Category Archives: Election

Election Day Turnout

Bloomberg.com: Top Worldwide

Up to 121 million people will vote, compared with 105 million in 2000, according to Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. That would be 60 percent of eligible voters, the highest percentage since 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when 61.9 percent of eligible voters went to the polls.

A heavy turnout probably hurts Bush, said Larry Sabato, who runs the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics in Charlottesville, Virginia.

”If this turnout goes about 120 million, which it might, he’s gone,” Sabato said. ”That many new people are not showing up to say, `Good job, Mr. President.”’

The Writer’s Almanac – NOVEMBER 1 – 7, 2004

Today is Election Day. Millions of people across the country will be going to the polls today to elect new legislators, judges, sheriffs, school board members, and of course, the President. Generally between fifty and fifty-five percent of eligible voters actually vote in each presidential election year. There have only been four presidential elections in the last seventy years that inspired more than sixty percent of eligible Americans to vote: 1952, 1960, 1964, and 1968. The lowest turn out in the last seventy years was in 1924, with 48%. Turn out in 1996 was the second lowest, with 49%.

But the lowest turn out in the history of American elections was the first federal election under the US Constitution, held in 1788. Only eleven percent of eligible voters voted in that first election. To be eligible to vote at the time, you had to be a white male property owner. But different states had trouble defining what a property owner was.

Nasty politics?

Nasty politics? Puhleez! Get a historic grip. | csmonitor.com By William Schambra

US politics is exasperating – always has been. But through the calumny and distortion, we’ve selected decent, if not always excellent, presidents.

“Let’s step on them!” exhorts the early 1950s Republican election poster hanging in my basement. It features the party’s pachyderm with his foot planted squarely on two squirming figures, one a mustachioed Stalin look-alike labeled “Communism,” the other a spectacled, briefcase-toting bureaucrat labeled “New Dealism.”

Left and Right Agree the Media is One or the Other

Week in Review > The Public Editor: Political Bias at The Times? Two Counterarguments.” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/weekinreview/17bott.html?pagewanted=all&position=”>The New York Times > Week in Review > The Public Editor: Political Bias at The Times? Two Counterarguments.

FROM THE LEFT
By Todd Gitlin

The Times is not pro-Bush in the way that The Washington Times is pro-Bush, slamming John Kerry with Vietnam falsehoods week after week.

But The Times’s decorous approach to the news has often helped President Bush in three significant ways: by equating his gross deceptions with Mr. Kerry’s minor lapses; by omitting or burying news of administration activities and their consequences; and by missing the deep pattern of Mr. Bush’s prejudices and malfeasances. …

FROM THE RIGHT
By Bob Kohn

IS The New York Times systematically biased against President Bush? Of course it is.

I couldn’t quote more of the Right’s argument because it was ad hominem. mjh

mjh’s Blog: The Vile Left

mjh’s Blog: ‘It should be he said/she said/we say — and here’s why we say it.’

mjh’s Blog: ‘It should be he said/she said/we say — and here’s why we say it.’

Perceptions of Partisan Bias Seen as Growing, Especially by Democrats

comparison chartSummary of Findings: Cable and Internet Loom Large in Fragmented Political News Universe

The 2004 presidential campaign is continuing the long-term shift in how the public gets its election news. Television news remains dominant, but there has been further erosion in the audience for broadcast TV news. The Internet, a relatively minor source for campaign news in 2000, is now on par with such traditional outlets as public television broadcasts, Sunday morning news programs and the weekly news magazines. And young people, by far the hardest to reach segment of the political news audience, are abandoning mainstream sources of election news and increasingly citing alternative outlets, including comedy shows such as the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, as their source for election news.