Before the election, in my often contrarian way, I pointed out that high turnout on election day likely favored McCain not Obama. While politicos will be crunching the numbers for months there are several reasons to think I was right. From Chuck Todd at MSNBC’s First Read
McCain’s underperformance: Channeling John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times, we also looked at the state-by-state vote totals. And we found that Obama’s wins in many battlegrounds weren’t solely a result of Obama increasing Kerry’s totals from 2004; they were also because McCain’s performance was DOWN from Bush’s in 2004. (See our “Unbuilding 2008” section for the stats here.) In short, we saw a one-sided rise in turnout. Had McCain's turnout increased at the same rate as Obama's in many of the battleground states, we would have topped 140 million, which was the argument some in the McCain campaign were making. They needed a HUGE turnout -- and they didn’t get it.One particularly good example Todd left out is Ohio, where Obama essentially matched the vote total Kerry got in 2004 while McCain significantly underperformed Bush and the state flipped. Bush’s ‘04 campaign in Ohio will likely be studied by political science types for a long time (and not just because of the ongoing conspiracy theory that Bush and/or Rove and/or Diebold stole it). Rove leveraged 13 anti-Gay marriage initiatives to turn out 4 million more Christian Conservatives than voted in 2000, and nowhere more effectively than in Southeast Ohio. Again, it will take a while before all the dust settles on the numbers — a quick web search will show you people are still arguing over Ohio in ‘04 — but overall it does seem like Evangelical Christians disaffection was a key variable. Imagine how bad it would have been without Palin.
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