lordandrei

Driving issues:
How religious a candidate was?
Stance on the war on terrorism.
Perceived resolution.

Ignored issues:
The cabinet members or potenial cabinet members of each candidate.

According to the NPR kids and their guests this morning (from both sides of the aisle), abortion and gar marriage were the most important issues for most people. That's what "moral values" means to most people. A number of people have observed that while the Dems continue to support legal, safe abortion availability, this prevents people from voting for them. See don_negro's post on this topic, e.g.

Sadly, safe and legal abortion is not available to most of the women in this country who live in primarily suburban or rural areas.

Issues didn't drive me to vote, I always vote, I feel it's important.
That being said, I wish people would talk more about the impending oil crisis.

Oh, ok, misunderstood, my bad.
The issues that drove this election were: the war; security vs. civil liberties; and theocracy vs freedom (shown in the dichotomy of pro-choice and pro marriage rights vs anti-choice and anti-marriage rights for gays.)

Someone I know posted that Kerry was going to raise taxes and create more people on Welfare, and that's why they voted for Bush.

That kind of counts? Right?

Okay, here's more.

Views that are spouted rather than thought about:

Abortion is wrong, it kills unborn babies, it's evil, it's Satanic.

Kill all terrorists no matter what. Attack attack attack.

We get a lot of that around here...

Driving issues: Christianity (not "religion"), fear of terrorists.

Insufficient attention: the Supremes, civil liberties (got attention but not enough), balance among branches of government.

Drove: terrorism/Islamofascism, #1 issue, regardless of what the exit polls say. That wraps up national defense as well. After that, the economy ($55 a barrel for oil and Wall Street shrugs).

Ignored: Very, very few. We in the blogosphere kept anyone from shuffling much under the carpet, from Memogate to the truth about the status of Iraq.

I think what you might be overlooking here is that the single most driving issue of the election wasn't either candidate, but what they represented. That's why you saw so many naming 'moral values' as why they voted for Bush.

You had an absolute clash in ideals. All the way fron Vietnam, these two men have lead very different lives and now find themselves on the exact opposite ends of the spectrum. By choosing Bush, we chose someone who represented certain ideals and yes, morals. We watched Kerry try to slip and slide his way through every political impasse, while Bush stood his ground. Many didn't agree with him, but he certainly didn't back down or waffle, he stood firm even in the face of criticism.

So I think the main issue here was the clash of the ideals more than individual issues.

Over here, the issues were:

If Republican: Iraq
If Democratic: Abortion, Gay Rights, the Economy.

Frankly, I'd think one of the big reactions to this would be to rethink the structure of your voting system. Althought the electoral college was, frankly, an inspired solution to a problem two hundred years ago, it has no relevance today. Why have I not heard anyone talking about reforming it? Why is there no newspaper article, online reference in mainstream media? Last election the decision was made by 22 states. This time, only 11 states mattered. Next time??? People are talking about moving to Canada. I think you should all move to Ohio.

Just my two cents....