Blaming the voters

In lieu of writing anything more substantial on the US elections, I'm noting in passing the anguished denunciations of the American public from Kerry supporters who cannot believe that their incoherent campaign for a risible candidate failed to mobilise the voters. Or rather, it failed to mobilise their voters; you know, the one's who are supposed to vote Democrat: even African-Americans are "unreliable" now, it seems. (Or see some of the comments here for other examples.) There are numerous reasons why blaming the voters is usually a bad approach for election post mortems; in this case, the major one is that by claiming overwhelming chunks of the US public are now recidivist bigots, beyond the appeal of reason, it wildly overstates the stability of the Republican's electoral coalition. Like Nixon after his 1972 landslide, there are any number of reasons to suppose the honeymoon for the Republican's happily married tribes will be brief. They start at Fallujah, and end at Wall Street.

Update: Michael Albert at Z-Net has the statistics. In a terrifically exciting development, Socialist Worker have used their first ever web-update thingy for a post-election analysis.