So, on Tuesday after I finished voting, I went home and flipped on the TV. I fired up my PowerBook and launched a few tabs in OmniWeb, refreshing the following pages:
- The Drudge Report for the latest news — sometimes I’m amazed by how quickly Matt Drudge gets the word out.
- Daily Pundit for some Quick insight.
- Yahoo’s election coverage to see where things stand as states were being called.
- CNN’s coverage of the same because it looks like they’ve spent oodles of time making that slick site.
- TradeSports only to regret not having bet on Bush when he was down (I’m still kicking myself — I could have been in at 20 and stood to multiply my money by 5 times).
I soon realized that I was in sensory overload and left the election coverage in my living room while I wandered off to play some CS: Source and kill some time. In the few servers I played on, people were talking politics and at least one player on every server had a name endorsing some candidate (Bush/Cheney 04, Kerry/Edwards for a Stronger America, etc.) Normally I wouldn’t suggest mixing politics and CS, but in this case it was actually fun. Granted, most of the people playing probably weren’t even old enough to vote but it was interesting to see how passionate they were about whatever candidate they were supporting.
Shortly after the first polls closed, I decided to head back out to the living room to watch them with the state predictions. I primarily watched Fox News and it was interesting how much they kept talking about not being able to call states — primarily because of the exit poll data not jiving with the actual data received from the states. After talking about this for a while without actually mentioning numbers, one of the members on the panel finally said ‘enough is enough, here are the numbers’ and proceded to rattle off what the exit polls were showing for the states that were already called. Some predicted Kerry wins that never materialized, though the reporters on Fox News didn’t speculate as to why the numbers were off, they just kept predicting how states would go. I think I passed out shortly after the polls had closed here in Iowa (9pm Central) — at least, I think I saw some county numbers on CNN’s map.
I woke back up around 1:30am or so and by that time Fox News had called Ohio for Bush. This was pretty big news, as apparently only they and one other network called Ohio. This put bush at a solid 269 electoral votes — possibly meaning an exact tie if Kerry could carry all the other states (WI, MI, IA, NM, NV as I recall). Now what I thought was interesting about this was the hesitation of Fox News to call Nevada for Bush. I was flipping between FN and CNN and saw CNN had much earlier called Nevada. It seemed like Fox News just didn’t want to be the first network to call a victory for Bush — even though it was obvious at that point if they predicted Bush taking Ohio.
I decided to hit the sack around 2am, feeling much better about Bush’s victory than I had in the afternoon with Drudge posting the leaked exit polling data. I was a little dismayed when I found out no network had declared Bush the victor in the morning, but I can understand how cautious everybody was being after the mess they helped create in 2000. There was still a lot of speculation around work and on blogs that Kerry was going to legally challenge Ohio’s count, but again Drudge was the first reporting Kerry had privately conceded to Bush and was going to hold a press conference to do the same publically.
In the end, I’m glad that the concession came as soon as it did and that there wasn’t a legal battle. The majority of the country has elected their president (which many are eager to note that it is the first time a majority has elected the president since Bush 41’s term in ‘88). I don’t think this country can be led from the Left, and this election helped prove that. The Democrats seem to be looking forward instead of bellyaching and trying to overturn this election like Gore tried to do, which is a good thing for both sides.
Here’s to hoping that with an easily Republican dominated House/Senate, we can get some real conservative legislation passed — including much-needed spending cuts.
Oi!