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Steve Sailer

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November 1-15, 2004 Archive

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#schoch

The Jewish Century -- Here's a fascinating interview in the UC Berkeley alumni magazine with Berkeley history professor Yuri Slezkine about his important new book The Jewish Century. It was only about five years ago that I realized that I couldn't understand the central events of the 20th Century by continuing to conceive of Jews as merely passive victims of history. Instead, Jews played a variety of active roles in making history happen. The Moscow-born Slezkine, who is half-Jewish, puts the crucial Jewish role in 20th Century history into perspective in this interview. Dynamite stuff. Here's the opening:

Russell Schoch: In your book, you say that Jews experienced three Paradises and one Hell in the 20th century. Hell of course refers to the Holocaust. What are the Paradises?

Yuri Slezkine: These are the destinations of the three great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are the two we all know about--from Eastern Europe, mostly the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, to America and to Palestine. Then there is the one I am particularly interested in: from the Pale of Settlement to the Soviet cities. Most of the Jews who stayed in Russia moved to Kiev, Kharkov, Leningrad, and Moscow, and they moved up the Soviet social ladder when they got there. This third, invisible or less visible, migration was much bigger than the one to Palestine and much more ideologically charged than the one to America. And, for the first 20 years or so of the Soviet state, it was also seen by most people involved as the most successful. But, by the end of the 20th century, it was seen by most people involved--the children and grandchildren of the original migrants--as either a tragic mistake or a non-event.

All three migrations were, in a sense, pilgrimages, and all three represented different ways of being Jewish, and of being modern, in the modern world: non-ethnic liberal statehood in the United States; secular ethnic nationalism in Israel; and communism--a world without capitalism or nationalism--in the Soviet Union. That, plus the Holocaust, of course, which stands for the dangers of not going on one of those three pilgrimages, represents much of the 20th century, I think.  [More...]

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#ahmed

Powell is gone -- For the second term, it would be most efficient for Bush to streamline his foreign policy operation by cutting out the middle men. Just appoint Ahmed Chalabi as Secretary of State and be done with it. Hey, Chalabi has plenty of experience running American foreign policy already, more than Condi Rice whose main job during the first term was reassuring Bush that he wasn't too lazy and ignorant to be President, keeping Bush from exclaiming, "I had this terrible nightmare. It was like I was back in school during Finals Week, except I was President of the U.S. but I hadn't studied anything at all!"

Come to think of it, with the way things are going with Bush so far, that might be the only way to keep us out of a war with Iran -- put an Iranian agent in charge.

A reader writes:

What a disaster this is shaping up to be. With Gonzalez at AG, Rice as SoS and the housecleaning at CIA, one can only conclude that the president really does think he can do no wrong, and that his cabinet's only function is to agree with him and implement his policies. It's going to be a long four years.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#rbreq

Request: What's your Red-Blue theory? I've got a commission to write a big article this week on the underlying cause of the regional differences in the vote for Bush and Kerry. I've got my pet theory, but I'd like to hear yours.

Also, does anybody out there know how to find out from General Social Survey data the average number of children for white Republicans and white Democrats?

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#IQ417

IQ Hypocrisy, Chapter 417 -- Among the most heavily advertised products on the Web are online IQ tests. Evidently, there is a huge market out there for IQ testing. (In case you are wondering, I have no opinion on the quality of online IQ tests. I recall an email discussion where John Derbyshire asked Charles Murray to help him interpret the score he'd gotten on a free IQ quiz. Murray replied waspishly, "You took a heavily advertised, free, seven-minute IQ test and you want me to tell you what that says about your intelligence? Haven't you answered your own question already?")

Yet, despite this vast interest in IQ (see various IQ hoaxes for more evidence of America's IQ obsession), the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve has passed with almost no mention by either the mainstream media or those oh-so-courageous bloggers. So far, I have only been able to find a single 10th anniversary comment anywhere on Google that isn't by a friend of mine.

It is irresponsible of the press to provide almost zero informed commentary on a topic of pervasive interest, thus leaving the field wide-open to the ignorant crackpottery evident in the various hoaxes about high IQ Democrats and low IQ Republicans.

Here's a new interview with Murray by my pal Philippe Gouillou, the French science writer (page down to read it in English.) An excerpt:

PG : After TBC, you have published the impressive "Human accomplishment". What will be the topic of your next book ?

CM : The working title is "Decadence." It extends some of the themes of Human Accomplishment through its stopping point at 1950 through the rest of the century. 

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#oskwat

Oscar Watch -- The Academy Awards face a big problem this year. In a lousy year for films, the three best movies so far, in my unhumble opinion, are The Passion of the Christ, Hero, and The Incredibles, all of which did well at the box office but none of which is likely to get a Best Picture nomination. No doubt, some good movies will be released over the next six weeks (God I hope so), but this year's Oscar ceremony is likely to be most interesting for who is not there. Similarly, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, while hardly in a class with the Big 3 aesthetically, was at least lively and highly profitable. If it misses out on a Best Oscar nod, that will add to the sense that all the most interesting movies are excluded.

***

"The 2004 IQ Wars: So much for the candidates, what about the voters?" My new VDARE article is up. I publish, for perhaps the first time anywhere, a table of average IQs by states from a study of Vietnam Vets. It won't tell you anything about who deserved to win the election, but it is interesting.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#julian5

Were the "hobbits" of Flores Island modern humans instead of Homo Erecti? In the NYT, Nicholas Wade ponders some of the puzzles. Australian blogger Julian O'Dea may have been the first to raise this theory. 

By the way, another posting of Julian's is quite interesting. He quotes British biologist Anthony Barnett's description of an experiment Barnett carried out in his refrigerator:

" Evolution by natural selection is about adaptive change, adjustment to circumstances, especially changed circumstances. My experiments concerned adaptation to cold. I kept house mice for many generations in refrigerators. They were 'selected' simply by being left to breed. And, after only ten generations, the 'Eskimo' mice were heavier and hairier, they produced larger litters, the females secreted more, and more concentrated milk, and they looked after their young better. The males were very parental too."

Among humans, ten generations would be about 250 years, so when people tell you that humans haven't been around long enough to evolve different behavioral tendencies in different regions, just act snooty and say, "Apparently, you've never heard of Barnett's mice."

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#hispads

What issues appealed to Hispanics? A reader writes:

Enjoyed your statistical analysis, but you did not discuss a possibly more important aspect of the Hispanic vote- ... the reasons Hispanics supported Bush. See the New York Times story a week after the election which analyzed not the vote itself, but the actual Bush and Kerry advertising appeals to Hispanics. Other analyses support the reporters' evaluation. It seems that in their ads aimed at Hispanics, the Bush-Cheney campaign used the moral issues of gay marriage and abortion and the empowerment themes of education and small business development. Surprise: No mention of immigration. The Kerry campaign on the other hand did use immigration as an issue. The actual size of the Hispanic vote for Bush is less important than WHY they voted for him, and they did so NOT in response to promises of immigration reform. This is consistent with both common sense and real-politik: Left to their own devices and charged with the task of increasing Hispanic votes for Bush, campaign managers selected issues and themes they knew would work. Conclusion: The Bush reelection may owe something to Hispanic voters, but it owes nothing to the immigration lobby.

Right, Hispanic voters tend to have sensibly ambivalent feelings about illegal immigration. In contrast, Hispanic political consultants and politicians are all for it because it means more money in their pockets.

***

Bush's Brain -- My American Conservative article on the Bush-Kerry IQ whoop-tee-do is now online:

For a moment, I thought Sen. John F. Kerry was the exception to the rule that all liberals are secretly obsessed—even though they tell each other they don’t believe in it—with IQ...

When Kerry insouciantly replied to Brokaw as if he didn't care what he scored on a 90-minute exam 38 years ago, as if he believed that all that he had accomplished since then was the proper measure of the man, I was impressed.

But then, Kerry broke the spell by quibbling about my research, "I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from." Evidently, IQ mattered to Kerry, too.

A few days later, Brokaw went on Don Imus' radio show and revealed just how much it bugged Kerry that I had said Bush probably had a slightly higher IQ. After the cameras had stopped rolling, Kerry had rationalized to Brokaw, "I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test."   [More...]

***

AEI conference on race and medicine on CSPAN: A reader writes:

I've enjoyed reading the articles on your website and at VDare.  I was first introduced to your works from an Amazon.com review you submitted.  I don't know if you're aware or not, but a conference about race, anthropology, and population genetics is currently on C-Span 2 (as of 8:20 pm CST Friday evening).  It is surprisingly fascinating, and borderline politically incorrect!  In fact, a few moments ago, Professor Vincent Sarich of Berkeley mentioned you by name as a friend.  Hopefully this presentation will be replayed in full on the network.  Perhaps you could spread the word to other loyal readers.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#lovihoax

The funny thing about the Lovenstein Institute Presidential IQ hoax that The Guardian and Doonesbury fell for is that the email announcing it ended:

About the authors : Cristina L. Borenstein and Lana Taamar are both recently off the campaign trail where they served as receptionists for the Pennsylvania chapter of Gore For President, Inc., and have co-written the eBook Gore Got Gored. Together they publish the The Pennsylvania Court Observer which has a circulation of 5.

Dr. Lovenstein lives in a mobile home in Scranton, Pennsylvania with his long time companion Patricia F. Dilliams. When the two are not publishing reports for their Lovenstein Institute, they run an internet business www.collegedegreesforsale.com.

And they still didn't get it.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#bridget2

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason -- Because the sequel to the 2001 hit is exactly the same as the original, only more so, here's an excerpt from my review of the original movie in 2001:

Probably the only people who will be disappointed by the film will be those who loved the howlingly funny book. The moviemakers have turned what was a tart satire on feminism into a pure romantic fantasy. In the book, the ditzy, incompetent, and adorable Bridget slowly comes to realize that by letting her stridently feminist friend Sharon bully her into believing that her (dismal) career was more important than marriage, she has reached the verge of wasting her life.

The novel's subversive perspective elicited howls of protest from feminists in the press. Just this Sunday, an author of a book of feminist film criticism named Molly Haskell wrote in the New York Times that the novel is "grotesquely reactionary." She went on to plaintively ask, "[H]aven't we all evolved" past Bridget's emotional states?

Considering that a couple of million more women have bought "Bridget Jones's Diary" than have bought Ms. Haskell's theorizing, the answer seems clear. As Darwin pointed out, humans don't evolve very fast. Modern women feel the same emotions as their cavewomen ancestors.

Novelist Helen Fielding modeled Bridget's misleading mentor Sharon on her own friend, the documentary filmmaker Sharon Maguire. Perhaps in repayment for fictionalizing her as a hypocritical harpy, Fielding promised to let Maguire direct the movie version. Not surprisingly, Maguire's movie fails to lampoon her own ideology.

Instead, Maguire has made a fantasy about an ugly duckling with pudgy jowls and lank hair who somehow entrances both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. That other British sex symbol plays Mark Darcy (who is modeled upon Mr. Darcy in Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"). Firth's character is the unfashionable but rich and reliable human rights lawyer who slowly comes to worship Bridget from afar.

Much of the hype surrounding the movie claims that by putting on about 20 pounds to play Bridget, Zellweger has undermined Hollywood's obsession with actresses who, as Bridget would say, "look like stick insects." Unfortunately, Zellweger's portrayal will only reinforce Hollywood's infatuation with near-anorexia because the extra weight makers her look awful. Many of the new pounds went to her face and arms. Since Zellweger has the scrunched up features of someone suffering an allergy attack, the only time her face appears even moderately attractive is when she's concentration-camp thin.

Now, Zellweger's an excellent actress, so it may seem harsh to dwell on her physical shortcomings. But it's necessary because the fact that Zellweger puts her pounds on in unappealing places made it hopeless for the movie to even try to get across the book's satirical point about Bridget's neurotic obsession with her weight. The character in the novel, whose weight fluctuates between 119 and 133, isn't fat by any rational standard. She's just overweight by the unnatural norms that women in her fashionable social strata apply to each other.

If Jennifer Aniston of "Friends" had played Bridget, she could have helped make the movie a terrific satire on the media business' diet frenzies. Plump Aniston up and most of the added weight would have gone to her hips and breasts. In any normal human culture that values child-bearing capacity in women, a voluptuous Aniston would have been viewed as a goddess.

But the upper reaches of Anglo-American society have become deeply suspicious of women who show evidence of an ample supply of womanly hormones. A thoroughly modern man worries that a woman who grows her own breasts, rather than buying them from a plastic surgeon, might want to use them someday. If he married her, she might quit her job and stay home to breastfeed her babies. And then how could he afford the trendy life?

(The rest of my movie reviews are here.)

A few notes about the new film. The book it's based on is even funnier than the original, but they don't keep much of it. Most of the new inventions aren't as good as the unfilmed material in the book -- especially the film's groaningly stupid lesbian plot twist starring the world's least likely lesbian. And they eliminate the climax of the novel when Bridget is finally freed from a month in a Bangkok prison on a rice and water diet, rushes to a scale, and records in her diary:

114 lbs. (Yess! Yess! Triumphant culmination of 18-year diet, though perhaps at unwarranted cost.)

Women moviegoers love the moment when the ugly duckling turns into a swan, and this would have been a great parody, but the movie completely passes it up. They could have filmed Zellwegger's release at a 114 pounds first, then checked her into a hotel in, say, Bologna for two weeks of intensive fattening up while they filmed the mandatory Hugh Grant - Colin Firth fistfight over her, then filmed the rest of the movie. It would have been easy, but they didn't do it.

One reason they couldn't stick to the book is that Zellwegger is 42 months older and looks even worse than in the first movie, while the second book's plot is predicated on Bridget actually being a definite hot number by anybody's standard except for that of the dating market she competes in, which consists of the top 2% of the U.K.'s eligible bachelors and bachelorettes.

On the other hand, the filmmakers do pump up the role of the cad Daniel Cleaver, and since he's played by Hugh Grant, who is the best cad in the business right now, that's a more than welcome change. 

As Bridget's two-timing boss, Grant (who played cute but fluttery leads in the similar British romantic comedies "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill") had women in the preview audience audibly gasping at his leering sexiness. Like Pierce Brosnan before him, the 40-year-old Grant has finally matured out of his pretty boy youth. More importantly, he has also brought under control his always-remarkable ability to cycle rapidly through facial expressions.

In the past, Grant has tended to come across as a twitchy, dithering cross between Ally McBeal and William F. Buckley Jr. Here, though, he uses his face's ability to send multiple messages in a fraction of a second to show off dominance rather than diffidence. When flirting with Bridget, his lustful looks tell Bridget that not only does he want her, but that he knows she knows he wants her, leaving her feeling arousingly checkmated by his masterful control of the situation.

Interestingly, Zellweger appears to have responded to the challenge of playing against Grant's famously mobile features by raising her own game. She's always been a fine actress, but now you can watch one emotion after another flit momentarily across her face. 

UPDATE: A reader writes: 

Zellweger's "scrunched up features" are from a Swiss father and Norweigian Lapp\Saami mother, which explains her Oriental facial features.

Cool! The invaluable IMDB.com reports:

Her Norwegian mother, Kjellfrid Irene Andreassen, is of sami origin (a minority originating mainly from the northern parts of the Scandinavian peninsula often referred to as Lapland). Zellweger herself has many typical sami features, such as the strong cheekbones and the squinty eyes.

(Zellweger's dad was born in St. Gallen canton in Switzerland where the Sailers are from, but that's of only local interest.)

Now, can anybody fill me in on why Icelandic singer Bjork looks the way she does? Is she part Lapp too, or is she part Eskimo? Were her ancestors the last Vikings to make it out of Greenland alive back around 1400?

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#guardianz

British Journalism's Fact-Checking Standards Are Abysmal: You'll recall that the most important mainstream publication to fall for the state IQ hoax last May was The Economist, and that the main purveyor of the Lovenstein Institute hoax claiming Bill Clinton's IQ was 182 and George W. Bush's was 91 was The Guardian. Now, the Guardian is back with a long think piece about the state IQ hoax:

Mr [Chris] Evans was careful to cite the Economist magazine as his source - he did not vouch for the table that so many had rushed to consult. The Economist (May 15 2004) had cited as its source the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (2002).

The article then goes on to give four paragraphs detailing the fictitious IQ data. It never mentions that The Economist issued a retraction on May 20, 2004:

Clueless in St James's

Last week we published a list that purported to show the IQs of states voting for George Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Alas, we were the victim of a hoax: no such data exists. By way of apology, here are two very crude ratings of states' intelligence—and how they voted. 

Eventually, The Guardian gets around to admitting:

More tellingly, the Evans-Economist table is, as bloggers such as the (ultra-conservative) Steve Sailer [hmmhmmh, I prefer "level-headed, truth-telling realist Steve Sailer," if you please] have protested, probably something of a hoax: a concoction of Democratic wishful thinking and statistical manipulation. It does not, in fact, come from the book cited, although, as other corrective bloggers pointed out, for example) there are correlations that generally agree with the Lynn and Vanhanen thesis as regards (a) levels of income and levels of intelligence, and (b) levels of income and recent American voting patterns. But the issue is a whole lot fuzzier than everything above IQ 100 Blue: everything below IQ 100 Red.

No, it's not "something of a hoax," it is a hoax, 100% a hoax.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#marquardt

More on IQ and Voting: Here's the education levels of voters in the 2002 Midterm elections broken out by race. This comes from the long-lost exit poll data that I bought and personally number-crunched. GOP candidates for the House of Representatives did exceptionally well with the well educated in 2002, especially compared to Bush's rather downscale re-election campaign in 2004.

As you can see, with each race, the GOP did the worst with high school dropouts. With whites and Hispanics it did the best with college grads, and among blacks, Republican candidates greatest appeal was to those who had done postgrad studies (not necessarily a postgrad degree -- and all this is self-reported so there is likely some exaggeration of credentials, although voters do tend to be better educated than nonvoters.)

So, overall, there was a positive correlation between educational level and Republicanism. Still, the fact that for whites, there was a drop-off between college grad and postgrad in support for the GOP indicates

For comparison, here are the GOP candidates for the House's share of whites in 2002 versus Bush's share of whites in 2004. The 2004 numbers come from a post-election phone poll of 1800 respondents conducted by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg's Democracy Corps (see p. 34 of this big PDF):

Republican House candidates in 2002 got 59% of the white and Bush in 2004 got 58%, so it's a clean comparison. Clearly, Bush's re-election campaign appealed to people farther down the educational ladder than the 2002 House candidates, although the difference is not huge.

*

Scott Marquardt graphs IQ, income, and voting by state. IQ comes out a wash but Kerry states tend to be richest, followed by very heavily Bush states, with moderately Bush states the poorest.

On an individual level, Bush did somewhat better with high income people, but something that jumps out from the county maps showing the vast, empty red counties and the small, crowded blue counties is that while liberals may not be particularly rich themselves, liberals like to live near rich people.

I'm actually quite serious about this. One of the big things going on in the country is that people with bigger families are moving to the emptier Red states where it's easier to afford a bigger family. People with no or few kids are moving to the more crowded Blue states, where cultural amenities are denser.

***

"From the Folks who Brought You President Kerry ..." My new VDARE column showing that the exit poll's claim that 44% of Hispanics voted for Bush is not just unrealistic, but it's internally inconsistent, assuming that Hispanic voters in small states cast over 100% of their voters for Bush.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#gonzo

Bush thanks religious conservatives for their votes by dumping their hero John Ashcroft and replacing him with Alberto Gonzales, who gutted Ted Olson's objections to racial quotas at the U. of Michigan, which is the main reason the Supreme Court validated affirmative action last year. Randall Parker has the ugly details on what Gonzales' nomination means for immigration (Prop. 200 voters -- you've been warned) and quotas.

I just found out today that Gonzales was a year ahead of me at Rice U. Funny, Rice has only 2600 undergrads, but I can't recall ever hearing of him while I was there.

So far, in the week since Bush's re-election, it looks like Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World is his highest priority for his second term.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#arrrrgggh

Our Infallible Leader's pet obsession is back: From the Washington Times:

President Bush yesterday moved aggressively to resurrect his plan to relax rules against illegal immigration, a move bound to anger conservatives just days after they helped re-elect him. The president met privately in the Oval Office with Sen. John McCain to discuss jump-starting a stalled White House initiative that would grant legal status to millions of immigrants who broke the law to enter the United States...

"We are formulating plans for the legislative agenda for next year," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "And immigration will be on that agenda." He added: "The president had a meeting this morning to discuss with a significant member of the Senate the prospect of immigration reform. And he's going to make it an important item."

While the president was huddling with Mr. McCain, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was pushing the plan during a visit to Mexico City. "The president remains committed to comprehensive immigration reform as a high priority in his second term," he told a meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Commission. "We will work closely with our Congress to achieve this goal."

Bush should name his bill "The George P. Bush Dynastic Succession Enablement Act."

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#arrrrgggh

Our Infallible Leader's pet obsession is back: From the Washington Times:

President Bush yesterday moved aggressively to resurrect his plan to relax rules against illegal immigration, a move bound to anger conservatives just days after they helped re-elect him. The president met privately in the Oval Office with Sen. John McCain to discuss jump-starting a stalled White House initiative that would grant legal status to millions of immigrants who broke the law to enter the United States...

"We are formulating plans for the legislative agenda for next year," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "And immigration will be on that agenda." He added: "The president had a meeting this morning to discuss with a significant member of the Senate the prospect of immigration reform. And he's going to make it an important item."

While the president was huddling with Mr. McCain, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was pushing the plan during a visit to Mexico City. "The president remains committed to comprehensive immigration reform as a high priority in his second term," he told a meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Commission. "We will work closely with our Congress to achieve this goal."

Bush should name his bill "The George P. Bush Dynastic Succession Enablement Act."

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#aced

Education levels and voting: From my upcoming article in the Dec. 6th American Conservative:

A more direct comparison of the parties' voters can be found in the 2000 exit poll, where Bush voters reported an average educational level negligibly greater than Gore voters. Gore did best among high school dropouts and those who had undertaken post-graduate studies, with Bush leading among those in-between. (Many Democrats with advanced degrees, by the way, are public school teachers with credentials in the easy field of Education.)

In the 2002 midterm elections, voters supporting Republican House candidates were particularly well-educated. The GOP won 58% - 40% among college graduates and even captured a majority among postgrads for the first time in many years.

In 2004, Bush's majority was more downscale. If you assume that high school dropouts averaged 10 years of schooling, high school grads 12 years, those who attended college but didn't graduate 14 years, college grads 16, and postgrads 18, then Kerry voters claimed 14.64 years of education and Bush voters 14.48 years, or only about six weeks less schooling.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#polarx

The Polar Express - From my upcoming review of Robert Zemeckis' $160 million G-rated Christmas pageant, starring Tom Hanks, in the Dec. 6th American Conservative:

Chris Van Allsburg, author of 1985's The Polar Express, writes and paints the kind of hardcover picture books that win the Caldecott Medal, bedtime books that, at $18.95 each, only grandparents can afford. This format tends toward bland multiculturalist fare of the Lo-Ming and N!xau Celebrate Cinco de Mayo ilk that libraries feel obligated to buy, but Van Allsburg creates mysterious, sometimes sinister tales that kids actually enjoy.

When Van Allsburg's Jumanji was made into a 1995 Robin Williams picture, the paucity of his plot required the screenwriters to tart up the movie with an elaborate backstory. His Polar Express is even sketchier, consisting, along with his lovely but oblique paintings, of no more than a few hundred words. On Christmas Eve, a boy who is not sure he believes in Santa Claus anymore finds a magic train in front of his house, which takes him to the North Pole where Santa gives him a bell from his sleigh.

Zemeckis add a few characters, some rollercoaster action, and two musical numbers, but, on the whole, he stoically resists injecting conflict, motivation, humor, or even incident into the soporific storyline, which Van Allsburg devised, after all, to lull excited children to sleep on Christmas Eve.

While placid, the G-rated "The Polar Express" is pleasant and unobjectionable. It's endorsement of the will to believe is in tune with the times. It's even mildly admirable for bucking the "War against Christmas" waged by the bureaucrats to replace Christmas with a diversity-sensitive "Winter Solstice Holiday" -- a top-down cultural revolution opposed by 50 million Christmas-loving children. Now, that could inspire an exciting Christmas fantasy.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#melg

Conservative anger at Hollywood - A clear theme since the election is how much conservatives resent the huge influence of Hollywood liberals. But, guys, the solution isn't to write snarky blog items about it. The solution is to do what Mel Gibson did: Make really good conservative movies.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#incredibles

The Incredibles - From my upcoming review in the Dec. 6th American Conservative:

Superheroes normally have wards or nephews instead of children because real kids hate to imagine their own parents engaging in derring-do. Brad Bird wisely sidesteps this by having the adventurous couple's daughter raise to her younger brother the specter of the only fate that scares modern children more than death - divorce: "Mom and Dad's lives could be in danger, or worse -- their marriage!"

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#foxbutter

Flat Learning Curve at the NYT: A friend writes:

Sensing I had heard the song before, I went to Nexis immediately after noting the following hilarious headline over Fox Butterfield's entry in today's New York Times: "Despite Drop in Crime, An Increase in Inmates."

     Other Butterfield-based headlines, from Nexis:

     "Number In Prison Grows, Despite Crime Reduction" -- Aug. 10, 2000

     "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops" -- Aug. 9, 1998

     "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling" -- Sept. 28, 1997

Jayson Blair at least kept changing the subject.

***

The absurdity of the exit poll's Hispanic figures: A reader adds a telling fact to my VDARE.com article attacking the NEP exit poll's claim that Bush's Hispanic share leapt upward by 9 points:

Did you see the Oklahoma exit poll numbers for Hispanics? Supposedly 74% voted for Bush!  That's 3 points higher than for white Oklahomans!  

What a joke...

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#turk

The IQ Hoax makes the Turkish newspapers! From Vatan, under the headline "Bush'a oy verenlerin IQ'su düsük çikti:"

Kerry'nin eyaletleri
Connecticut: 113
Massachusetts: 111
New Jersey: 111
New York: 109
Hawaii: 106
New Hampshire: 105
California: 101

bush'un eyaletleri
Ohio: 99
Teksas: 92
Oklahoma: 90
Güney Carolina: 89
Idaho: 87
Utah: 87
Missisipi: 85

UPDATE: A friend writes: 

This data was displayed this morning on Japanese national television as the truth by Dave Specter, an American who speaks Japanese fluently and appears frequently as a "commentator."

For my debunking of this resurgent hoax, click here. You can see the full phony-baloney table, in English, here.

In contrast, here is a good-faith attempt at making up a realistic list of states by IQ and voting. (By the way, in most of the red states at the bottom of the list, the main reason they are at the bottom is because of the lower average IQs of the Democrats in those states.)

***

My new VDARE.com column on the election is up:

It took four years, but the conventional wisdom has finally accepted the “Sailer Strategy”—my oft-repeated argument (which got VDARE.com banned by Free Republic) that the simplest way for the GOP to win national elections is not outreach to minorities, but inreach, to its white base.

No doubt my check is in the mail.

We ridiculed Karl Rove's widely celebrated minority outreach initiatives—such as Bush's misbegotten promise in the 2000 campaign to weaken anti-terrorist efforts in pursuit of the Muslim vote (which turned out to only make up 0.3 percent of the electorate anyway).

And we applauded when, in the crunch before the 2002 midterm election, Rove abandoned trying to broaden the tent in favor of turning out the base, with excellent results.

Bush got his 2004 re-election campaign off to a potentially disastrous start by calling for Open Borders last January. But Congressional Republicans quickly hushed it up. Indeed, Bush benefited from a bit of his patented luck—his proposal to allow unlimited numbers of the world's six billion foreigners to move to America to work at minimum wage jobs was so insanely beyond comprehension that it simply didn't register with the media or the public. John Kerry never even attacked him for it.

That almost nobody could grasp that their President wanted to open the borders to hundreds of millions of aliens reminded me of that 1996 Simpsons' election episode where Kodos, the green space monster, kidnaps and impersonates Bill Clinton, but the public can't bring themselves to notice the hideous truth about their President:

Kodos [disguised as Clinton]: "I am Clin-Ton. As overlord, all will kneel trembling before me and obey my brutal commands." [Crosses arms] "End communication."

Marge Simpson: "Hmm, that's Slick Willie for you, always with the smooth talk."

Indeed, by the end of the campaign, Bush, who never lacks for effrontery, was scoring points by denouncing Kerry for advocating amnesty for illegal aliens!

I also debunk the claim that Bush did radically better among Hispanics.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#edincpol

Sailer's Theory of Education, Income, and Politics: "An individual whose educational level is higher than his income would predict will tend to vote Democratic. An Individual whose income is higher than his educational level would predict will tend to vote Republican."

Any thoughts?

A reader writes:

Your theory needs a little fine tuning, in my humble opinion. Engineers and scientists seem to vote Republican. They're real smart, but don't make nearly as much money as say, an ambulance chasing lawyer (John Edwards) or a high-level bureaucrat in an NGO with a degree in "Art therapy" or "Underwater Basketweaving."

Pseudo-intellectuals tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic, as I learned in my years going to college in Washington, D.C.

That's true. I grew up around conservative-voting Lockheed engineers, including Henry Combs, the chief designer of the most magnificent industrial artifact of the 20th Century, the SR-71, and they didn't make too much money.

*

Actors and singers would be exceptions in the opposite direction -- make lots of money with little education and vote left.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#canadanogo

Hey, Democrats thinking of moving to Canada! How do you know Canada wants you? 

Back in 2001, I wrote about Canada's system for choosing immigrants. I know, I know, the concept of choosing immigrants sounds downright un-American, but that's how the Canadians do it. Unfortunately for American Democrats, they may not get in:

Canada doesn't want me. I just found out that, if necessary, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would bar me from immigrating into Canada. Why?

Because I'm just not good enough to be a Canadian.

With possible immigration reform much in the news in America, I decided to research Canada's system for choosing immigrants. Perhaps America could learn something from its northern neighbor.

The Canadian government has a voracious appetite for new immigrants. The ruling Liberals intend to boost the legal immigration rate to 1 percent of the population annually, about three times the American rate. Despite that, I discovered, its official position is that the people currently living in Canada would find my joining them to be less of a blessing than a curse.

In 15 minutes, on the government's "self-assessment worksheet" at Web site cic.gc.ca, I was able to learn that Canada's considered judgment of me is, "Don't call us, we'll call you."

On this nine-question test, a would-be immigrant to Canada must score a minimum of 60 points out of 100 to qualify to be interviewed by a visa officer.

It's not that I particularly want to become a Canadian. I'm a loyal American, born and bred. I've only spent about six days in Canada in my life. From what I saw (mostly the insides of Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas), Canada seemed to be a fine country; one blessed with Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas every bit as nice as those in my native land. Still, I couldn't resist the challenge. Was I man enough to be a Canadian?

I sat down to take the test. First, I found, you get 8 points just for having a pulse. "Hey, how hard can this be?" I said to my wife.

Then the test inquired into a series of important facts about oneself.

How old are you? I'm 42, which won me the maximum of 10 points for being in my immigrating prime. But not for long. I'll soon enter a rapid decline. By age 49, I'll get zero points.

How much schooling have you had? High school dropouts get zero; high school graduates, five; college grads 15; advanced degree holders 16.

Those two long years I spent getting an MBA have finally paid off! Chalk up 16 more points for me.

I'm rolling now, with a running total of 34 points.

Can you speak English and/or French fluently? I get nine points for English, but what about snagging those additional six for French? Perhaps they'd be a good sport and give me a few points just for trying to parlez la (le?) Francais? No. As anyone who has attempted to speak French has learned the hard way, trying isn't good enough. You have to be able to "comprehend and communicate effectively on a range of general topics" -- and that's just to score three points.

So, I'm at 43 points by now.

Do you have a close relative in Canada? That's worth five points. No. My wife helpfully pointed out that one of her Italian great-uncles stayed in Canada for a few months before he could arrange to sneak into the United States. I appreciated her suggestion, but didn't think that would count.

Maybe I could talk one of my uncles into moving to Canada ahead of me. But what if he couldn't qualify unless I moved to Canada ahead of him? Thinking about this made my head hurt, so I moved on to the occupation questions.

Do you have a guaranteed job arranged in Canada? No. The closest I could come to that is to point out that last year I had a part-time job in Canada. Oddly enough, while I was living in Chicago, I was actually hired as a columnist by one of Toronto's biggest newspapers, even though I haven't been to Canada since 1994.

Unfortunately, I was fired almost immediately, probably because my awareness of Canadian culture was limited to knowing that it is intensely beaver-centric and that Wayne Gretzky is (was?) a hockey player.

How much formal education or training does your occupation require? To be frank, I've never noticed that journalism requires any. As irascible basketball coach Bobby Knight likes to point out to reporters, "Everybody learns to write by the second grade, but then most of us move on to other things."

Yet, somebody has apparently hoodwinked the trusting Canadian authorities into awarding journalists 15 out of 18 points, the same as they give computer systems analysts and tree-service technicians.

Does Canada need more workers in your field? As a journalist, I only scored three out of 10. It would appear that Canada is quite capable of producing an ample supply of native know-it-alls and doesn't need much help from abroad. Importing additional journalists is officially deemed less important to Canada's well being than bringing in more blacksmiths (5 points), not to mention extra clinical perfusionists (10 points).

Whatever it is that clinical perfusionists do, Canada can't seem to get enough of it. I tried to assure the authorities that if they admitted me -- while I wouldn't actually know how to clinically perfuse anybody (anything?) -- I would definitely write hard-hitting editorials deploring the clinical perfusion shortage and demanding that Steps Must Be Taken. But there was no place on the form to indicate that.   [Continued here...]

*

A reader writes:

I've had a lot of lefties tell me they are going to move to Canada or New Zealand due to the election, so I then ask them why it is they don't move to a country run by (and with a majority of) 'people of color'. They have no real answer, so I then tell them that the only logical explanation is that they are racists. I figure if I keep it up at least one of them will move to the Sudan in order to prove me wrong.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#iqhoaxrec

The State IQ hoax claiming that Democratic states have much higher IQs (Connecticut = 113) have much higher IQs than Republican states (Utah = 87) flared up again, with just one website publishing the fictitious table reporting 540,000 hits.. This time, however, lots of people immediately linked to my debunking from last May, providing iSteve.com with its busiest day ever on 11/5/04. One person wrote:

Just thought I'd drop you a note saying thanks for debunking that.  I am a diehard liberal, voted for Kerry (almost for a 3rd party leftist) and one thing I can't stand is hateful lies from either side.  A bunch of liberal friends showed me the IQ chart, which I didn't believe, so I looked it up and found your analysis of it.  If liberals want to attack conservatives for the truthfulness of their propaganda, they need to first examine their own information before passing it on.  I'm with you that this is an attempt on the part of the democrats to feel better about themselves and put down republicans, and the fact that it is so spiteful and false is shameful.

I just finished an essay for the December 6, 2004 issue of The American Conservative (available to electronic subscribers about Saturday, November 13) on the propensity of liberals to simultaneously deny the validity of IQ while obsessing over their supposed superiority in IQ over conservatives.

By the way, this page makes a good faith attempt to estimate average IQs by state from SAT and ACT scores. The methodology is far from bulletproof, but the author's results sound not too implausible: his estimates range from an average of 94 in Mississippi and South Carolina to 104 in New Hampshire. If you can think of a better way to do it, send the author an email.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#vest

Kudos to Mickey Kaus for guessing right on Bush's back bulge -- It apparently is his bulletproof vest, So, here's a follow-up rumor (which I just made up out of whole cloth): If Bush looks lean and trim while wearing a bulletproof vest, he must in reality be wasting away down to Karen Carpenter proportions underneath it! Is Bush anorexic?

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#alfie

"Alfie:" From my review in The American Conservative: This 60s-remake genre's only success was last year's nifty updating of the Michael Caine heist flick "The Italian Job," so it was predictable that Caine's trademark film, the 1966 comedy-drama "Alfie" about a womanizing Cockney chauffeur, would be redone. As Canadian seer Colby Cosh has noted, Hollywood believes that "The public adores the familiar, even if all they know is that it should be familiar," and anybody who has ever set foot in a piano bar has that catchy Bacharach-David line "What's it all about, Alfie?" tattooed to their gray matter.

Jude Law, the cute young Englishman who is in six movies this autumn, replaces Caine as the cad who slowly learns he should have acted like a dad, but incompatibilities quickly surface. Caine was 33, a Korean combat veteran, 6'-2," and every inch a man. With his bulging Adam's apple and pop eyes, Caine's Alfie was a tad funny-looking but his cast-iron confidence made him irresistible. In Alfie's many asides spoken directly to the camera, Caine's rather flat affect was ultimately less tiresome than Law's attempts to charm and seduce. In short, Caine addressed the men in the audience, Law the women...

Changes in the script mostly dissipate the elemental power of the original. The cad vs. dad distinction (first named by anthropologist Henry Harpending in 1982) had been underlined by the first version's subplot where Alfie's stand-by girlfriend, whom he won't marry or support even though she'd given him a beloved son, wedded an unsexy bus conductor because he'd promised to provide for her little boy. Two years later, a despondent Alfie chanced upon the now-happy family at the christening of their second child.

But Law's Alfie isn't even the father of Marisa Tomei's little boy, and when she eventually dumps him, it's for a guy who is so cool-looking that he could be the bass-player for The Strokes.

Even worse is the loss of the famous climax that shattered, at least temporarily, Alfie's regal self-assurance. After he'd impregnated a sick friend's wife, he hired an illegal abortionist to induce her to deliver a stillbirth in his apartment. Returning home later, the camera focuses in on his trembling face as he found, we later learn, the dead body of his tiny but perfectly formed child.

Forty million legal abortions later, no Hollywood movie would dare drive home the reality of abortion so powerfully. So, Law's Alfie merely chauffeurs his pal's girlfriend to the clinic, where, predictably, she decides not to have the abortion. In today's films, almost nobody ever actually has an abortion. See, everybody in Hollywood is pro-choice, but being pro-choice isn't about having abortions, it's about, like, the abstract, metaphysical concept of choice, you know.

Okay, sure, whatever … but it makes for a forgettable movie.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#Hisptex

Request for help: For my VDARE column that will appear Sunday night, I need to evaluate Dick Morris' spin: 

GEORGE W. Bush was re-elected on Tuesday because the Hispanic vote, long a Democratic Party preserve, shifted toward the president's side. The USA Today exit poll shows Hispanics, who had voted for Al Gore by 65 percent to 35 percent, supported Kerry by only 55 to 43. Since Hispanics accounted for 12 percent of the vote, their 10-point shift meant a net gain for Bush of 2.4 percent which is most of the improvement in his popular-vote share.

I like ol' Dick, but even I have to admit that no pundit is more spectacularly wrong about more things on a regular basis than Dick Morris. 

Obviously, he's totally exaggerated the size of the Hispanic vote, but did Bush really score in the mid 40s with Hispanics? I've looked through the troubled NEP exit poll data, and most of the states look reasonable: California 32%, Illinois 23%, New York 24%, Colorado 30%, Nevada 39%, Florida 56%, etc., but that national figure appears to be driven by an eye-popping report of 59% of Hispanics for Bush in Texas, up 16 percentage points from 43% in 2000.

So, what I need your help with is in finding articles from local newspapers evaluating on a county or precinct basis voting by ethnic bloc. For example, if Bush really did carry 59% of the Hispanic vote in Texas, then he should have swept the mostly Hispanic counties in the Rio Grande Valley. Did that actually happen?

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#nclbf16

Bush puts teeth in his No Child Left Behind law:

LITTLE EGG HARBOR, N.J. Nov 4, 2004 — A National Guard F-16 fighter jet on a nighttime training mission strafed an elementary school with 25 rounds of ammunition, authorities said Thursday. No one was injured.

The military is investigating the incident that damaged Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School shortly after 11 p.m.

Police were called when a custodian who was the only person in the school at the time heard what sounded like someone running across the roof.

Police Chief Mark Siino said officers noticed punctures in the roof. Ceiling tiles had fallen into classrooms, and there were scratch marks in the asphalt outside.

The pilot of the single-seat jet was supposed to fire at a target on the ground three and half miles away from school, said Col. Brian Webster, commander of the 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard. He does not know what happened that led to the school getting shot up.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#chalabster

What Kerry should have done: Just as Bush ran against Saddam Hussein, Kerry should have run against Ahmed Chalabi. Kerry should have constantly called the war in Iraq "the Cheney-Chalabi War." He should have ignored Bush, whom lots of people like, and focused on the baleful influence of Cheney and Chalabi as the architects of the war.

After 9/11, Americans wanted an Ay-rab to hate. Bush gave them Saddam Hussein, even though he didn't have anything to do with 9/11. Kerry should have blamed the Iraq war on Cheney's infatuation with this fat Arab convicted embezzler. It would have worked psychologically and it was certainly a lot more honest than what the Bush Administration did. 

So, why did Kerry stop talking about Chalabi during the last months of the campaign? Presumably, because Chalabi's supporters in the Administration were disproportionately Jewish, and the neocons would have smeared Kerry as anti-Semitic. Better to lose the Presidency than that! 

In reality, the voters don't know from neocons. Kerry should simply have talked about Cheney as Chalabi's conduit to control over American foreign policy.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#votesmart

How smart are Bush and Kerry voters? I'm getting thousands of hits today because last May's IQ by state hoax is hot again as Kerry supporters try to console themselves by proving that they have higher IQs than Bush supporters. But what about 2004?

Probably the simplest and surest way to get actual data on this question is by looking at the education level demographics in the exit poll data. As I've mentioned, I'm cynical about the accuracy of Tuesday's monopoly exit poll, but it's probably as good we've got. So, let's put education credentials on a 1 to 5 scale with:

No high school degree = 1

High school degree, no college = 2

Some college, no degree = 3

College graduate = 4

"Postgrad study" = 5

In 2000, Bush's voters had almost higher levels of education, with an average of 3.29 to 3.28 for Gore voters. (A 3.29 means that the average Bush voter fell 29% of the way between Some College and College Graduate). Gore did best with high school dropouts and those with postgrad study, and Bush did best in-between.

In the 2002 midterms, GOP candidates for the House attracted a particularly brainy bunch of voters, garnering a 3.37 to the Democratic House candidates' voters' 3.21. GOP house candidates carried college graduates by a 58-40 margin, and even won a majority among those with post-graduate study. (Please note that the post-grad category gets inflated by Democratic-voting public school teachers with advanced degrees in Education.)

In 2004, however, Bush went slightly down-scale, with an average voter educational level of 3.24 to Kerry's 3.32. Bush did much better among high school dropouts in 2004, attracting 49% of their vote, compared to only 35% in 2000.

The gap was narrower among voters for the House candidates with Democratic supporters averaging 3.31 to Republicans 3.28. (This suggests that the small number of people who voted for a  Republican House candidate but not for Bush were particularly well-educated). In sum, these are not big differences. 

Alternatively, you can look at income rather than education as a proxy for IQ: Bush won 56-43 among people making more than $50k in household income and 58-41 among households making over 100k. 

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#jewishv

The Jewish vote: The exit polls suggest that Bush did badly among Jews --- a little better than in 2000 when Joe Lieberman was on the Democratic ticket -- but perhaps a little worse than the GOP norm, and much worse than Reagan's record 39% in 1980. Apparently, the much celebrated realignment simply didn't happen.

Unfortunately, I have some real concerns about the National Election Pool's [NEP] exit poll validity this year, since it predicted a solid Kerry victory. Since the election ended, they've rejiggered the results to make it look like the poll predicted a Bush victory, but who know how valid the internal demographics are. So, if you see anything about actual voting in counties or precincts with heavy Jewish populations, please let me know. (The same goes for Hispanic voting.)

For what it's worth, the NEP National Presidential poll currently says Bush got 25% of the Jewish vote in 2004, and in the battleground state of Florida, only 20%. 

The LA Times conducted a separate exit poll in California and came up with 20% of California Jews voting for Bush. This compares nicely to the 19% the NEP poll is claiming in California.

For House candidates, nationally in 2004 according to NEP, the GOP got only 22% of Jewish votes. This compares to 29% in 2002 and 22% in 2000.

Assuming this data is roughly correct, I would suggest two driving forces. First, although before the invasion, Jews advocated the Iraq Attaq in about the same proportions as the rest of the country, they may subsequently have turned against it earlier than the national average because Jews tended to be better informed. 

Second, my guess is that, despite all that Bush does for Israel, a lot of Jews just don't like evangelical Christians. So, the GOP has to choose between appealing to one group or the other. Evangelicals are much more numerous than Jews, so that's the way to win elections. However, Jews are much more articulate than evangelicals, so that's not the way to win in the history books, since history is written not so much by the victors as by the good writers.

***

IQ by State Hoax -- Lots of interest again in my debunking of the last May's hoax claiming that states that voted for Gore in 2000 have much higher IQs than state that voted for Bush. If you came here looking for my blog items on the IQ by State hoax, click here.

By the way, if you are interested in this topic, you are probably also interested in my big scoop story from October 2004 on how John Kerry and George W. Bush compare in IQ, as indicated by their scores on IQ-like military aptitude tests. The original story is here. A follow-up story putting the whole question of presidential IQ in historical perspective is here. You can read all sorts of reactions to my study, including the interview where Tom Brokaw asked John Kerry about my article here in my October blog archive. (Just scan down through my blog items for lots of good material mixed in with irrelevant stuff.) And, you can read what Kerry told Tom Brokaw off camera about why his score might have been worse than Bush's here.

Finally, I'm going to be adding material on IQ and the new 2004 elections on my blog at www.iSteve.com. So check in periodically.]

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#convwis

The new conventional wisdom (is what I was hawking four years ago):

Bush's Strategic Gamble Pays Off

NEW YORK, Nov. 3, 2004

(CBS) By David Paul Kuhn, CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

President Bush's campaign won re-election through the strategic gamble that there was more to gain from galvanizing conservatives and stressing moral issues than from reaching out to centrist voters.

The election swung on Ohio's 5.8 million voters. In what proved to be a pivotal endgame decision, the Bush-Cheney campaign refocused on the Buckeye State in the last two weeks, visiting it on seven of the last 12 days prior to the election.

Previously, Mr. Bush had paid more attention to Pennsylvania, visiting it more than any other state since he took office. Pennsylvania ultimately went for Kerry.

Ohio lost one-fourth of the nation's manufacturing jobs - 230,000 since Mr. Bush took office - yet even there 23 percent of voters said morality was the most important issue in determining their vote, second only to the economy.

"Ohio with the job loss figure should have been an easy win for Sen. Kerry but it wasn't, essentially because of these values issues," said Gary Bauer, a leading social conservative. "To some extent voters in Ohio may have felt, 'I'm not happy about the job loss but I can't do anything about those international trends anymore than George Bush could.'"

Of those who said the economy mattered most, 83 percent supported Kerry while only 17 percent supported Mr. Bush. Of those who said values mattered most, 85 percent backed President Bush while just 14 percent supported Kerry.

Though he won support from social conservatives nationwide, it was not evangelical Protestants alone who tipped the scale in Mr. Bush's favor. Strikingly, John Kerry, the would-be second Catholic president, was unable to capture more Catholic votes than Mr. Bush, a born-again Christian. An altar boy as a child, Kerry won only 44 percent of Catholics; Mr. Bush improved on his 2000 mark, grabbing 55 percent of Catholic support.

"We've either got to find a way to win much more strongly among women, which we have done in the past, which I believe we did in 1992. Or we've got to find a way to gain the trust of white men who do not believe that Democrats serve their interests," said Steve Grossman, who co-chaired John Kerry's 1996 Senate campaign and was chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Bill Clinton's presidency.

Indications are that evangelical whites turned out heavily for the president in Ohio and elsewhere. A contributing factor for their high turnout may have been the amendment to ban same-sex marriage, which passed in Ohio, as well as in the ten other states.

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, pressed the Republican secretary of state of Ohio to have the marriage ban on the ballot. Though all indications are Mr. Bush had a principled belief that marriage should only be defined between a man and women, Rove believed the measure would galvanize his base - even if it meant the estrangement of an estimated 1 million gay Republicans.

Rove's decision to largely ignore independent voters at the close of the election was a strategic gamble. But by early Wednesday morning, Rove looked to have hit the jackpot - yet again. (That's possibly why President Bush called Rove the "architect" as he accepted a second term in office Wednesday afternoon.)

***

Readers write:

Way to go! The people who said "moral values" most likely used the exit polls as an infomercial and heaier issues played a role. The Sailer strategy is just common sense and historically inevitable. You are very far ahead of the curve and I really appreciate your site.

*

Has Karl Rove thanked you for showing him how to win the election?

*

The dynamic of President Bush's second term could change a lot from his first because of his dynamic with his father. In his first term, Dubya cut taxes, reversing the family stain from his father's "read my lips" lie and tax increase; captured Saddam and killed his sons, all of whom had survived Bush I's first term; and won the re-election that his father couldn't achieve. He now can move on to his own accomplishments, for good or ill.

***

http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#HouseRaces

Scoop: House Race Summary: Please give credit to iSteve.com. As of about 2:30 pm Eastern Standard Time, in races for the U.S. House of Representatives, the GOP candidates currently have 50.4% of all votes nationally (50,433,174), vs. 47.2% for Democrats (47,182,438), and 0.9% for Libertarians (945,535). T

This 3.2 point advantage for the GOP in the House races compares to the 3.1 point margin enjoyed by George W. Bush over John F. Kerry, suggesting that the two Presidential candidates ran about as strongly as their parties. 

This 3.2 point GOP edge is somewhat smaller than the approximately 5 point advantage enjoyed by the Republicans in 2002, and somewhat larger than the 1 point margin the party possessed in 1998 and 2000.

One thing to keep in mind here is that no votes are counted in races where there was only one candidate. Thus, the total number of votes cast in House elections is only 99 million, compared to about 113 million and counting in the Presidential race. Across the country, the Republicans and Democrats each won 17 House races unopposed, so this factor won't have much impact on the overall proportions of the vote.

The raw data for each race is available at the San Jose Mercury-News' website, but I tabulated the national totals.

***

David Dreier survives KFI rabble-rousers John and Ken's Political Human Sacrifice, but the California Republican Congressman's 54-42 margin of victory is the smallest of the 50 or so incumbents in hideously gerrymandered California.

***

Initiative 200 passes 56-44 in Arizona. Peter Brimelow has the story on VDARE.com.

***

Tom Tancredo win re-election to the House from Colorado with 60%.

***

Mitch Daniels wins the governor's house in Indiana -- I had dinner with him a couple of times back in the 1990s and he's a very nice and very smart man. He spent a couple of years as Bush's budget director, which must have been like being the chaperone in a bordello, so I'm sure he'll find this a less frustrating job.

***

House of Representatives national total votes by party -- Back in 2002 I scooped everybody by first calculating the GOP's overall margin of victory over the Democrats in national votes for the House. I shall be posting that number again by the dawn's early light.

***

The election in a nutshell -- It was a repeat of 2000, except that the country shifted about four or five points to the right, most likely due to 9/11.

***

The Exit Poll changes its tune in the wee hours of the morning. The National Election Pool exit poll on CNN is now reporting figures showing that Bush supposedly won in the exit poll, after reporting for many hours that Kerry had a two point margin in the exit poll.  They've boosted the national sample size by 500 and, surprise, surprise, the missing voters were almost all for Bush. Now they are claiming they projected a 2 point Bush victory. This is bogus CYA maneuvering. They screwed up, so how can we trust their numbers for doing historical analysis of which demographic segments contributed to the victory?

This is what you get with a monopoly: incompetence. We had three exit polls in 2000: VNS, the LA Times, and, I believe, the NY Times. In 2002 we only had one and the data was a year late! This year we've got one and it's no good.

***

Hawaii: Did you notice that Hawaii turned out not to be as close as it was played up to be by all the journalists who wanted an expense-account trip to check out pulse of the electorate in Maui?

***

How big a win for Bush? The average margin of victory in the popular vote from 1940-2000 was 9.2 points. Bush's final margin will probably be about one third of the average after California is fully counted. His electoral college margin will likely be well below average because his support is highly concentrated in that big L-shaped group of states. So, it looks like a clear win, unless something screwy happens in Ohio and Kerry somehow runs the table on the rest of the states, but hardly a sizable one for Bush.

Here are the popular vote margins:

1940   9.9 points

1944   7.5

1948   4.5

1952  10.7

1956  15.4

1960   0.2

1964  22.6

1968   0.7

1972  23.2

1976   2.1

1980   9.7

1984  18.2

1988   7.8

1992   5.6

1996   8.5

2000   0.5

***

So, all you who wrote me to say Bush's IQ was really -63, have you noticed by now that ever since he stopped drinking, he always figures out how to get what he wants? Granted, he doesn't particularly much want to be a good President, not if it would interfere with his bedtime, but he sure wants to be President.

In a recent movie review in The American Conservative of John Sayles' anti-Bush movie Silver City, I wrote:

That Chris Cooper, a late-blooming but brilliant character actor who won an Oscar as the motormouth orchid poacher in 2002's "Adaptation," portrays the President sounded promising. I'd hoped that Cooper could make sense of Bush's complex personality, which long ago dazzled Rove with its political potential: gauche in public but commanding in private; cocky with peers but intimidated by his father; cunning at politics but bored by policy.

Sadly, Sayles' script simply renders Cooper's candidate as inarticulate to the point of brain damage. You wind up feeling sorry for this harmless halfwit … and for the misguided liberals like Sayles who think they can beat Bush by claiming to have higher IQs.

By the way, Charles Murray and I calculated from Bush's 1206 SAT score that his IQ falls around the 95th percentile, which the late historian Jim Chapin estimated would put him only a little below average for a President. Senator John Kerry's test scores and grades are kept under tighter security than the Pentagon's Iran secrets [not any more!], so there's little reason to assume Kerry is any brighter than Bush, although he does seem more interested in current events.

In the President's lone losing race, his 1978 run for Congress from West Texas, the victor stressed Bush's two Ivy League degrees. Bush resolved never to allow himself to be outdumbed again. And the Democrats haven't outsmarted him since.

And you can say that again.

***

My friend Steve Valles' fraternity buddy Leroy Chiao votes from outer space:

With a quick computer key stroke, space station astronaut Leroy Chiao (search) became the first American to vote for president from space, casting an encrypted ballot via e-mail and urging fellow countrymen to go to the polls Tuesday.

"It was just a small thing for me, but it is important symbolically to show that every vote does count," Chiao said from the international space station a few hours after the polls opened 225 miles below.

Chiao, 44, sent in his ballot Sunday night — "Halloween night and maybe that's kind of appropriate."...

The astronaut, who is sharing the space station with Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov (search), does not expect to learn the outcome of the election until he wakes up Wednesday morning. An early wake-up call usually conveys bad news, he said, "so this is something that can wait until the morning."

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National Exit Poll Demographics are up here on CNN -- I would imagine these are preliminary because the polls haven't closed in California yet. Or maybe they'll just ignore people who vote late on the West Coast. Or maybe they just made up all these numbers, I'm getting pretty frustrated between the lack of agreement between the exit poll projections and the actual vote counts.

It looks like the final set of pre-elections telephone polls turned out to be more accurate than the exit polls. The exit polls appears to have a pro-Kerry bias of about 3 points (making the margin bias about 6 points)  That is inexcusable. Exit polls have an order of magnitude larger sample size than telephone polls and fewer problems with the "likely" voter issue.

Other people care about exit polls' accuracy because they want to know who won a few hours ahead of the actual results, but I'm willing to wait. What I care about exit polls for is being able to figure out later what happened. And this sizable inaccuracy in the exit poll undermines confidence in their use for historical analysis.

Meanwhile, NBC has an exit poll with slightly different results here. Both NBC and CNN belong to the National Election Pool consortium that's using the same pollster. It also projects a 2 point national popular vote win for Kerry. I'll try to figure out what's going on and let you know.

Overall, CNN NEP exit poll seems to show a 2 point Kerry win in the popular vote, but who knows about that? 

Approaching midnight EST, the actual vote shows Bush with a sizable lead of 2 million votes.

 Are Democratic bosses holding back their votes? That's the oldest trick. In 1960, Theodore H. White was sitting at Hyannisport two days after the election with Kennedy's minions when Walter Cronkite comes on to announce that the long-awaited downstate Illinois votes have finally come in, and they are landslide for Nixon, giving him a shot at the White House. Teddy White is heartbroken but Kenny O'Donnell and the rest of the Kennedy spearcarriers erupt into cheers. White is baffled, until they explain what just happened. The downstate Republican bosses were trying to out-wait Mayor Daley but they finally cratered and tossed in their hand. Now, Hizzoner knows exactly how many votes from Cook County he has to deliver to make JFK the President, and Daley has never let them down yet.

Or it could be that the exit poll is just biased toward Kerry. If it turns out that Bush wins the popular vote, this would be the third national election in a row in which the exit polling produced a major embarrassment. If the exit poll numbers are off by, say, 4 points, that will make demographic analysis less trustworthy. Despite the Florida fiasco in 2000 and the meltdown in 2002, the overall national numbers that came out of the exit polls were very close to the actual election results, so I felt a fair degree of faith in looking at the demographic breakdowns, but if the overall national results are off this year, then we're going to have to go back to the drawing board to get accurate demographic breakdowns.

For whatever it's worth, the NEP exit polls show Kerry winning Ohio by 4 points, Bush winning Florida by 0.15 points (i.e, a toss-up), Kerry winning Minnesota by 9, Wisconsin even, Kerry winning Iowa by 1, Kerry winning Michigan by 5, and Pennsylvania by 9, Kerry winning New Mexico by 2 or 3. Nevada is close to a tossup, with Kerry in a slight lead, due to 3% of men voting for None of the Above. Considering that Bush won Florida pretty easily, maybe you should subtract 3-5 points from Kerry's lead in each of these to adjust for pro-Kerry bias in the exit polls. We shall see.

Otherwise, demographics look pretty similar to 2000. Keep in mind as we go thru these versus 2000 that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by about half of a percent, and there will be one or two points less going to third parties this year. So, Bush would need to improve by one or two points to win the popular vote this year, assuming these are accurate.

Kerry is up strongly among men, from 42% of men for Gore, versus 47% of men for Kerry. Among white men, Bush is down from 60% to 58%, while Kerry is at 40%, up from Gore's 36%. Bush is up among women from 43% to 45%. So, the gender gap narrowed from 11 to 7 points from 2000 to 2004. As, you'd expect, this doesn't make much difference.

Among whites, Bush is up 1 to 55% while Kerry is up 2 to 44%. Bush is up 1 among blacks to 10, up 6 among Hispanics to 41% (but what about California?), and down 2 among Asians to 39%.

Bush is down 4 among 18-29 year olds and up 4 among over 60s. Most importantly, he's down 2 among 45-59s.

Education: Bush is up strongly, +7 points to 46%, among those who admit to not having a high school degree. He's down 1 among college grads (50%) and down -3 to 41% for Bush among postgrads. Only a modest decline in educational level among Bush voters versus 2000, but a big droppoff versus the 2002 House races, when the GOP candidates took 58% of college grads and 53% of post grads.  

Homosexuals (4% of the electorate) are going 21% for Bush, down 4 from 2000. So, even though running against gay marriage cost Bush Andrew Sullivan's endorsement, the overall impact was miniscule (4% times 4%).

Protestants at 56% for Bush, no change. (This includes black Protestants - the more interesting number is white Protestants, but I don't see that yet). Catholics going 49% for Bush, up 2, Jews 22% for Bush (up 3, but that's compared to 2000 when Lieberman was on the ballot -- a pretty weak return on investment). The big problem for Bush is the "Other" category, where he's down 7 to 21%. I don't think that's many Muslims -- they were only 0.3% of electorate when they were broken out in 2002. But who are they? None is down 1 point to 29%.

Razib in the Pacific Northwest says: "i bet you a lot of the "Other" category are a lot of new age spiritual people, my town is packed with them, and they HATE the war in iraq." 

Late breakers went strongly for Kerry, with Kerry winning 54-40 among those deciding on election day.

Kerry won 57-41 among those who said they didn't vote in 2000 and 64-17 among those who voted for a third party candidate in 2000.

The main regional difference is that Kerry beat Bush by a bigger margin out West, largely due to Nader being less of a factor.

One interesting point is that in 2000, 67% of voters said they worked full time, while in 2004, only 60% said they worked full time. 

A reader writes:

If you've ever read Robert Caro's bio of Lyndon Johnson, you know of Johnson's greatest political bunder: in his first race for the senate in 1941, he got overconfident and allowed the bosses from the border counties (which he had bought, mostly with money from Brown & Root, later Kellog Brown and Root, curently a part of Halliburton...) to report their vote early in the day, thus giving his opponent the chance to beat his numbers in his counties. He probably thought his opponent ("Pass the Biscuits" Pappy O'Daniel, unaccountably transported to Mississippi by the Coen Brothers in "O Brother Where Out Thou") didn't have the resources to buy enough votes - and he was right. But it turned out that Pappy, a prohibitionist, had been making noises about outlawing beer - and the the beer distributors, on their own, decided that it would be better for them if he were kicked upstairs to the Senate where he could do less harm, so they bought the votes themselves.

Ah, Texas politics- makes all the other states look downright boring...

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iSteve.com -- the only blog not overloaded today!

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So, how much would Bush be winning by if:

- He'd invaded only Afghanistan

- He hadn't run up vast deficits

- He'd been against illegal immigration

- He'd been against racial quotas?

5 points? 10 points? 15 points? A sensible Republican President could have breezed home this year, but Bush isn't one of them.

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Let me know when first exit poll demographics are available: Please E-mail me with the URL when you see demographic breakdowns from the exit polls. Thanks.

Democratic sources are feeling pretty pleased and Republicans are not, but it's still early. We should all know soon enough.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#skunk

What Kerry Told Brokaw Off-Camera about his IQ Score: From NewsMax:

Brokaw revealed Kerry's off-camera excuse in an election-morning interview with radio host Don Imus.

"I asked the question of John Kerry because the New York Times had reported that a man by the name of David Sailer [sic] had analyzed their military aptitude tests and then had had IQ experts do an analysis as well - or the Times did," the NBC anchorman explained. "And they concluded that George W. Bush might be a point or two higher than John Kerry in IQ." Brokaw continued:

"And John Kerry was caught a little off guard, he said. 'Well, more power to him. I thought that that was not public.' And when the interview was over he said, 'I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.'"

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#gogh

A not fun story: Theo Van Gogh, maker of a Pym Fortuyn documentary, assassinated in Amsterdam. The AP reports:

A Dutch filmmaker who had received death threats after releasing a movie criticizing the treatment of women under Islam was slain in Amsterdam on Tuesday, police said.

A suspect, a 26-year-old man with dual Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was arrested after a shootout with officers that left him wounded, police said.

Filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been threatened after the August airing of the movie "Submission," which he made with a right-wing Dutch politician who had renounced the Islamic faith of her birth. Van Gogh had received police protection after its release.

Dutch national broadcaster NOS and other media reported that Van Gogh's killer shot and stabbed his victim and left a note on his body. NOS said witnesses described the attacker as having an "Arab appearance."...

The slain filmmaker was the great grandson of the brother of famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, who was also named Theo. ...

In addition to his film, van Gogh also wrote columns about Islam that were published on his Web site, www.theovangogh.nl, and Dutch newspaper Metro.

The short television film "Submission" aired on Dutch television in August, enraged the Muslim community in the Netherlands.

It told the fictional story of a Muslim woman forced into a violent marriage, raped by a relative and brutally punished for adultery.

The English-language film was scripted by a right-wing politician who years ago renounced the Islamic faith of her birth and now refers to herself as an "ex-Muslim."

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament, has repeatedly outraged fellow Muslims by criticizing Islamic customs and the failure of Muslim families to adopt Dutch ways.

The place of Muslim immigrants in Dutch society has long been a contentious issue in the Netherlands, where many right-wing politicians have pushed for tougher immigration laws and say Muslims already settled in the country must make a greater effort to assimilate.

Theo van Gogh, 47, has often come under criticism for his controversial movies. In December, his next movie "06-05," about the May 6, 2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, is scheduled to debut on the Internet.

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"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#berlinski

The Continuing Intellectual Decline of Commentary: In former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz's second autobiography, 1979's Breaking Ranks, he expressed pride that cutting edge sociobiologists like Edward O. Wilson had become more welcome on the right than on the left. Yet, in recent years, Commentary has turned its back on Darwinism and formed an alliance with creationists in order to reward evangelical Christians for backing Israel, and thus missed out on much of the intellectual excitement of recent years. 

For example, the November issue features "On the Origins of the Mind: Evolutionary psychology is a rhetorical tour de force, but something else as science" by their recurrent debunker of Darwinism, David Berlinski of the "Intelligent Design"-purveying Discovery Institute. It delivers Berlinski's usual grating combination of pedantry, snideness, and obtuseness. 

If I was editor of Commentary, my #1 goal would be to recruit Steven Pinker as a regular contributor. Indeed, I imagine the Podhoretz of the 1970s would have agreed. Instead, Berlinski is Commentary's designated hitter on Darwinism!

Further, while I normally approve of initiatives for Jewish-Christian rapprochement, I very much doubt that Israel picks up any additional support from evangelicals because Commentary runs Berlinski's abstruse and coy essays. 

This is not to say that all is lost at Commentary. It continues to run Dan Seligman's fine work. 

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#Floridabotch

Back to Florida: Since you are going to be hearing a lot of lies over the next 24 hours about what happened in Florida four years ago, here's my UPI analysis that explains what went down: Gore really did represent the Will of the People who turned up at the voting boots, but his would-be voters were more incompetent at casting unambiguous ballots than Bush voters were. This was not caused by Gore voters being faced by objectively more difficult voting conditions -- indeed, it appears that Bush voters tended to live more in counties with harder to use voting machines. No, Gore's problem was that within counties, where everybody used the same voting machines, the precincts that favored Gore had higher rates of botched ballots due to the greater ineptness of Gore voters.

Here's what I wrote a month after the election:

December 8, 2000 (UPI) -- Did unfair disparities in voting machines and ballot designs rob Al Gore of certain victory in Florida? Did his supporters have crucial ballots thrown out as uncountable because they tended more than Bush voters to live in counties with antiquated voting systems and confusing ballots, such as Palm Beach County's notorious butterfly ballot? Surprisingly, a statistical analysis implies that difficult voting conditions may have victimized George W. Bush's supporters more than Gore's backers. In reality, what may end up costing Gore the Presidency was that his followers' appear to have found it more difficult than their Bush-backing neighbors to correctly follow their county's voting procedures. This conclusion stems from comparing a Nov. 19 UPI study of disqualified votes by county to a Dec. 3 Miami Herald study of bad ballots by precinct; The county analysis provides more insight into the effect of local rules on the two candidates' vote totals. The precinct analysis focuses more on how how effectively Republican and Democrat voters within a county responded to the rules.   [... More]

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#satelaei

"Race," Medicine, and Public Policy is the title of a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. on Friday morning, November 12. Participants include Jon Entine, Sally Satel, and Vince Sarich.

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#wolfeguard

Tom Wolfe on the election: The greatest observer of America tells the British Guardian:

"I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states' - a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree - which here means, literally, middle America. I come from one of those states myself, Virginia. It's the same resentment, indeed, as that against your own newspaper when it sent emails targeting individuals in an American county." Wolfe laughs as he chastises. "No one cares to have outsiders or foreigners butting into their affairs. I'm sure that even many of those Iraqis who were cheering the fall of Saddam now object to our being there. As I said, I do not think the excursion is going well."

But Wolfe doesn't seem sure whether Bush is the appropriate beneficiary of those healthy heartland attitudes:

"That day [9/11] told us that here was a different kind of enemy. I honestly think that America and the Bush administration felt that something extreme had to be done. But I do not think that the Americans have become a warlike people; it is rare in American history to set about empire-building - acquiring territory and slaves. I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire. And while the invasion of Afghanistan was something that had to be done, I am stunned that Iraq was invaded."

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http://www.iSteve.com/04NovA.htm#duval

What Really happened in Florida in 2000: The last Presidential election in Florida has become encrusted in myths ("Blacks were disenfranchised!") because what really happened stems directly from the media's Great Unmentionable: the white-black IQ gap. 

What actually happened in Florida is that more Gore supporters showed up to vote than Bush supporters, but as so often happens, the Democrats tended to screw up their ballots, making them invalid, at a higher rate than the Republicans. Most unmentionably, Gore's biggest problem was that blacks, who voted for him by at least 10-1 margins, were much more likely to make a hash of their ballots than were whites, who tended to support Bush. For example, the New York Times reported:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Nov. 16 [2000] — Democrats in Duval County prepared meticulously for Election Day. They registered thousands of voters and ferried enough people to the polls in predominantly African-American precincts to give a solid boost to Vice President Al Gore in a county expected to swing reliably into Gov. George W. Bush's column.

But the results of Duval County's vote left Democrats here shaking their heads. More than 26,000 ballots were invalidated, the vast majority because they contained votes for more than one presidential candidate. Nearly 9,000 of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly African-American communities around Jacksonville, where Mr. Gore scored 10-to-1 ratios of victory, according to an analysis of the vote by The New York Times.

The percentage of invalidated votes here was far higher than that recorded in Palm Beach County, which has become the focus of national attention and where Democrats have argued that so many people were disenfranchised it may be necessary to let them vote again. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have demanded a hand recount or new election in Duval County.

Local election officials attributed the outcome to a ballot that had the name of presidential candidates on two pages, which they said many voters found confusing. Many voters, they said, voted once on each page. The election officials said they would not use such a ballot in the future.

Rodney G. Gregory, a lawyer for the Democrats in Duval County, said the party shared the blame for the confusion. Mr. Gregory said Democratic Party workers instructed voters, many persuaded to go to the polls for the first time, to cast ballots in every race and "be sure to punch a hole on every page."

"The get-out-the vote folks messed it up," Mr. Gregory said ruefully.

If Mr. Gregory's assessment is correct, and thousands of Gore supporters were inadvertently misled into invalidating their ballots, this county alone would have been enough to give Mr. Gore the electoral votes of Florida, and thus the White House.

The voters turned out by Democrats, Mr. Gregory said, took the instructions to vote in every race to mean: "I've got to vote for Gore. I've got to be sure Bush doesn't get elected. I've got to vote on every page."

Democratic officials, Mr. Gregory said, should have told voters they were bringing to the polls. Vote for Gore, then skip the next page.

"In hindsight," he said, "we didn't fully understand the problem. "

The Duval County ballot listed Mr. Gore on the first page, along with Mr. Bush, Ralph Nader and two other candidates. Then on the second page were the names of five other presidential candidates. After voting for Mr. Gore, many Democratic voters turned the page and voted for one of the remaining names, Mr. Gregory said.

The double-marked ballots substantially affected Mr. Gore's showing, a Times analysis of voting data suggests. More than 20 percent of the votes cast in predominantly African- American precincts were tossed out, nearly triple the majority white precincts. In two largely African-American precincts, nearly one-third of the ballots were invalidated.

La Griffe estimates that the one standard deviation difference in IQs between blacks and whites caused Democrats to foul up their ballots more often enough to cost Gore a margin of victory equaling 1.25% of the total vote.

Griffe reports that the 2002 election in Florida saw very few fouled ballots, whether due to new error-checking voting machines or due to better instructions by Get Out The Vote workers. So that should be an advantage for the Democrats compared to 2000.

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