How can anyone call Wisconsin before Ohio and expect to escape charges of bias?

UPDATE: An emailer offers this justification for calling Wisconsin and not Ohio:

I would suggest 16,000 votes in Wisconsin is a big margin. Wisconsin differs from Ohio in two major respects — it has a long history of running clean and relatively undisputed elections, with a pretty strong non-partisan tint to them (meaning, the people in the municipal government trenches actually running the thing). We’ve had little of the election-day disputes that have marred states like Florida (Ohio isn’t notorious in this respect, but it does have a lot of big- and medium-sized cities ((Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Youngstown, Akron-Canton)) where election-day activity is controlled by strong party/organizational/union/mafia elements. We don’t have much of that here (some in Milwaukee, probably more so in Kenosha).

Secondly, Ohio has provisional ballots, with lots of time (relatively speaking) after the election allocated to count them. Now, I don’t think the provisional ballots will make the difference in Ohio, but there are still a lot of uncounted ballots out there, which is what the Kerry folks are hanging on to. No so here in Wisconsin — your ballot (provisional or otherwise) is in by the end of the day Tuesday, or it’s not counted. Wisconsin is very lenient regarding voter registration, relative to other states, but very tight about provisional ballots.

Thirdly, Kerry’s margin here is roughly three times Gore’s margin in ’00, when he won by 5,700 votes. And that produced no recount; see this (particularly the quote near the end from a GOP official saying 5,700 votes is a “big hill to climb.”).

POYNTER DROPS THE BALL: This article by Steve Outing takes blogs to task for publishing exit polls:

Other bloggers also published early exit-poll numbers, including: The Drudge Report (as he did in 2000), The Daily Kos, MyDD, Atrios, Instapundit, and PowerLine.

Er, except that InstaPundit, at least, didn’t. (In fact, I pooh-poohed the exit polls.) Perhaps Outing was confused by this post, which reported: “On the other hand, exit-polling suggests a sudden Bernstein surge in Virginia. . . .” But there were no “numbers” and if Outing had followed the link, he would have seen that the “exit poll” in question was David Bernstein’s own blog entry saying that he had put himself down as a write-in candidate.

If Outing wants to call blogs “loose cannons,” perhaps he should try being a bit more careful to tie things down himself.

UPDATE: The error has been corrected, and the correction noted. Good job.

Some people wonder if I think it’s wrong to post exit poll results. Not really. I didn’t post ’em because I figured everyone had already seen them on Drudge. And the only comment I had was the one with the Mystery Pollster link, above, that I didn’t trust them. The good news is that as the exit polls continue to be wrong, releasing them makes less of a difference!

SPEAKING OF THE GRACEFUL ACCEPTANCE OF LOSS … Senator Kerry, how about a concession speech? Remember how good Al Gore looked in 2000, when he finally gave his concession speech? Gore had reason to drag out the vote counting, given how close things were, and we survived that ordeal. But when he conceded he had a beautiful, eloquent dignity. I was sorry when Angry Al Gore emerged in the 2004 campaign season and dispelled that fine image he had left us with at the end of the 2000 struggle. Senator Kerry, for your own legacy, you should give a beautiful, dignified concession speech this morning. You have many supporters, and you can help them recover from the loss and accept the reality of the situation in a positive spirit. You do not have the cause that Gore had to drag out the post-election counting. What good can that do? Please use the opportunity that you have today to help Americans pull together and move beyond the long, harsh argument we’ve just had with each other.

DEALING WITH THE PAIN. My UW colleague, socprof Jeremy Freese asks “is the gravity of the situation really well-served by a graphic that makes the two candidates look like they are shooting eye beams at each other?” and generally displays pain on his always cool blog. Here in Madison, I’m surrounded by overwhelming numbers of people who voted against the President and must be horrified at the prospect of four more years. I was just saying yesterday afternoon, as I was reading the exit polls that so favored Kerry, that it might be better for the national psyche, at least, if Kerry won, that it would be much harder for Kerry supporters to tolerate more Bush than for Bush supporters to accept giving the other party a chance for a while. But, despite some lingering denial among Kerry supporters (including some MSM outlets), that is not to be. Those of us who are happy with the outcome would do well to resist gloating. There is a lot of pain out there, and perhaps setting an example of graceful winning can help inspire some graceful acceptance of loss.

GOT UP: Saw that people are still wrangling. It looks to me as if Bush has won it, and I think that Kerry should consider whether he wants to concede gracefully or become a second Al Gore, only this time without the popular vote. I’m going back to bed.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan: “IT’S OVER: President Bush is narrowly re-elected. It was a wild day with the biggest black eyes for exit pollsters. I wanted Kerry to win. I believed he’d be more able to unite the country at home, more fiscally conservative, more socially inclusive, and better able to rally the world in a more focused war on terror. I still do. But a slim majority of Americans disagreed. And I’m a big believer in the deep wisdom of the American people. They voted in huge numbers, and they made a judgment.”

Stephen Green: “Bush has obviously won the popular vote. If he was ‘selected not elected’ in 2000, then why on Earth would the Dems want to try to put Kerry in via lawsuits in 2004?”

Will Collier: “If Kerry hasn’t admitted defeat by tonight, he’ll land squarely in the sore-loser category for the rest of his life–and he’ll take Edwards there with him.”

John Hillen: “A failure to concede by this morning can only mean the Dems, lacking anything to rally around for the next four years, want to keep the victim-magic going and will hang on long enough to create the auro of ‘another stolen election’ for their base.” I hope not. That’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap. They’d better get out while they can. . .

Cliff May: “Privately – by which I mean in the CNN green room — I’ve now spoken to two prominent Democrats who acknowledge not only that Bush won, but also that this was a huge election for Republicans.”

Reader Jim Hume (via email): “How does Andrew figure a 3.5 million difference is a ‘slim’ majority? It would be slim if there were only a hundred voters, but 3% of 110 million is not slim.”

BEFORE I GO TO BED, THOUGH, the question of the night is “What the hell happened with the exit polls?” They wildly overstated Kerry’s margins. Some weird systematic error in the sample collection? Biased pollers? Sheer bad luck? I hope someone takes on these questions over the next couple days.

FINALLY FILED; I’ll be off to bed in a minute. As of now, Bush’s lead seems to be widening in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, and Ohio seems like a real stretch for Kerry. Colour me shocked; I’ve been predicting it for Kerry for weeks now, and loudly proclaimed the race over around 3:00 this afternoon. I’d certainly never have predicted such a solid Bush lead with record turnout. Conventional wisdom, thy name is dust.

More after I get some shuteye. But just in case you were wondering, I have indeed been blogging in my pajamas these last few hours. And mighty comfortable they are, too.

NOW WHAT? Stephen Green looks at the next four years.

NBC JUST REPORTED THAT KERRY WON’T CONCEDE TONIGHT. They’re hanging onto the slim hope of Ohio’s few remaining votes. The networks are standing by their projections, but hey, it’s not like the projections haven’t been wrong before.

Update I’m watching John Edwards’ speech saying that they will “fight for every vote”. He’s good. I expect we’ll see him in the presidential race again.

Update II NBC is talking to bloggers, following an interview with Rudy Giuliani in which he argued (to my 100% agreement) that the country really doesn’t need another 30 days of litigation. I’m wondering about all this coverage — who’s still up watching it? I have to be; it’s my job to watch it. But are ordinary citizens still awake right now?

YOU’RE GETTING SLEEPY I have to stay up until the networks call it in order to file my story. At this point, I find it hard to imagine how Kerry can pull it out in Ohio, but then, last time I went to sleep thinking Bush had won, and woke up to the Florida mess.

Quite apart from my own vote preference, I hope Bush wins it, because it looks like Bush is going to win the popular vote, adn I think it will be good for the country for the popular vote to line up with the electoral.

In other news, Drudge is reporting 120 million voters turned out. If Bush wins, what will the “selected, not elected” crowd do for a sound byte now?

FOX CALLS ALASKA FOR BUSH, putting Bush at 269, and Kerry with only, at best, the possibility of a tie, which would lead only to a loss in the House. So can we say Bush has won? I see Drudge is running his rotating siren and saying “Bush Wins.” I’m surprised. I had entirely prepared myself for a Kerry win earlier this evening.

BUSH WINS OHIO. Says Fox. If true, he wins the election.

“REALITY IS HERE, and I think we’ve got to give the President and his team a lot of credit. … They’ve won it.” So said James Carville just now on CNN.

THINGS ARE LOOKING BAD FOR TOM DASCHLE IN SOUTH DAKOTA. I confess I don’t understand the obsession that led to pouring $25 million into the state to defeat a rather moderate minority leader, but this will be a big scalp for the Republicans.

GOOD NIGHT. See you tomorrow. Maybe we’ll know more then.

FOXNEWS CALLS OHIO FOR BUSH. That leaves him 3 votes short of the needed total.

FOX JUST CALLED OHIO FOR BUSH

“FIRST RED STATE TO GO BLUE,” says Brit Hume announcing that FoxNews is calling New Hampshire for Kerry. (In other words, NH is the first state won by Bush in 2000 to go for Kerry.)

CNN JUST CALLED FLORIDA FOR BUSH.