Enough about why the Democrats lost the election. Let's talk about why they thought that they would win. How could so many people who should know better be surprised? After all, Bush led Kerry in the polls for months before the election. Here is what the Democrats were telling themselves.

False patterns:
The son or grandson of a president loses re-election.
Presidents who lost the popular election lose re-election.
Members of the Bush family lose re-election.

I could add that the candidate who has the biggest treasury as of Jan. 1 will be the candidate but Howard Dean proved that "laws" like these are actually statistical blips.

Bush really lost in 2000. If every vote is counted in 2004 he will lose again. The assumption here was that Bush had already gotten as many votes in 2000 as he would ever get. This ties in with the next couple of points.

Nader. New voter registration. Getting out the vote. Getting out the youth vote. etc. If Bush had already peaked then all the Democrats needed to do was drum up some new anti-Bush votes and their candidate would be in. Michael Moore spent the Summer insisting that the country is 75% liberal but only 1/3 of them bothered to vote in 2000. By contrast he insisted that all of the conservatives in the country had voted in 2000. By getting out the vote it would be a Democrat landslide.

ABB. Bush voters for Kerry. Etc. The country was supposed to be so fed up with Bush that any presentable candidate could beat him. An obliging media kept giving us stories of people who voted for Bush in 2000 but were voting against him in 2004. For some reason they never found a single Gore voter who was going to vote for Bush even though there was a large percentage of them in nearly every county in the country. Which brings us to...

Anti-Bush Media. Dan Rather was the worst of it but anti-Bush coverage was everywhere - The Bush voters for Kerry I mentioned above, the drumbeat on Iraq, constant stories about Bush's missing months in the Air Guard. Fox News may be bigger than CNN but CBS, ABC, and NBC are each bigger still and they all hated Bush.

The Echo Chamber. This is a big one. The map of votes by county shows how concentraited the anti-Bush people were. They represent 47% of the vote but they all live on top of each other. When everyone you know hates Bush you assume that the rest of the country is the same.

Questioning the polls. The polls showed Bush ahead but Democrats convinced themselves that the polls were wrong. The pollsters were missing young voters with unlisted cell phones or they made too many calls during the week and not enough ont he weekend. The Media Fund took out full page ads arguing that one poll was skewed because they oversampled Republicans.

Misreading the polls. By Memorial Day Kerry's campaign had declared victory. They noted that whenever a president's approval ratings were below 50% he lost. The undecideds would all break for change. Zogby said this nationally several times just before the election. What they didn't look at was that Kerry's numbers were much lower at the same period than any challenger who defeated a sitting president.

Bush Hatred. When all is said and done, the left hates Bush. They think that he is either Hitler in disguise or Karl Rove's talking chimp. They are sure that he lost on 2000 and they could not believe that anyone would vote for him in 2004. Their hearts are pure, they have fire in their bellies, and they did everything right according to conventional measures. They would win because they were right. No one could tell them otherwise.

Not even the actual voters since they keep insisting fraud.

Notice how little a factor Kerry played in this? After the first debate Democrats felt more comfortable with him as their candidate but he never had more than tepid support. Too much effort was being wasted hating Bush.

And that is what it comes down to - Bush hatred. It doesn't matter what Bush does, it is wrong and they will waste even more effort fighting.

This will probably give the Republicans the White House in 2008. After 8 years of hatred, the Democrats will be too exhausted to elect someone.