This morning's papers also brought this:
"A survey of more than 35,000 Florida Panhandle registered voters conducted
by the Republican Leadership Council found that 2,380 Bush supporters didn't
vote in this election, citing the errant call."
A straight extrapolation from this would suggest Bush lost over 17,000
voters in the Panhandle to the early call or about 6% of his overall total.
I too find it hard to believe that ten minutes could make such a difference
or that any effect of the early call would be skewed exclusively to
potential Republican voters.
I suspect we will find out more in the months to come.
John Samples
Cato Institute
Washington, DC
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
William Dickens
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 2:18 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Query on Media
>Has anyone seen more of this analysis or any of the data?
>
>
>Unfortunately, more than a few Florida votes were also affected. An
>examination of past Republican presidential votes by county in Florida from
>1988 to 2000 shows that while total votes declined, the Republican voting
>rate in the western panhandle was significantly suppressed relative to the
>non-Republican vote. The 4 percent greater reduction in Republican votes
>averages about 1,000 votes per county, 10,000 Republican votes for all 10
>counties in the western Panhandle. This holds true even after accounting
for
>the average differences in voting rates across counties as well as the
>changes in voting rates from one election to another.
>
>This conservative estimate of 10,000 votes is more than the any additional
>votes that Gore might pick up from the manual recounts in counties like
Palm
>Beach, Boward, and Dade.
I brought this up at lunch at Brookings today and the response from Tom Mann
was incredulity. He claims that the polls were only open for another 10
minutes after the early call and wants to know how Lott thinks that it could
have had that big an effect. -- Bill Dickens
