1) Peut-on aujourd’hui, après l’analyse des résultats, dresser une physionomie des deux camps électoraux qui se sont affrontés ?

2004 a stolen election ?

First we should note that the November 2004 election was an extremely hard fought campaign that raises serious questions in the minds of analysts about the overall integrity of the American electoral process. Coming after the judicial “coup d’Etat de velours” that decided the 2000 election in favor of Mr. Bush ; fears that this year’s election would be stolen were widely felt on the Left before the election.

Now, many feel that their worst fears were realized for two reasons : the weird discrepancy between the election-day exit polls that reported Kerry getting 5 million more votes than he actually ended up receiving in the official count, and the massive number of “spoiled” minority ballots that were invalidated after they were cast.

In the days following the November election, there was a great deal of speculation in the “blogosphere” asking whether the winning formula for the Republicans in 2004 hadn’t been two parts evangelical mobilization in rural America to one part massive voter fraud in Florida and Ohio.

This line of speculation was soon backed up by academic specialists such as Steve Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, who argued that the discrepancies between exit poll data and the reported vote from the some swing states like Ohio constitute a clear indication that there was massive voter fraud at the county or state level - just as they would anywhere else in the world and as they did recently in the Ukraine . Freeman’s argument has been backed by seasoned reporters such as the BBC’s Greg Palast but also strongly disputed by other progressive analysts such as Ruy Teixeira of and David Corn of The Nation.

The battle over the election, however, continues to this day both in the courts and in the halls of Congress. In January 2005, Representative John Conyers and other members (3,2 Mo en PDF) of the Congressional Black Caucus challenged ratification of the vote of the College of Electors and were joined in their protest pour l’honneur by Senator Barbara Boxer of California. This meant that the Congressional recognition of Bush’s victory was delayed for one long afternoon. But the battle over our electoral malfunctions in 2000 and 2004 and the broken state of our electoral system is far from over - especially now that new voter rights legislation has been introduced in the Congress by Representative Conyers on the House side and Senator John Kerry in the Senate. So for the second presidential election in a row, we find ourselves in a situation where the legitimacy of the result, (if not its legality), remains in doubt, at least for some “die-hard” Democrats.

Blue Islands in a Red Sea

When all is said and done though, we are still left with a national victory for the Bush/Rove team that gave them 10 million more votes than in 2000 with an official total of over 61 million votes and a comfortable 3 and 1/2 million margin of victory in the popular election. The Democrats center left coalition also managed to increase its absolute vote by some 6 million votes compared with 2000 from 51 million to 57 million - which in an ordinary election would have been more than enough to put Kerry in the White House . The Bush Cheney victory of 286 to 252 in the Electoral College wasn’t exactly a landslide but it was a decisive win. On the other hand, it wasn’t quite the “massive endorsement” of Bush policies reported in the foreign press either. Even so, this narrow Republican victory is beginning to look more and more like an historic defeat for the Democratic Party with all that implies.

In the new post 2004 electoral map, the Democrats are left as a minority party isolated within three “Blue State” enclaves : the Atlantic urban corridor that stretches down from Maine through Washington DC ; the Northern States around the Great Lakes, and the West Coast urban corridor from Los Angeles to Seattle plus the Pacific state of Hawaii. Much the rest of America has been colored in red - outside of the isolated blue islands that mark the bigger cities and university towns where Kerry won massively. When we look at the vote map at the county level, the result seems even worse. Everywhere the Democratic “Blue States” are spot-marked with dozens of rural and suburban counties that have turned Republican red.

The most significant aspect of this Republican triumph is that their popular victory was achieved despite an historic jump in turnout - hence the significance of those exit polls that pointed toward a Kerry victory in the popular vote. Over 120 million voters participated in November’s election, giving us the highest turnout in any election since 1968 with a participation rate of close to 60% of the voting age population. For most political scientists, this kind of jump in participation usually means only one thing, that we have just witnessed the kind of “realigning election” that redraws the boundaries between majority and minority coalitions for the foreseeable future. If this interpretation is correct, then Karl Rove has won his gamble ; put an end to decades of unstable parity between the two parties and established the Republicans as the national majority party for the coming generation. This widespread interpretation, however, has been strongly contested by Ruy Teixeira and John who argues that Bush’s coalition is little more than a copy of the Reagan’s coalition of 20 years ago and hardly a harbinger of our political future. In 1984, Reagan was able to win one Democratic vote out of four. This time Bush barely carried one in ten. 89% of Democrats voted for Kerry, while 91% of Republicans voted Bush. We are left with two strongly cohesive, partisan coalitions.

In this sense, John Sperling’s description of the partisan division as one between “Metro versus Retro America” is perhaps more helpful than the prevalent media image of Blue State America Versus Red because it opposes electoral demography to simple geography. In this view, the Democrats still control the high population corridors on the two coasts and the Republicans are left with the Southland and the “Great American Desert” that remains largely empty of people. But Blue State America covers only 17% of America’s territory and can be described as a series of isolated urban demographic spikes that stand out against a national county map that is colored a monotone red. This urban/ rural cleavage leaves us with an electorate that may be split fifty/fifty in terms of the popular House and Senate vote, but still ends up giving the Republicans an effective “lock” on the Houses of Congress, the Electoral College and most governorships.

Is the Republican Party becoming an American version of the PRI ?

The Republican lock on our national government means that we are dealing with a political system that remains divided between two regional one-party systems, but with one of the two increasingly dominant in all branches of the Federal Government - including the Federal courts. The Republicans also control geographically many more county and state governments - which are significant, because in our Federal system these are the institutions responsible for overseeing our national elections !

The 2004 election, then, not only confirmed the existing Republican partisan alignment, but also gave us a Republican one party hegemony that could allow it to institutionally marginalize its Democratic opposition. This could threaten to create a feedback loop in terms of funding-raising for campaigns and the allocation of federal monies to interest groups and local governments that would degrade the Democrats’ ability to compete in future elections. That outcome could eventually leave us in the hands of an American version of Mexico’s PRI. In other words, we would have an Institutionalized Republican Party at the summit of an authoritarian, corporatist system of corruption.

In this scenario, the Democrats would simply cease to be an effective party of government and be reduced to the status of the party of the permanent opposition. While the idea of having a real Democratic opposition might be a welcome change, the threat of its marginalization is not. Indeed it’s my greatest worry about where we’re headed under Bush II - with some analysts arguing that Republican power is so entrenched in Washington that we’re already passing the point of no return.

Looking at this election, however, we should recall that in 2004 Bush won re-election with a narrow margin of 2.7%, and that this represents the smallest margin of victory for an incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 with a margin of 3.1%. Most of his advantage in the national popular vote came from a massive mobilization of conservative voters in the safe “Red States” like Texas and Georgia that had been already won by his campaign in the months before election-day. In terms of state victories, the number of states Bush won was virtually unchanged from 2000. With only two new victories, New Mexico and Iowa, and with one loss, New Hampshire, Bush had a net advantage of only one state compared to 2000. Kerry won almost all of the Gore states, and had he carried Ohio, he would have won the national election in the College of Electors. So in terms of partisan coalitions, the 2004 election would have looked exactly like a repeat of 2000 with two strong regional parties in the running, had it not been for the jump in turnout and a reapportionment of Presidential College that added 7 new electors to the Republican total. But we should note that according to the Zogby post-election poll of November 3-5th 2005, most of this years’ “first time voters” voted for Kerry. The democratic standard bearer won 62% of the young voters aged between 18 and 24 and took 58% of the self-described “moderates.” Can a political realignment truly be at hand without the support of younger voters and the political center ? Past evidence says no. One can not conclude, therefore, that America today belongs to Bush in the same way that it was “Reagan country” twenty years ago.

2) Ce qui a bougé par rapport à l’affrontement Bush/Gore d’il y a quatre ans tient-il seulement à l’effet 11 Septembre ? Comment le rapport à Dieu polarise-t-il le débat politique ? Est-ce conjoncturel ou cela va-t-il marquer durablement le débat public ?

As the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press noted in its 2003 report, 2004 the Political Landscape->, America remains an intensely religious nation where the importance of religious belief has grown since the 1980s and become ever more closely wrapped up with political ideology and partisanship. This makes the United States the “outlier” as far as modern developed societies are concerned.

When we look at the national exit polls in 2004, we see that for 22 % of November’s voters “moral values” were their most important issue. These are code words that cover a basket of issues from Gay marriage to abortion to presidential “character” which are hard to break down. Apparently Bush voters admired the President’s “strong religious faith’ (14%) ; found him honest and trustworthy (16%) but most of all believed that he was a strong leader (29%) with a clear stand on issues (27%). Obviously most of these “moral values “voters were drawn from Bush’s Conservative Christian Evangelical base, and they turned out massively for the candidate whom they saw as a “good Christian”. The Christian Right and the Republicans : the emergence of a quasi-clerical party ?

The Gallup polls now estimates that 41% of all Americans call themselves “born again” Christians, but according to the Fundamentalist Evangelicals own survey institute, the Barma Research Group Ltd., only 8% of the US population (some 15-20 million people) are true “Bible-based” evangelicals - equivalent therefore in size to the equally small group of agnostic/atheists of 9%. One out of two of this core group of fundamentalist evangelicals lives in the South and they are 81% “white self-identified.” Close to 60% vote Republican and 70% consider themselves ideologically as well as theologically conservative. They co-exist with much a larger group of non-fundamentalist, “born-again” Christians who make up close to 33% of the general population or some 65-70 million people.

The first group represents the real core audience of the religious right, and in a February 2003 Barma survey 82% of them gave President Bush a high job approval rating. This made them the most committed group of likely Bush voters in 2004. The second group of “non-evangelical,” born-again Christians are also southern based but more minority in background (30% Black and Hispanic) and more Democratic (40%) than Republican (35%) in partisanship. They do, however, represent a group with strong cultural affinities with the “true” evangelicals that made them a receptive audience for evangelical single-issue campaigns against Gay marriage this year.

In 2004 over 78% of all white evangelicals voted for Mr. Bush - up 10 % from 2000, and they represented on third of Mr. Bush’s total vote. But at close to 23 % of the actual voters in November, conservative evangelicals didn’t represent a larger share of the national vote than they had already in 2000. In 2004, however, the evangelical vote was more cohesive as well as more committed than they ever were in the campaign against Mr. Gore in large part because their churches acted as the institutional arm of the Bush/Cheney campaign under the personal direction of Karl Rove and Ralph Reed. Having provided Mr. Bush with his “moral mandate” as well as his political victory, the leaders of this “God’s Lobby” now expect a substantial payback in terms of influence over federal judicial appointments, the allocation of government grants for faith based social service organizations and the introduction of “Christian inspired” social legislation concerning gay partnerships, sex education and the teaching of evolutionary theory. Echoing Pat Robertson’s remark that Bush’s re-election was akin to “Heaven’s blessing on the Emperor,” the Reverend Bob Jones III reminded the president that : “In your re-election, God has graciously granted America... a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. Don’t equivocate. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ... If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them.”

The Republican Party - especially at the level of its state organizations - has thus come to resemble a “quasi-clerical party “with President Bush playing the role of the national spokesman of the Christian Right. This development is a first in American political history, but is not enough by itself to explain either the Bush victory or capture full impact of religion on this election.

Bush’s Concordat with the Catholic Church and Contract with the Black Evangelicals

This tendency to identify the Republicans with “the Party of God” is much less common among the remaining 44% of American Christians, (most of whom live outside the South and whom Barma dismisses as being merely “notional Christians”), but even so moral appeals to regular church and temple goers seemed to pay off for the Bush campaign in 2004. In addition to mobilizing nearly 100 % of their white evangelical base, the Rove/Bush team reached out to mainline Protestants, devout Catholics, conservative Jews and Afro American evangelicals - eroding the Democrats hold over these groups and helping to squeeze out their narrow 51 % majority. In particular, following the President’s visit with the Pope last June, the Bush campaign cut a deal with conservative Catholic Bishops to intervene with their congregations against John Kerry’s candidacy. Several Bishops not only threatened to withhold communion from Kerry himself for his “pro-choice” stand, but threatened their own parishioners with sanctions if they voted for “a candidate” that didn’t adhere to Church teachings on abortion and contraception. These appeals from the Catholic hierarchy (more than the threats !) seem to have resonated with enough “devout Catholics” (those who attend mass weekly or more), to win for Mr. Bush 52% of the white Catholic vote and 56% of Hispanic Catholics in his race against a “Catholic” candidate from Boston . Similarly, appeals to conservative black evangelicals over the issue of gay marriage, (as well as the promise of government cash for Black churches) seemed to have swayed some black pastors and their voters, increasing Mr. Bush’s vote among Blacks from a miserable 8% in 2000 to 11% in 2004. Mr. Bush also gained ground with Jewish voters, winning a quarter of their votes in 2004 as opposed to only 19% in 2000. This was especially significant in Florida, but this gain among Jewish voters probably was due to other factors than religion - that is, it came because of Bush’s devotion to Ariel Sharon rather than to Jesus.

Of Secular Warriors, Muslim dissenters and the Anti-Clerical Opposition

Religious mobilization doesn’t only cut one way ; it also works against the Republican “Party of God” as the Democrats are identified as the “anti-clerical” party by secular forces. Just as Kerry lost ground with regular church goers, so he gained ground with secular voters, the “un-churched” and non-Christian believers. Kerry’s vote among voters who weren’t Christian or Jewish went up to 74% - reflecting the sharp shift of Muslim voters away from the Republican party and his vote among “seculars” climbed to 67% . The seculars include agnostics and atheists (9%) as well as the religiously unaffiliated - the “un-churched” Americans who are the 29% who never go to church or only show up at most once a year. The pollster, Sydney Blumenthal, has identified a subgroup that he calls the “secular warriors” who are ferverent Democratic “Party loyalists” and who makeup about 15% of the overall electorate. Committed not only to the separation of Church and State, (as are many moderate Catholics, Jews and Mainline Protestants), this group sees itself as waging a desperate battle to defend modern culture and science against “traditionalist,” reactionary forces. Secular warriors oppose both the “political religion” that justifies the “cult of personality” around President Bush and the political concessions to religious extremists that seems to shape much of American social and environmental policy under his Administration.

These secular activists come from the ranks of the upper-middle class and are especially prominent in the urban and university town enclaves of “Blue America.” But they are only a small minority of American voters. According to the latest Pew Poll, 75 % of Americans agree with the statement that “religion is a very important part of my life,” while only 24% do not. Accordingly, the main battle lines over religion in the United States are drawn within our churches and temples where the conservative traditionalists are waging a cultural crusade for the "soul" of their traditions against "progressive" reformers striving to bring orthodox teachings on the family, women and sexuality into conformity with modern scientific research and the norms of multi-cultural, "tolerance". Increasingly conservative Christians and Jews find themselves at odds with their liberal co-believers in ways that overlap with the broader partisan debate and ideological divisions. Accordingly internal theological disputes have been married to domestic politics and foreign policy in new and unpredictable ways as we saw this past fall.

3) L’électorat n’a-t-il pas finalement été plus sensible à la campagne sur"la guerre contre le terrorisme" ou à celle sur les valeurs traditionnelles qu’aux aléas de la guerre en Irak qui n’a finalement peu marqué l’opposition entre les deux candidats ? Plutôt que de chercher à rallier les indécis, Bush n’a-t-il pas ciblé avant tout le noyau le plus convaincu son propre camp ?

The War on Terrorism and the “Security Moms.”

Despite all of the attention paid in the media to “value voters,” the post-election polls suggest that the principal winning issues for Bush were “the War on Terrorism” and his credibility as a “War President”. In November 2005, one voter in three told exit pollsters that either the War on Terror (19%) or the War in Iraq (15%) were the decisive issue for their vote. Surprisingly given the general “gender gap” that tends to favor Democrat candidates, this seemed as true for women voters as for men - giving Bush an advantage with the bloc of women fearing for the safety of their families that the Press instantly dubbed “the security moms”. Bush’s campaign speech argued that a “good defense demands a good offense” and that we had taken “the War” to “the Terrorists” with our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the President declared : “We will fight the terrorists across the globe so we do not have to fight them here at home ! ” Endlessly repeated by conservative media machine in the Red State radio and television markets, this message made sense to many suburban and rural voters and made them feel safer. The security issue was the trump card in this election, with Bush’s poll ratings going up following every time a new terror alert was announced. In short, as Mark Danner notes : ”The 2004 election turned on a fulcrum of fear.”

The message about the War on Terrorism was also a message about Bush’s resolute and determined leadership which reinforced his moral appeal to “values voters.” It was further reinforced by an all-out assault on John Kerry’s credibility as an alternative which made him seem like too much of a “risk” for security minded voters in wartime.

M. Kerry s’est montre trop « nuancé » dans ses positions sur la politique de sécurité pour se faire comprendre facilement par les électeurs des « swing states ». Prenant position simultanément pour la Guerre contre le Terrorisme et contre l’invasion de l’Irak, Kerry a critiqué sévèrement le bien fonde de la décision d’envahir l’Irak mais a constaté qu’il amènera la guerre contre le terrorisme à une conclusion victorieuse - y compris en Irak ! En même temps, il était la cible d’une campagne très efficace de diffamation montée par les anciens combattants du Vietnam (Swiftboat Veterans for Truth) alliés au Parti Républicain. En visant le service militaire de Kerry au Vietnam et en ternissant sa réputation de héros de guerre, les Swiftboat Veterans ont fini par mettre la campagne de Kerry sur la défensive - un fait accompli étonnant compte tenu du fait que M. Bush a évité la guerre en se planquant dans un escadron « champagne » du Texas National Guard. Mais suivant de près la formule d’attaque « sale » dont son maître Lee Atwater a été le pionnier en 1988 contre M. Dukakis, Karl Rove, le conseiller politique de Bush, a réussi en quelques semaines en août à transformer l’élection présidentielle en une sorte de referendum sur le caractère moral du challenger plutôt que le bilan politique du président sortant.

But in order to believe the President’s claim that the War in Iraq had made us safer, and to disregard Kerry’s critique that it had actually increased the likelihood of future terrorist attacks on the U.S., Bush voters had to willfully disregard important facts about the presumed linkages between our ground war in Iraq and the campaign against Al Queda. Despite intense news coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Iraqi WMDS announcing their non-existence, 72 % of Bush voters told pollsters that U.S. forces had either found WMDS (46%) or proof that the Iraqis had major weapons programs to develop them (26%). Amazingly enough, Bush supporters also insisted that most experts shared this view. Similarly, Bush voters tenaciously held to the myth that Saddam was involved in supporting the 09/11 attacks - with 75% believing that he had given Al Queda significant logistic support and about 20% claiming he had played a direct role - despite all evidence to the contrary.

Both Bush and Kerry supporters believed that the Bush Administration had supported these “mensonges d’Etat” - but then drew totally opposite conclusions about whom and what they ought to believe. But then Bush voters were also often willing to credit the President with positions in other policy areas that he actually opposed - with some 84% of Bush supporters believing he supported international environmental and labor standards ; 72% the international convention banning land mines ; 69% the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, 66% the International Criminal Court, and 51% the Kyoto Global Warming Accord. Evidently, for many Bush voters their willingness to suspend their disbelief about Presidential claims was seen as a necessary step to justify to themselves our unprovoked invasion of Iraq as well as a test of their patriotism.

As a result, many of them voted for the President on the basis of beliefs about his policy positions that were so wrong headed that they border on the delusional, but which had been, more often or not, endorsed at one time or another either by the Administration itself or by conservative media outlets such as Fox News or Rush Lindbaugh’s talk radio closely allied with it. Indeed, knowing a voter’s favorite news source has become a good predictor of how well informed they are about U.S. foreign policy - with NPR listeners who tend to support Kerry showing much greater accuracy in their knowledge than viewers of the Fox News channel who tended Bush . On the whole, Kerry supporters proved to be better informed, and much more willing to “decouple” the Iraq invasion from the campaign against Al Queda. The National Election Poll showed that 79% of Bush voters believed that the Iraq war had improved U.S. security, while 88% of Kerry voters said it had not. Unlike their candidate, Kerry voters not only were opposed to the decision to invade Iraq but also opposed to maintaining any long-term, US troops presence there - a difference that reveals broader fissures in American public opinion about foreign policy.

The Partisan Divide over Iraq and the Nationalist Vote.

Unlike the survey data from five years ago where foreign policy issues barely registered, today attitudes toward the Iraq War and towards “patriotism” have become the single strongest predictor of partisan identity and voter choice. Two months after the November election, they demonstrate a persistent and widening partisan divide in perceptions and policy positions that clearly distinguishes Multilateralist Democrats from Republican Nationalists. Two questions in the most recent Pew Survey demonstrate this difference. While a modest majority of Americans (55%) agreed with the proposition that “good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace,” 76 % of Democrats endorsed this position while only 32% of Republicans did. Moreover, 66% of Republicans agreed with the idea that “military force is the best was to defeat terrorism,” and 49% with the proposition that the United States “should follow its own national interests” rather than take “its allies interests in to account.” By contrast, 76% of Kerry voters believed that using “too much force creates hatred that leads to more terrorism,” and 68% said that the U.S. “must take allies interests into account” before committing to military action. Equally revealing was the difference in partisan attitudes toward military service and the Iraq war. Only 49% of Americans surveyed supported the proposition that a citizen should fight in our wars - whether the country was right or wrong - while an equal number said that its was acceptable for a person to refuse to fight in a war they saw as morally wrong. 66% of Republicans held the view that citizens have an obligation to serve in wars they morally oppose, while only one third of democrats did. The implications of this divide are potentially explosive, if and when the Bush Administration moves to reintroduce conscription in order to find the troop strength necessary for its foreign wars. Certainly, it also suggests that Blue and Red State Americans inhabit different worlds of perception where one is closer to Paris, France and the other Paris, Texas.

The 2004 presidential poll, then, didn’t resolve much in terms of national policy, because the election has left public opinion just as divided as ever over the Iraq occupation and the unilateral militarist direction of American foreign policy into competing partisan camps. As Antol Lieven observes, the Republican Party has become the party of an American Nationalism that identifies itself positively with militarism as well as unilateralism. This is a pathological kind of patriotism “which seeks legitimacy for American hegemony and makes a public cult of the unrestrained exercise of American will. ”

But while support for Bush’s foreign policy remains strong among core Republican activists and voters, general public confidence in the President Bush has dropped below the critical 50% threshold since his re-election . As America grows ever more isolated from the outside world , the political tensions between Red and Blue America over how to deal with this real decline in our influence are bound to intensify. And we will be confronted once again with Abraham Lincoln’s question of how long “a house divided against itself can stand ?”

Interview à paraître dans Recherches Internationales

Liens
(ajoutés par temPS réels)

Preserving Democracy : What Went Wrong in Ohio
Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff
(5 janvier 2005 - 102 pages en PDF, environ 3,2 Mo)
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
2004 the Political Landscape
(5 novembre 2003)
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3 ?ReportID=196

Election présidentielle du 2 novembre 2004
article dans Wikipédia
Élection présidentielle des États-Unis d’Amérique 2004