The Story of the Election

I think that one of the really interesting things about the election was the use of ballot initiatives to turn out voters. In this year's case, eleven states had ballot anti-gay marriage language of some sort. Those initiatives likely had a strong pull to the polls for religious conservatives that counteracted all the ill will Bush has built up because of the war. If Nader was the spoiler in 2000, I think that these may turn out to have been the spoiler in 2004.

The other thing that happened, from my perspective, was the disappearance of the Greens. Basically, in 2000, the Greens selected (not democratically as far as I could tell) Nader. In his speech here I was moderately interested in his statements saying that he wanted to build the Greens as a grass-roots party over time and that 2000 was a kick-off to that. That never happened. It seemed to set the Greens back by a great deal. (Upon googling, found that the Greens had some sort of delegative process to nominate Nader.)