I definitely got that one wrong. Big time. Congratulations to you and the others who got it right.

I concede my mistake in thinking that the GOP will lose their hold over the Senate. Otherwise, I was right.

The last line of the blog entry reminds me of the joke (by Groucho Marx?), “I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member.”

The exit polls got it pretty wrong, too, and they should have known (perhaps even did know) they were getting it wrong. Here is an excerpt from an email bulletin sent out by Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families:

“The Drudge Report posted exit polls in Ohio and Florida a few hours ago that showed Kerry with a slight lead. The reaction was instantaneous on the financial markets with stocks dropping like a rock. (The Dow Jones average went from +79 to -30 within minutes.) There was panic on conservative websites and Newt Gingrich, speaking on Sean Hannity’s radio program a short time ago, said, “We (conservatives) may have to eat crow tomorrow.”

But my sources tell me that the exit polls were terribly distorted. The sample was 59% women and 41% men. That is way out of line with the gender breakdown of likely voters who will vote today. In short, don’t believe the exit polls and certainly don’t let them discourage you from voting today. Drudge’s sources were in the Kerry campaign and the media. This could be just one more last minute attempt to impact the final outcome.”

I wrote a comment a few minutes ago, but I think I pushed the wrong button. I apologize if this is a duplicate.

My comment was a bit off topic. I did not participate in the unofficial poll. I felt Bush would win by a tiny margin but I feared a Kerry upset.

I just want to enjoy the moment. It will be very brief. Soon Mr. Auster and the others will bring me down to earth and its painful realities. But last night watching FOX I was disgusted by the anchor named Shep (Shephard?). His bias was palpable. He kept cautioning us not to jump to conclusions when it was obvious Bush was winning. Often Rich Lowry was cut off before he finished a sentence.

I just made a small donation to VFR. I wish to thank Lawrence Auster for his insights, his wonderfully clear language and his ability to see through the sham of certain conventional conservative notions. I do not have this ability, so I rely on others for help. He has opened my eyes to the defects in neo-conservatism. Yesterday, when I voted for Bush it was with little enthusiasm, but on leaving the poll a young girl with purple spiky hair, rings in her nose, pierced lips and black booties distributing Kerry fliers made me feel a bit better about what I had done.

I discovered this site several months ago via FPM. Thanks again.

I can attribute my healthy serving of crow platter to a total lack of faith in America.

Despite that, I think Bush won by too slim a margin considering his opponent. The fact Kerry did as well as he did despite his serious character defects says something about what is now acceptable in a presidential candidate (as long as there is a (D) next to his name).

The next time the Republicans may not have the the support they had now, so they would be well advised to refamiliarize themselves with the principles of traditional conservatism and imediately start by securing our boarders now.

That would be a step in curtailing their parties extinction by immigration.

I just received a CBS Market Watch e-mail bulletin saying that Kerry has called Bush to concede. At the same time, the GOP has increased its majorities in both houses of the Congress, and Republican gubernatorial candidates are doing well. Is this the worst conceivable outcome for traditionalist conservatives?

The Bush/Rove Republicans increase their stranglehold over the GOP. The neocons can proclaim victory for their addled neo-liberal policies and further cement their claim to be the true face of conservatism. Unfortunately, most Americans - including most who think of themselves as conservative - will believe them. In Hegelian Mambo terms, this is a worse result than a Kerry victory, which might have spurred conservative opposition. Intimidated GOP congressmen will fail to oppose the now-vindicated Bush when he pushes his amnesty/”guest”-worker Destroy America Plan, his support for affirmative action and general ethno-pandering, his appointment of Mexican leftist Alberto Gonzalez to the Supreme Court (and his elevation of the execrable O’Connor to Chief Justice), his addiction to federal encroachment and spending, and his imbecilic overseas interventions - things they might have opposed if proposed by a Democratic president.

I’m trying to see the silver lining in these clouds, but I glimpse nothing gleaming. If this election shows anything, it is that there really is no future for true conservatism in the GOP and that we will have to do the hard work of creating a viable alternative party if we are to have any effect on how we are governed. HRS

Howard,

I wouldn’t be too sure about an amnesty plan passing. The Arizona initiative passed easily, and Tom Coburn won his senate seat largely due to an ad directly attacking illegal immigration. I even saw John McCain, astoundingly, stating that illegal immigration was a national priority. The numbers from Sailer’s site seem to confirm that Bush and the GOP are heavily dependent on white voters and that their pandering efforts yielded, at best, some marginal gains.

On a brighter note, the PC Left has been effectively neutered. Moral concerns seemed to have topped the list, and they definitely did not break in the left’s direction. Also, given a stronger GOP Senate, Bush may be able to go with some firmer conservative appointments (cross your fingers).

I’m not saying everything is peachy. Obviously, it isn’t, but things may not turn out as gloomy as they could be.

“I’m not saying everything is peachy. Obviously, it isn’t, but things may not turn out as gloomy as they could be.”

That’s right. In fact, the outcome roughly corresponds to the parameters laid out in my article, “The best traditionalist conservative scenario for a Bush victory.”

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002740.html

Here’s hoping that the Auster/Copold forecasts are more accurate than mine… HRS

Another to consider, one of the most liberal of liberal Massachusetts senators came within an ace of winning this election. If it weren’t for a number of events that broke in Bush’s direction, Kerry could have easily closed the 100,000-odd gap in Ohio and won the whole shebang. Bush may be able to breathe easy, but any GOP candidate looking to 2006 and 2008 would be stupid to take his conservative base for granted.

Here is a poster at Lucianne.com who says about the election outcome exactly what I said would be (assuming a Bush victory) the best possible outcome:

“I didnt really think it would happen. How amazing. Hard to believe Republicans could do so amazingly well at the House and Senate level yet Mr Bush’s victory is so narrow. But it works in any case.”

I know that this site is primarily for mutual education and discussion, not for political activism. However, I think it is worth mentioning that when you get involved in certain forms of activism, it makes you more optimistic about the future of the GOP and conservatism.

For example, I signed up at NumbersUSA.com for their Action Alerts just a few months ago. They send me emails when big legislative items are pending, and I go to a web page that permits me to customize a fax to my Senators, Representative, and/or the White House, depending on the item. A boilerplate fax body can be chosen from among several options, and then I add a personal postscript (this is the main part that the Congresscritters read; the boilerplate is scanned pretty quickly).

The NumbersUSA action email list has tripled in size in this calendar year, and the congressional staff can hardly keep paper in their machines when the Open Borders crowd is up to their evil ways. Weaklings on immigration have suddenly gotten new religion this year. Congressmen have simply been telling Bush to take a hike when he tries to destroy the country. It even reached the point (on House Resolution 10) where the likes of Denny Hastert, country club Republican Speaker of the House, was going against the White House’s lobbying efforts (along with the entire House GOP leadership).

Try signing up, send a few faxes at the touch of a button, and you will be encouraged by what happens when the legislators start feeling the heat.

While I share many of Mr. Sutherland’s fears about Bush and the Republicans, the fact remains that they won only by a small margin. This election was Bush’s to lose. In the midst of a war, with a blatant traitor running in opposition, he should have won with a landslide. If the Democrats would have run anyone even halfway sensible (like Gephardt), Bush would be headed back to the Mexican Consulate in Crawford, TX.

Moreover, as Mr. Copold pointed out, there was some good electoral news for our side, especially in AZ with Prop 200. Bush ran a remarkably wimpy campaign and did a poor job articulating any real opposition to the hard core leftism of John Kerry. Were it not for the brave SwiftVets, who came to their nation’s service again, I’ve little doubt we’d be looking at the gloating, arrogant visage of Lurch bowing and courtseying before King Kofi the Kleptocrat every time we turned on the TV set.

I had the opportunity to witness many sour faces drowning their sorrows last night at work in San Diego. I also heard of the great calamity that a right-wing radical like President Bush would potentially create. Here at VFR, I feel the same sense of defeat at a less onerous level and yet the complaint is of a way too liberal President Bush. It should be clear from last night that both views are faulty. It seems that neither the far left nor far right has the decency to recognize the historic assention of a man that has obviously galvanized a sizeable coalition of Americans and set out and accomplished many bold initiatives. I think it is beneath contempt to continue in the fallacy that this is a “dumb” president unless one is willing to either castigate a majority of Americans or simply turn on those that truly share a majority of their core values.

I felt a great sense of relief this morning. Coupled with a 70-degree cloudless morning and you can say it is a great day. President Bush needs amnesty like he needs a cist on his ass. A potential for 3 center-right to conservative judges in the Supreme Court could have incredible potentail for a re-establishment of more traditional values. Tom Daschle going down was historic. President Bush clearly won a mandate that has to silence any sensible Democrat concerning Florida and stolen elections. This was a solid rebuke of liberalism of the camouflaged variety. Imagine if the left becomes even more radicalized? And last but not least, how nice is it to slap nanny-state Western Europe in the grill?

On balance, things didn’t go too badly for us. More GOP lawmakers have been forced to listen on the immigration question.

Mr. Sutherland’s concerns are well-taken, however. GWB may want to continue his “imbecilic overseas interventions.” I have also predicted that he will move O’Connor to Chief Justice and put a left-wing hispanic on the Court. I don’t think anything (Limbaugh will call it brilliant) will stop Bush from doing this if Rehnquist steps down. The Mexican leftist will go on if any vacancy comes up.

There are encouraging signs that the victory of Proposition 200 has had an effect on GOP lawmakers. We must remember that the victory of Proposition 200 will have NO effect on Bush.

“Imagine if the left becomes even more radicalized?”

In that case, the Bush GOP can move even farther leftward and still be to the right of the Democrats, effectively watering down the definition of conservatism. This has already happened, as reflected in the comments you heard and reported.

The core of conservatism for at least 70 years has been small government. Please explain to us all what Bush is doing to make government smaller. Then we will all agree that our view of Bush as way too liberal is “faulty”.

Mr. Sutherland writes:

“I’m trying to see the silver lining in these clouds, but I glimpse nothing gleaming. “

One an obviously good thing is starting tomorrow GWB is a lame duck -).

Oh, of course he will have a brief honeymoon period, at most 6 months, and then he becomes a real lame duckee.

Basically Bushies have a chance to accomplish 1 or 2 big things before he becomes irrelevant. One of them is Iraq. If he will not fix Iraq soon, 2006 will be a rout of Repubs.

Will Bush spend his only one opportunity on Illegal Amnesty? I’m mildly optimistic he will not.

Thor’s logic is as follows: Certain people think Bush is too liberal. Bush won the election. Therefore it is not true that Bush is too liberal.

Thor seems to be assuming that “too liberal” means too liberal to be elected. But that is not the sense in which we believe that Bush is too liberal. We think Bush is too liberal for the good of America. His election doesn’t change that.

Mea culpa. I had expected a Kerry victory. In contrast to Howard Sutherland, I do see a slight silver lining, not of course in Bush’s reelection, but in the electoral success of some other Republicans, which suggests the electorate may be more conservative than pessimists had thought. I am not so sure that the GOP in Congress will roll over for some of the Bush-Rove pandering.

Mr. Auster, I think my sentiments were wildly different. This site seems to be stuck on immigration as the issue that helps define President Bush as too liberal by the far right. The problem is that anmesty is just an idea and its usefulness is now questionable. This site treats it as a reality instead of perhaps a political calculation. It may not be the latter but it is most certainly not the former. Why be so bitter about presumed realities while completely ignoring the actual reality like the complete rebuke of gay marriage? This site reminds me very much of the left-wing with a notable exception. It stresses President Bush’s faults while giving little credence to his successes. Much like the left, the far right is alienating itself from a majority of Americans. Unfortunately, it’s a majority that shares a great deal of its own values. VFR gives the impression that a Bush victory is bad for conservatism. I think a Bush victory is far worse for liberalism and that in effect is a boon for conservatism. I think the disposition of this site is a turnoff to many conservatives and so one is left with the obvious question: Is VFR doing conservatism right?

I would be interested in finding out just what were Bush’s successes. They seem invisible to me.

Thor has only recently begun posting here and may not be familiar with the reasons why I and others regard Bush as a disaster for conservatism. Immigration is obviously a major factor but I agree that while Bush himself has pushed his insane proposals in that area, mainstream conservatives and Republicans haven’t been particularly supportive. His immigration stand almost emerges as a Bush eccentricity without political legs rather than as a primary threat we need to worry about. (Which doesn’t mean that everything he attempts by way of open borders must be opposed, as Numbers USA and others have so effectively done.)

No, it’s many issues beyond immigration. They’ve been catalogued so many times. His total abandonment of any notion of restraint of government spending and growth. His support for racial proportionality as a primary social goal, including his endorsement of the Grutter decision and his intent to nominate Alberto Gonzales, also a supporter of racial proportionality, to the Supreme Court. His consistent failure to expose the left’s lies as lies, in the interest of seeming nice, or out of sheer incomprehension. His merely pro forma support for the Federal Marriage Amendment. His indulgence of his vice president who openly opposes the FMA and who had nothing to say in defense of conservatives when Edwards denounced the supporters of the FMA (which included the president of course) as cynics who were merely using the marriage issue to “divide” the electorate. His stunning signing of the McCain Feingold, a blatantly unconstitutional law. And that’s just for starters.

The point of the Hegelian mambo is that as the Democrats move to the left, and the country moves to the left, the Republicans also move to the left, but because they are still relatively to the right of the left, people think the Republicans are standing by “conservative” principle. As a result of which, people who maintain the conservative beliefs of five minutes ago are attacked as, at best, marginal misfits who need to get with the program. Bush has done this more of this hollowing out and transformation of conservatism than anyone before. Mainstream conservatism used to be right-liberalism. Now, under Bush, in key respects, it is becoming a modified form of left-liberalism.

But his right-liberal or neoconservative policies, namely his democratic universalism, are also a major problem of course.

And then there’s the fact that, since a president’s leadership style always has an influence on his time, Bush’s simplistic, uninformative, mantra-like explanations of his policies has become the way Republicans generally have begun to speak. So it’s not just a “leftization” of conservatism that Bush is bringing about, but a dumbing down of conservatism.

And worst of all for me right now is the way he just keeps saying that we’re having a “remarkable success” in Iraq even as mass murders are going on every day, and his supporters go rah rah. So there is the loss of the ability on the right to have intelligent discussion about the most important issues facing the country.

I don’t see any of these things changing during a second term.

But remember, while you’re accusing me of being too negative, that I have tried to find the good side of Bush’s election. See again my recent article on “The best traditionalist scenarior for a Bush victory.” Many of those things have happened. Bush has won by two or three points, against a leftist anti-American appeaser whom he should have beaten by 20 points. The GOP in Congress has been strengthened and may show more backbone, both vis a vis the Dems and even vis a vis Bush. And the evil left has been foiled again.

Now, Thor may simply disagree with my brand of conservatism and agree with Bush’s brand of conservatism, and that’s fine. But that doesn’t prove that my type of conservatism is wrong. The fact that VFR is out of step doesn’t prove that VFR is wrong. VFR exists as a voice of dissent from contemporary America. We are dissidents. We do not expect our views to be instantly accepted. We attempt to subject the beliefs of contemporary America to a critique that will pull people, bit by bit, back from the various forms of liberalism toward a better, traditionalist understanding.

See my Traditionalist’s Credo:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001666.html

Respectfully, if I may, Mr. Thordaddy makes two errors. He assumes two fallacies. He assumes Bush is a conservative and the defeat of a liberal is always a good thing. Bush, a reputed conservative, defeated a reputed liberal. Therefore, criticism here of Bush is negativism to him.

Bush is not a conservative. Many articles by Mr. Auster to such effect are on file here. (A quick tick off might inspire further inquiry: amnesty for illegal aliens; sweet-talking a Mexican president that opposes our war on Islamic aggression and whose administration boldly speaks of taking back the Southwest; active support for minority set-asides despite lies to the contrary; muted anti-abortion efforts, etc.)

The defeat of a liberal is not always a good thing. If Franklin Roosevelt, a liberal, had been defeated shortly before WWII, there would have been no secret buildup of America’s armed forces or the sham lend-LEASE program, in which we brazenly breached our supposed neutrality, thankfully.

Mr. Sutherland’s 12:26 PM post said it better than I could have:

While the Prop. 200 win looks good on paper, it won’t do anything to halt the Invasion, which is what happening along our Southern Border in AZ. Besides, some lilberal Fed. judge will likely throw it out as they have CA grass roots propositions that have passed. McCain simply “mentioning” that illegal immigration is a problem won’t get the job done; he’s running for president in ‘08 and will not be able to run on an anti-illegal immigration platform. It’s been happening on his watch for decades! Chairing Senate committees that “look into illegal immigration” or terrorist threats to the homeland isn’t going to change anything.

Mr. Sutherland’s thoughts on a conservative third party interest me. I’d like to hear more on that score. Also, is Mr. Sutherland fairly certain that it will be Justice O’Connor (the turncoat) whom Bush will elevate to Chief Justice? Has Justice Scalia (far and away the sharpest justice on the Court, in my opinion) been left behind because he is too conservative for Bush to elevate?

Mr. Levin writes:

“While the Prop. 200 win looks good on paper, it won’t do anything to halt the Invasion”

Feeling a little down, aren’t we -)

I think we should act as if there will be no breakthroughs in fixing immigration problem. At best we can hope for is a long series of small steps. As a small step Prop 200 looks good to me.

And if a breakthrough will come, we will be pleasantly surprised.

Two weeks ago, I predicted a Bush loss. I’m glad to have been wrong. The(at least) symbolic defeat of the likes of Michael Moore, George Soros and the crazies at MoveOn will help slow the leftist juggernaut and maybe buy right-thinking folks some time to formulate a way to permanently block implementation of the socialist agenda.
As Lawrence correctly points out, Bush is by no means a practicing traditional Conservative. I find it troubling that as the American Left becomes more radically left, what’s commonly referred to as “Conservatism”, continues drifting towards the left as it has for close to twenty years now. Maybe someday, Conservatism will more resemble today’s leftism. At that point, what will it mean to be a leftist? Will leftism and rightism eventually intersect and merge into an amorphous, meaningless pseudo-ideology-theology like New Ageism?

Now we are into negativism by assuming Proposition 200 will be emasculated. I realize this is a possibility, but let’s hope for the best; more importantly, get going and start your phone calls, letters, speeches, money contributions, and speaking out in uncomfortable venues. Search for ways to overcome adversity rather than search for reasons to be negative. The few Chosen People have accomplished a great deal here in America; so what is the excuse for the rest of us? You need not do everything in one day. Just take one tiny step at a time. Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare.

Am I perfect? No. Besides blogging here tonight, I sent encouragement to one of the keenest minds in football, LSU’s Coach Nick Saban. LSU (#17) is 6-2 and faces a tough remaining schedule against its proud SEC rivals, Alabama, Ole Miss, and Arkansas.

Mr. Levin, Prop 200 is actually good news, despite the fact that it will inevitably face court challenges and injunctions. My report is anecdotal, but comes from my younger brother, who lives in Arizona and was active in Prop 200 and its predecessor, the English-only proposition passed a few years before.

The folks who drafted the English-only referendum spent several million dollars for a team of top lawyers to assist inj its creation. The goal was to make it essentially bulletproof to the left’s legal onslaught. (It’s amazing the money the leftists have lying around to fund this war they are waging.) The day after it passed, a Federal judge, predictably, issued a restraining order. Some 3 years of litigation followed. The end of the battle came when the notorious 9th Circuit (9th Circus to its many admirers) held that the English-only referendum passed constitutional muster. Did English-only become the actual policy in AZ? No. The elected officials and bureaucrats simply ingored the law and refused to enforce it.

In addition to being likewise carefully crafted, Prop 200 contains another interesting provision. It allows individual citizens to file criminal and civil charges against politicians and AZ government officials who refuse to enforce the law. A combination of leftists, corporatist Republicans, politicians and bureaucrats spent enormous sums of money in an attempt to defeat this measure. The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial board contains some of the leading Imams of the Open-Borders Jihad, weighed in furiously on the side of the oligarchs. They lost. By a large margin.

The court fight will ramp up shortly, of course. If Prop 200 hold up, it will be a big blow to the flood of illegals, who will no longer be able to access benefits, etc. The corporate types who hire them could no longer rely on taxpayer subsidies of their cheap labor force, who may suddenly find the climate in AZ much less attractive.

Mssngr. Carl gives a very detailed and to-the-point summation of Prop 200 in AZ I wasn’t aware that it has such inner workings as to defy the court actions to come. He has given me more hope that it will change the political landscape regarding illegal immigration/the Invasion. Thank you Carl! I will however reserve judgment until it has passed the court tests. I live in CA where 187 and otehr grass roots props passed by a large margin, only to be shot down.

Yes, Mik…I HAVE been feeling kind of “down”, thank you. I fully understand and appreciate the concept of “tiny steps”. Linda Muller at Team America (Bay Buchanan’s conservative PAC) takes exactly the same position. I however don’t believe in “tiny steps” getting the job done of stopping the Invasion and deporting those here illegally. But I may be completely wrong. After all, the tortoise beat the rabbit with “tiny steps”! I think I’ll crawl back into my shell now.

Mr. Coleman writes:

“‘Imagine if the left becomes even more radicalized?’

In that case, the Bush GOP can move even farther leftward and still be to the right of the Democrats, effectively watering down the definition of conservatism.”

I don’t see it. One of the more intelligent things I heard during CNN’s space-filling babble was Jim Carville saying, “If we can’t beat *this* president under *these* circumstances (unlike, oh… let’s say… 1992, just to pick a year), we need to tear down the Democratic Party and rebuild it from the ground up.”

That, of course, is a code word for “move it to the right”. It also means “sell out the gays”. The smart Democrats, like Dean and Edwards, already understood this. Dean’s line at the DNC was “Any election that’s about God, guns or gays, we’re going to lose.” Even the dumb ones have got to see the effect of putting the anti-gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in the swing states. Nothing like a last-second reminder that gay marriage equals Massachussetts and Massachussetts equals Kerry.

Carville also said, “We wrote off 173 electoral votes in the South and Southwest before the campaign started and that means we had to win 75% of the rest.” Listen to the way Democrat spin doctors describe those parts of the country — “flyover country”, “the cow counties” — the contempt comes through every time. These are places they don’t want to go, filled with people they don’t want to talk to.

But they can’t afford that kind of self-indulgence anymore. They’re going to have to start going there, they’re going to have start talking to people there and they’re going to have to learn a different language than the one that works in New York and San Francisco.

mik wrote:

“Will Bush spend his only one opportunity on Illegal Amnesty? I’m mildly optimistic he will not.”

My crystal ball says he will. His non-amnesty amnesty brought him from 25% of the Hispanic vote in 2000 to 40% in 2004. If that’s not an all-time Republican high, it’s got to be close to it. If he extends it to a real, citizenship-track amnesty, the payoff is obvious. The Republicans don’t just cut into a key Democrat demographic in 2008 — they take it over.

Ken Hechtman is a man of the left with whom I occasionally have e-mail correspondence. That he is recognizing, as a result of this election, that the Dems’ are out of touch with middle America and is urging them to move to the center, is most interesting. Other Democrats have been saying similar things.

I don’t think the Dems will tack toward the center and for good reason: they almost pulled it off!

Message to Republicans: No reason to be cocky. Bush’s victory is rather underwhelming. Just one state (Ohio) could have given it to Kerry. Nixon and Reagan won 49 states. Why was this election so close?

Of course. A switch of 75,000 votes in Ohio, and a few thousand elsewhere, and Kerry would be president elect today.

Correction: the switch of Ohio from Bush to Kerry, by itself, would have made Kerry president. So the triumphalist Republicans and the despairing Democrats are both wrong. This was a very close election.

“Why was this election so close?”

I think Clayton Cramer put it well in his blog (http://claytoncramer.com/weblog/2004_10_31_archive.html#109946607857308062), where he opined that by rights, Kerry should have won: “If the Democratic Party had been running against a Republican with a booming economy and no war problems, this [i.e., Kerry’s loss] would have been disappointing [to the Democrats, that is]. But they ran against a President who has been fighting with a sputtering economy, an unpopular war that has not worked out very well—and they can’t win?”

Cramer’s point is that if Kerry had run like a Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy Democrat, instead of like a McGovernite Democrat, he’d have cleaned up. But the fact is that the Democratic party is in thrall to the 60s counterculture, which took over the party in the wake of the McGovern Commission reforms. The party’s national leaders simply *won’t* drop their insistence on racial identity politics/gay rights/abortion on demand/radical secularism, because to them those are matters of principle more important even than winning elections.

Mind you, I really wouldn’t want a Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy Democrat getting elected (as my preferences run more along the lines of Robert A. Taft or Harry F. Byrd, Sr.). But the Dems have ensured that I will never have to worry about that prospect.

“His non-amnesty amnesty brought him from 25% of the Hispanic vote in 2000 to 40% in 2004.” I thought Bush got 35% of the Hispanic vote in 2000. That means that 40% of the 2004 Hispanic vote is a negligible increase, especially if he lost any white votes over it.

Not only that, but we would have to use very precise and extensive polling to determine why he got another 5% of the Hispanics. Many surveys have shown that immigration and amnesty are not high on the priority list for Hispanics, and they are mixed on those subjects. Those who have been here a while don’t always want wage competition from new arrivals. All of this has been documented extensively at VDare.com.

Let us refrain from deciding how other ethnic groups voted, and why they voted that way, until we have reliable data.

Just to gloat, I’d like to point out that I called it right on the nose. Bush wins popular vote by three points.

Okay, but now I do have to humble myself. I got spooked by the exit polls and the political futures in the afternoon. I knew that exit polls often get it wrong, but I did not expect that all of them would be wrong at once. I mean, they were showing Kerry ahead in all the battleground states except Florida. The odds of them all being off seemed just too great. Plus the futures markets were predicting a Kerry win with a 75% probability.

I had not followed the media during the day and completely missed the exit polling business. But it shows that the mainstream media has not reformed itself by one iota. It is as vicious and unprincipled as ever.

Mr. Coleman wrote:

“I thought Bush got 35% of the Hispanic vote in 2000.”

Many surveys have shown that immigration and amnesty are not high on the priority list for Hispanics, and they are mixed on those subjects. Those who have been here a while don’t always want wage competition from new arrivals. All of this has been documented extensively at VDare.com.”

You’re right. It was 35% in 2000, 21% for Dole in 1996.

You’re probably also right about amnesty as a priority. In my own experience here in Canada, we’ve learned not to go looking for sympathy for illegal immigrants and rejected refugee claimants from legal immigrants of the same ethnic group. We have to get the South Americans to support the North Africans, the North Africans to support the Asians and so on. So I didn’t expect much of a payoff for the amnesty before the election.

I got this one, including the 25-40 figures, from a friend of a friend in the Conservative Party. Since the numbers are wrong, the analysis is also wrong.

Mr. Hechtman should also consider that the “Hispanic” vote is a government-created amalgamation that lumps in Cubans (who predominate in Florida, and are generally quite pro-Republican) with Mexicans and Central Americans (who are generally Democratic).

A more realistic analysis would use a state by state breakdown. My bet is that any increase was thanks to an increased turnout from places like ‘Little Havana’ in Miami.

Carl’s point brings up an interesting question: What is Bush’s support among non-Cuban Hispanics? The key idea here is that there are few new immigrants from Cuba, and all the Open Borders policies affect are the other Hispanics. If Bush got only 30% of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote, then a Republican might wonder why we want to bring in a large group that is 70% Democratic, 30% Republican.

Of course, no Republican candidate has topped 50% among Hispanics in my lifetime, so why bring them in even if the split were 55-45 in favor of the Democrats?

Mr. Auster, my start date of posting says nothing about my start date of reading VFR. It seems that we are perhaps fellow “dissidents” as I am more fully in tune with what you have to say about conservatism than President Bush. But then again we are not politicians and we need not worry about getting elected and struggling for power. We can be straight-forward and honest and take arguments to their logical conclusions in Internet chat debates. We, in fact, try to assert our own little influence. Unfortunately, the hierarchy is clear and you haven’t convinced me to leave to battleship to entertain your mutiny. What are your chances of success outside the Republican Party? The more conservatives leave the party, the less influence conservatives will have on national politics. You can claim that over time your mutiny will grow strong enough to rival the two major party powers. At 30 years old, how long am I to wait? And how can traditional conservatives (like myself) believe that they could actually get a president as conservative as them in the White House after virtually admitting that on many fronts the battle has been lost? The utopian fantasy in many ways mirror the left. It seems that this wise and dissident conservative demands instant gratification.