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After the 2004 election, somebody did a map of red states/blue states, showing which states went for Bush vs. states that went for Kerry. Remember that? Some states all red. Others all blue. (--lots of all-red states in the middle, all blue states on the coasts--a pretty strange-looking and very divided country).
Then somebody did a map that was mostly purple, because, even if you believe the 2004 election returns, mostly what we were looking at was 51% Bush, 49% Kerry. A purple nation. Not a red vs. blue one. Many states had lots of Kerry votes and have lots of Democrats. Why write them off as "red"? I take that back-it wasn't a purple map. It was a map on which each state was colored red or blue proportionally with the vote. It reflected REALITY in a way that all-red/all-blue does not. (Or to put it another way, the first map--all red or all blue--was an Electoral Vote map; and the second--mixed blue and red everywhere--was a Popular Vote map.)
And it was this mixed colored map that got me to thinking. There was so much talk at that time about "red states." And that book "What's the matter with Kansas?" had just come out. And there was a lot of abuse, too--some of it here at DU--about "red staters," like, "rednecks," and "trailer trash," etc.--and threats that the "blue states" should secede from the "red" middle, and let them try to finance Jesus Bush's war without California and New York! Stuff like that.
I was also, meanwhile, learning quite a lot about our new electronic voting system--from TruthIsAll threads here at DU and other sources. Hm, I thought: what if "red states" aren't really red at all? what if the blue peoples' votes are being STOLEN? .
And I started thinking about those poor folks in Texas, saddled with the likes of Tom Delay and George Bush. I started reading the LoneStar Iconoclast--the free press of Crawford, Texas--just as leftist as you could want. That paper seemed much more like Texas to me, than fake cowboy Bush, and lying dirtbag Tom Delay. I know people from Texas. They are PROGRESSIVES. In fact, EVERYBODY I know from Texas--and also people I read (Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower)--all progressives! There's a great populist tradition in Texas. There are also lots and lots of poor people--many of them Hispanic. Would THEY vote for Tom Delay or George Bush? Not likely. And so, what is this narrative that Rove & Co. have created that Bushites were making inroads in the Hispanic community? Any reality to it--or is it just all Diebold, Delay redistricting and your typical Republican thuggery in suppressing votes?
Well, after studying this situation for quite some time, and reviewing a lot of opinion polls, I've become convinced that Republican political power--especially Bushite Republican power--is at least half myth. It's a pre-written narrative, for "explaining" stolen elections, after the fact. It's at least half illusion, created by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies giving the rightwing a Great Big Trumpet, way out of proportion to their real numbers. When you look at opinion polls--a range of approval and issue polls, over the last 3-4 years--you simply don't see this rightwing reflected there. What you see is a country that is 60% to 70% progressive on MOST major issues over a long period of time. It's curious. Where are these wingers whose irrational views we see/hear spouted on TV/radio all the time? And back a ways--Feb. '03, prewar--we had the NYT pushing the war every day, promoting every Bushite lie, while FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people opposed the war! So they were all in on it--all the news monopolies--pushing like crazy to make us think that OTHER Americans had gone nuts.
That was the war profiteers' only propaganda victory, I think--that and the coverup of Diebold/ES&S: they convinced us that sensible, progressive people, into good government, were a MINORITY.
I don't think it was ever true. And I think if we had had a real election in 2004--a paper ballot election, all votes counted--Map #1 (red state/blue state) would have been almost all blue, and Map #2 (mixed colors everywhere) would have shown most states 55%-60% blue, 40%-45% red. Yup, I'm beginning to think that Bush/Cheney lost by that much--if all who wanted to vote had been able to, and if all votes had been counted. Because I just don't see any other reason to fast-track a wholly non-transparent voting system all over the country, with $3.9 billion in boondoggle funding, if you don't have to.
Some of us have played with 5% to 10% Kerry win estimates. Quite good arguments, with lots of evidence, can be made for a 5% to 10% Kerry win. And maybe I'm too influenced by recent events and polls. But I'm thinking it was even bigger--and that a lot our effort toward getting wingers to see reality is misplaced. We should be concentrating on that progressive majority instead. We don't have to convince them of anything. We just have to help them re-empower themselves--as Dean, for instance, has done, with his 50-state strategy. But we need to go much further, as to the voting system itself. We have to get these Bushite corporations out of our election system altogether, and return to paper ballot/handcounted (at least until an open source code/high % audit system can be figured out).
Do you all know that in Venezuela they handcount FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the vote, cuz they don't trust the electronic voting machines? Do you know how much of a handcount check on e-voting totals is required by the "Help America Vote Act" of '02? Zero. Do you know how much the states do? 0% to 1%. How can this system have been put in place without a good handcount, at least in the first couple of elections with e-voting? And why is it so incredibly deficient?
And guess who was the chief engineer of non-transparent voting? Same guy who "redistricted" Texas.
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