Figure 8. The Black and Latino vote in big cities didn’t shift much from 2004. Bush lost big again. But he did much better among big city whites than his 2000 performance.
Where then did the Bush swing in the urban wave come from? The simple answer is that it was weighted into existence. The act of reconciling the exit polls to the official vote count created it. The Bush urban voters came into existence because they had to… otherwise the official vote count would be wrong.
Weighting is a practice used by the US Census, political consultants, public health officials and others who conduct large scale survey research. If you collect data on a population, Latino voting patterns in the 2004 election for example, and your data is unrepresentative of a subset of that population, you can weight certain responses by a multiplier greater or less than one to make your poll consistent with the population measured. The problem though is when weighting is used to reconcile polling data with a “known fact” that may not be known at all. The NEP assumes that the official vote total must be accurate and weights accordingly.
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The impossible election of 2004
Generating the Bush urban wave was effortless. Only 10% of urban voters required a call. They were not required to attend rallies or watch television ads. In fact, many of them didn’t even need to vote. That was taken care of by the weighting process conducted when the national exit poll was found to be inconsistent with the announced vote tallies. After all, how could the unintentionally released Election Day NEP be right in showing a 3% Kerry overall victory margin when the vote tabulators showed a 3% Bush win? Rural Americans didn’t produce that margin. Neither did the small towns or the suburbs. Even the improvement in the smaller cities wasn’t enough. The big cities, according to announced totals, delivered the vote for Bush.
Never mind the fact that exit polling reported that 95%, 66%, and 80% of black, Latino and Jewish voters supported Kerry. Never mind the fact that these voters represent over 50% of the United States urban population. Never mind the fact that whites in big cities are the most liberal group of whites in the nation. Finally, never mind that the new voter findings nationwide showed a 3 to 2 advantage for Kerry and that 40% of the voters in the big cities were new voters.
If there were ever a campaign that ignored on-the-ground efforts in big cities while espousing positions opposed by many in those cities, it was the 2004 Republican presidential campaign Bush was a divider not a uniter who pitted rural and suburban citizens against urban dwellers using wedge issues: the Iraq war; anti gay marriage amendments; religion forced into competition with science; the refusal to conduct stem cell research based on religious views; and opposition to a living wage for the poor. Then there was the Bush signal of solidarity to white conservatives by refusing to attend even one NAACP annual convention or Martin Luther King Day celebration. Bush was AWOL for the black voters other than the sanitized White House events.
The Bush campaign focused its efforts heavily, almost exclusively, on the rural areas and suburbs in order to counter the anticipated big city Democratic margins. But then the miracle occurred just when it was needed. White ghosts never seen before emerged from parking lots, alleys and perhaps even graveyards in big cities across the country to give George W. Bush a stunning victory in the presidential election of 2004. It had to be this way, otherwise the vote count was wrong and who would tolerate such a notion, despite the clear signs on the ground and in the National Exit Poll? But the convenient and wide spread Red versus Blue story of election eve was maintained through inertia. For those with nagging questions, that story was replaced by the Urban Legend of 2004: Bush won the 2004 Presidential election in big cities.
The exit polls weighted a voting block into existence but the pollsters will have to work much harder to get anyone serious about the election to believe that those voters were found anywhere other than in weighting formulas generated to ratify the vote totals
At this point we have to believe two absurdities:
Bush lost a huge portion of his core constituency, rural America, which dropped from 23% to 16% of the overall vote total; yet he won the election. Rural citizens gave Bush 2.5 million fewer votes in 2004 than they contributed in 2000. In the small town segment, voting increased substantially and helped Kerry get to a break even point Yet Bush managed to be the only presidential candidate to win a high turnout election after losing his base; an election where overall turnout was up 16% overall but total presidential votes were down 17% in the rural base areas.
Bush won a huge increase in urban America, a place where Bush didn’t advertise significantly, where the GOTV effort was unnoticeable compared to Kerry’s, and where he was clearly an unpopular president; yet he won the election. For example, by 2005 50% of New Yorkers said that the federal government had “foreknowledge of 911” yet let it happen, he improved his vote count by over 20%. In the 32 big cities across America, he was able to piece together a remarkable increase in his vote from 2000 to carry him over the top and elect him President. We must believe this if we accept the final vote count as accurate. These cauldrons of hostility and suspicion about Bush paused on Election Day 2004, reflected, and suspended their animus at least when they voted.
It borders on the absurd to believe that Bush won reelection on the basis of this huge increase in big city votes and vote share from 2000 to 2004. We’re supposed to believe that he went from 2.3 million big city votes in 2000 to 5.4 million in 2004, a 153% increase. This artifact of the NEP’s weighting process is a dead letter that simply can’t be delivered. It strains the limits of credulity, although no one noticed or those who did weren’t talking. There was something very wrong with the NEP weighting process, specifically big city results. This is apparent from the analysis just completed. But there’s something much more troubling about the vote total.
And this is the problem
There have been heated debates on the internet regarding the outcome of the 2004 election. Much of the analysis focuses on the disparity between released and unreleased national exit polls. The mainstream media has not covered this controversy. Yet by August, 2006 more than half of Americans had expressed doubts that the 2004 results were fair and square according to a Zogby Poll of 1018 registered voters nationwide. [5] '
For this study, we chose the less controversial approach of using the final, revised exit poll with a focus on the stated purposes of the exit poll, who were the voters and where did they cast their ballots. Why not take the numbers the pollsters finalized the day after the election. Yet after careful scrutiny, we’ve shown that the NEP’s urban demographic data just don’t add up to even a remotely convincing explanation for a Bush victory. The data is clearly inconsistent, incompatible, and results in a conundrum rather than clarity about what happened on Nov. 2 2004. Doubt leads to disbelief.
And then there’s one more problem that casts doubt on the entire process. The NEP reports a 66% increase in voter turnout in the big cities, from 9 million votes in 2000 to 15 million in 2006. This provides foundation for the increases in Bush urban votes and percentages, even though there is no common sense or historical reason to believe such an increase in Bush votes ever took place, as we’ve demonstrated.
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