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Bush and Kerry trade early victories
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-11-03 09:19
US President Bush and challenger John Kerry traded early victories
Tuesday in a tense and testy contest between an embattled wartime incumbent and
a hard-charging Democrat who blamed the Republican for chaos in Iraq and
joblessness at home.
| Candidate |
Electoral |
States
Won |
| Bush (R) |
210 |
24 |
| Kerry (D) |
199 |
14 | From
the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, polls closed in more than two dozen
states but the race was wide open. It was too close to call in Ohio,
Pennsylvania and Florida, with a combined 68 electoral votes, one-fourth of the
coveted total of 270.
Bush won West Virginia, a battleground state with five electoral votes and a
long history of backing Democrats until the president took it in 2000. Kerry
battled back by winning the statewide vote in Maine, worth three electoral
votes.
|
US President
George W. Bush, his daughter Barbara and first lady Laura Bush (R) gather
in the residence of the White House in Washington, November 2, 2004 as
election results from the 2004 presidential elections come in.
[Reuters]
|
Maine's northernmost congressional district, worth a single vote, was too
close to call.
So was the Senate, where Republicans held a 51-48 advantage with one
Democratic-leaning independent. Democrat Barack Obama of Illinois became the
third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
US President George
W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry are shown in photos made during the
campaign in October. [AP] | Only nine of 34 Senate
races on the ballot appeared competitive, seven in states where Kerry had not
seriously contested Bush. Republicans were expected to retain control of the
House.
But all eyes were focused on Kerry's bid to make Bush the first president
voted out of office at a time of war.
"I've given it my all," Bush said after voting at a Crawford, Texas,
firehouse.
Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator, got teary-eyed as he thanked his
staff for a campaign's worth of work. "We made the case for change," he said
after voting at the Massachusetts Statehouse.
Alongside the White House and congressional races, a full roster of
propositions and local offices kept voters busy nationwide.
They were torn over the presidential race, in ways all too familiar.
Exit polls suggested that slightly more voters trusted Bush to handle
terrorism than Kerry. They were evenly split on whether they approved of the war
in Iraq, with those backing the conflict heavily supporting Bush and those
opposed strongly behind Kerry.
Interviews with voters as they left the polls suggested that most believed
the country was headed in the wrong direction. Those wrong-track voters
overwhelmingly backed Kerry.
 |
| U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to the press under a banner
reading "No phone number left behind," at the Ohio headquarters of the
Bush-Cheney election campaign calling center in Columbus on election day
November 2, 2004. [Reuters] |
 |
| U.S. Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry (R) and his wife
Teresa Heinz-Kerry wave from the campaign plane after arriving in Bedford,
Massachusetts, November 2, 2004. Kerry ended his election campaigning and
returned to vote in today's 2004 presidential election against President
George W. Bush. [Reuters] |
 |
| Peter Baez, 84, and his wife Phyllis (R) of Great Falls, Virginia,
leave after casting their ballots while others wait in line to vote in
Great Falls, Virginia, November 2, 2004.
[Reuters] | One in 10 voters were casting ballots
for the first time and fewer than 10 percent were young voters, hardly the
groundswell that experts had predicted. Kerry was favored by both groups,
according to the surveys conducted for The Associated Press by Edison Media
Research and Mitofsky International.
Turnout could turn out to be the great decider. Spending more money than ever
to target voters, Democrats enlisted an army of paid organizers while
Republicans issued marching orders by e-mail to legions of volunteers in the
small towns and the farthest suburbs of battleground states.
Pre-election polls indicated the presidential race could be as close as 2000,
when Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore but won the Electoral
College count and the presidency after a ruling by the Supreme Court gave
him Florida. The incumbent hoped to avoid the fate of his father — former
President George H.W. Bush, who was bounced by voters in 1992 after waging war
against Iraq and overseeing an ailing economy.
Officials predicted a turnout of 117.5 million to 121 million people, the
most ever and rivaling the 1960 election in the percentage of eligible voters
going to the polls. Voters welcomed an end to the longest, most expensive
election on record.
"It's the only way to make the ads stop," Amanda Karel, 25, said as she
waited to vote at a banquet hall in Columbus, Ohio.
Legions of lawyers and election-rights activists watched for signs of voter
fraud or disenfranchisement. Complaints cropped up across the country, but
voting seemed to be going smoothly overall.
Poring over exit polls and field reports, campaign strategists barked out
11th-hour orders to wrestle every vote from key states. At Bush's headquarters
in Arlington, Va., aides identified low-turnout precincts and dispatched more
walkers to them. In Boston, advisers gave Kerry a longer-than-expected list of
TV interviews to conduct by satellite to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, New
Mexico, Nevada and Oregon.
That was an interesting list: Oregon was supposed to be safely Democratic and
Colorado had seemed to be tilting toward Bush heading into Tuesday.
In the final hours of the campaign, Kerry's aides tried to boost turnout in
Hispanic areas by having the candidate's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, do
Spanish-language television interviews. Exit polls showed the Democrat winning
the Hispanic vote, but not by as much as Gore in 2000.
Voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio received a wave of last-minute
telephone calls as Kerry's strategists sought to nail down victories in those
key Midwest battlegrounds.
Interviews with voters as they left the polls showed that Kerry was doing
better among women and independents than the incumbent.
Bush won Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West
Virginia for 66 electoral votes. Kerry won Delaware, Connecticut, the District
of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont and
statewide in Maine for 77 electoral votes. Maine's northernmost congressional
district, worth a single vote, was too close to call.
Democrats nurtured faint hopes of winning back the Senate.
In South Dakota, one of the tightest races was between the Senate's top
Democrat, Tom Daschle, and Republican rival John Thune.
Early winners elected to a six-year term were incumbent Sens. George
Voinovich, R-Ohio, Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Republican Johnny
Isakson took the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Zell Miller in Georgia.
Five hours before the polls opened in South Dakota, Daschle won a court order
prohibiting Republican poll watchers in one county from following American
Indians after they cast ballots, or from writing down their license plate
numbers. Thune's campaign said it would appeal.
All 435 House seats were up for election, but Democrats had little hope of a
takeover. Republicans hold 227 seats, Democrats 205, with one Democratic-leaning
independent and two vacancies in Republican-held seats.
With strategies molded by polls throughout the campaign, Kerry promised
voters a new direction while Bush played up the risks of change.
Bush, 58, never more popular than the weeks after the terrorist strikes three
years ago, constantly reminded voters of those days and cast himself as a
strong, steady leader in an era of unease. He called Kerry indecisive and argued
that Iraq was part of a global battle against terror.
"The people know where I stand," he said Tuesday. "The people know I know how
to lead."
Kerry, 60, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, questioned Bush's Sept. 11
response and often accused him of rushing into the "wrong war at the wrong time"
in Iraq. He said the president refused to recognize problems at home and abroad,
much less fix them.
On Tuesday, he criticized Bush on a spate of domestic issues plus Iraq, and
said whoever was elected would face a long list of problems.
"I'm not pretending to anybody that it's a bed of roses," Kerry said.
With nearly 1 million jobs lost in Bush's term, pre-election surveys showed
voters favoring Kerry over Bush on the economy and a majority believing the
country was on the wrong track. Barely half approved of the president's job
performance.
But most Americans also expected another terrorist strike, and they trusted
Bush over Kerry to protect the country. No wartime president has lost on
Election Day, though Presidents Truman and Johnson, both Democrats, opted
against seeking re-election while fighting unpopular wars.
Vying for 270 Electoral College votes, the candidates' playing field extended
as far as two dozen states but focused on fewer than 10, primarily in the
Midwest and Florida.
Despite spending caps, the candidates and their allies spent a combined $600
million on television ads, more than twice the total in 2000,
The legal fees piled up, too. Both sides braced for recounts and other court
challenges.
Eleven gubernatorial contests were being decided Tuesday, along with 5,800
legislative seats in 44 states. Democratic Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina
won re-election and Democratic Secretary of State Joe Manchin won the
governorship in West Virginia that had been held by a Democrat
Among the notable ballot measures was one in California to devote $3 billion
for stem cell research. Several states had propositions that would ban gay
marriage.
The war on terror aside, there were fresh reminders of the election's stakes.
Eighty-year-old Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, cornerstone of a
conservative Supreme Court, disclosed Monday he was undergoing radiation and
chemotherapy for his thyroid cancer, a sign that he had a potentially grave form
of the disease.
While neither candidate offered a specific exit strategy for Iraq, Kerry
asserted that the election of a new president alone would persuade allies to
take a greater share of the costs and sacrifices born by the United States.
The Democrats said he hoped to start withdrawing troops from Iraq in the
first months of his presidency. Bush said such talk only encouraged terrorists.
The weapons of mass destruction Bush said were in Iraq were never found and
more than 1,100 Americans have died in the conflict — 976 of them since he
declared an end to combat operations May 1, 2003.
Kerry voted against the Persian Gulf War waged by Bush's father. He voted in
favor of the 2002 resolution authorizing war in Iraq. On the stump, Bush called
Kerry's a record of political expedience.
Bush blamed the Sept. 11 attacks for the sluggish economy and said his tax
cuts put the nation on the road to recovery. Kerry noted that Bush was the first
president in eight decades to end his term with net job losses.
Unabashedly conservative, Bush said he shared with voters the values of faith
and family. Kerry said his faith and activities — hockey and hunting — put him
in the mainstream, too.
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