WSJ: How Bush Camp Won Ohio

[question everything]

How Bush Camp Won Ohio

Religious, Rural Voters Were Key; Cities Not Enough for Kerry

By JEANNE CUMMINGS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 19, 2004; Page A4

A close analysis of Ohio, which turned out to be the key swing state in the presidential election, shows that President Bush won thanks to a pitch on morals that went beyond evangelicals to Roman Catholics, a strong effort to turn out rural voters and a last-minute tax break for farmers, small businesses and families.

(snip)

Ohio certainly lived up to its billing throughout the campaign as must-have state for a closely fought election. Despite Mr. Bush's national victory of 3.4 million votes, a swing of just 68,000 in Ohio would have given that state's 20 electoral votes to Mr. Kerry... Though Mr. Bush won Ohio narrowly in 2000, Democrats were betting that a precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs created new opportunity in 2004. Kerry strategists devised a game-plan based on increasing turnout in the state's urban and manufacturing hubs and flipping some rural counties that supported Bill Clinton in the 1990s but went to Mr. Bush in 2000. They succeeded in their first goal beyond their wildest expectations. In the Cleveland area, Mr. Kerry beat Mr. Bush by an astonishing 217,000 votes -- 49,000 better than Al Gore did in 2000. "Unheard of," is how Bob Paduchik, the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign manager describes his adversary's urban results. "When we saw the first results, we could just stare at them."

But the Kerry campaign failed in the second goal. In the end, just one county that voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 voted against him this time: Stark County, home of Canton, a manufacturing base that has lost 6% of its jobs in the last four years. In the state's small, conservative northwestern counties, some of which have experienced net job losses nearing 10% of business payrolls, Republicans still lined up for the president. In Mercer County, which has lost 5% of its jobs in the last four years, residents voted 3-to-1 -- 15,022 to 4,924 -- for Mr. Bush, a sharp increase over his winning margin in 2000. Mr. Bush also did well in economically depressed Appalachia, where many one-time Democratic voters still blame that party's environmental policies for the declining status of the coal industry. Meigs County, along the West Virginia border, lost 30% of its jobs between 2000 and 2004, and yet Mr. Bush won the county by roughly the same margin as he did in 2000.

Aware of the economic threat, the Bush campaign countered by showcasing beneficiaries of his tax cuts. The $146 billion tax bill signed by Mr. Bush on Oct. 3 extended for five years a $1,000 tax break for parents, a reduction in taxes for married couples who file jointly and small businesses and farmers. The White House promptly issued a state-by-state analysis declaring that more than four million Ohioans would benefit from the bill, including a million parents, 1.2 million married couples and more than 800,000 businesses that would get a tax break on money reinvested in new equipment purchases, hiring or employee pay raises.

One place where the economics actually seemed to cut against Mr. Kerry was Clark County -- the one county that voted against Mr. Bush in 2000 but voted for him this year. Local Democrats grouse that Clark may have slipped away because of a rumor that Mr. Kerry planned to move a nearby military base to Massachusetts. The Kerry campaign distributed talking points to combat the whispers, but some Ohio Democrats think the response should have been more definitive and aggressive.

(snip)


Write to Jeanne Cummings at [e-mail]

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110082461160778867,00.html

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. actually Jeanne..if you got your head out of your ass, you'd notice

the cities WERE enough but they weren't provided enough voting equipment compared to the rural areas. Has anyone even figured out what the voting machines were per capita in the city versus rural areas?

[Philostopher]

2. Inner-city precincts, other than Montgomery County ...

were rumored to be understaffed, as well. Too few machines, some of which didn't work, too few people to handle the overflow ...

Nah, Blackwell didn't do it on purpose. And he's got some swampland down in Jebville he'd like to sell you.

[Quetzal]

4. you must be talking about the 9 hour poll tax

Someone should do a documentary on voting in minority, urban areas - Frontline?

[TexasChick]

7. "actually Jeanne..if you got your head out of your ass" LOL! Thanks for

the laugh! I needed that!

[genieroze]

9. Actually she needs to get her head out of Bushco's ass. eom

[NewYorkerfromMass]

3. Well here's how we won Pennsylvania

Someone want to tell me how Pa. and Ohio are different?

http://home.earthlink.net/~nashionale/id4.html

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

5. Similar but PA has larger cities...

With the mega-metro center of Philadelphia, midsized Pittsburgh and smaller Erie (& larger counties near the urban centers), we in PA can outmuscle the rural middle easier than OH.

Thank goodness PA is blue.

[Skittles]

6. they f***ing STOLE IT

that's how they "WON" it

[eridani]

8. Montgomery county info

Uncounted votes in Montgomery County
by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
December 10, 2004
I give my heartfelt thanks to Steven Elias for obtaining the precinct canvass data and producing the spread sheets that made it possible for me to write this report in a timely manner.

A 14-page letter dated December 2, 2004 from four Members of Congress to J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State, and posted online at

http://www.spidel.net/ohblackwellltr12204.pdf

contains many disturbing allegations concerning the presidential election in Ohio. Here is an excerpt:

“According to post election canvassing, many ballots were cast without any valid selection for president. For example, two precincts in Montgomery County had an undervote rate of over 25% each ? accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president. This is in stark contrast to the 2% of undervoting county-wide. Disturbingly, predominantly Democratic precincts had 75% more undervotes than those that were predominantly Republican. It is inconceivable that such a large number of people supposedly did not have a preference for president in such a controversial and highly contested election.”

To examine this allegation, I have utilized the precinct by precinct canvass data for the 2004 election, as I have done for other counties where such records have been made available. For Montgomery County, I had Steven Elias provide an extra column on his spreadsheet, subtracting the total votes for president from the total ballots cast, on a precinct by precinct basis.

Shortly after the election I obtained from the website of the Ohio Secretary of State the data I needed to make a statewide compilation on a county by county basis of the uncounted votes, exclusive of provisional ballots. These data have since been taken down from said website. I present them here.

Montgomery County

Registered Voters 391,914
Ballots Cast 279,801
Votes Counted 274,147
Votes Uncounted 5,654
Provisional Ballots 9,227



John F. Kerry 138,262
George W. Bush 134,716
Other candidates 1,169
Thus, according to the Ohio Secretary of State’s own data, the countywide percentage of uncounted votes, exclusive of provisional ballots, was 2.02%.

The Montgomery County Board of Elections has provided its precinct canvass records dated November 22, 2004. These include the counting of provisional ballots:

Montgomery County
Registered Voters 391,914
Ballots Cast 287,635
Regular 258,337
Absentee 29,298

John F. Kerry 142,977
George W. Bush 138,361
Other candidates 1,214

By comparing the two counts, one may deduce that 7,834 provisional ballots have been ruled valid and counted, and 1,393 provisional ballots have been ruled invalid and not counted, though hopefully not discarded. Of these 7,834 provisional ballots, 4,715 were cast for Kerry, 3,645 for Bush, and at least 45 for other candidates, excluding write-ins.

Already we have a discrepancy. 8,405 new votes have been counted, and 1,393 have not been counted, which works out to 571 more than the number of provisional ballots, 9,227, reported by the Ohio Secretary of State. If these 571 newly counted votes came from the 5,654 previously uncounted regular ballots, that should leave 5,083 regular ballots uncounted. The Montgomery County canvass records indicate that 5,085 ballots remain uncounted. Thus there are 569 newly counted regular ballots, and we may never know in which precincts these ballots were cast.

This brings us to the central question of this study: Where did the uncounted regular ballots come from?

Dayton Ward 13, Precinct C, had the most uncounted regular ballots, 37 in all, or 7.0% of the 525 ballots cast. Dayton Ward 14, Precinct A, had the highest percentage of uncounted ballots, 15.6%, or 7 of 45 ballots cast. Here is a table of the precincts with the highest percentages of uncounted ballots: (cont)...........

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/980