Okay, for those people who want to talk about the latest US Presidential returns, please don't do it here. This is a customization website, not a politics site.

To talk about politics on a fairly neutral site (relative to any site you're going to find on the net that's reasonably popular) go to JoeUser.com.

During the early hours yesterday things were looking pretty grim for the Republicans. In fact, early on last night, I told my wife "Don't bother watching TV, it's over. Kerry's got it wrapped up decisively."

The other news networks, while not publicly saying it, gave plenty of hints that Kerry had won the election. 

Why? Because the exit polls gave Kerry a large margin - 51% to 48%.  Which turned out to be completely the opposite and more importantly, outside the margin of error (11,000 respondants should have a 2 point margin of error).

So what happened? That is something that will hopefully come out. But basically females were over sampled. Females sampled were 54% of the respondants. In my opinion, they should have known better. But that's not the whole story.

There are many on the right who believe, perhaps with some reason, that this was just another example of the media trying to turn the election towards Kerry.

When you have CBS's memo gate, and then CBS also attempting to run that "missing explosives" story (which turned out to be false). And all kinds of other one-sided reporting. 

So what effect would faulty exit polls have? Big time in get out the vote drives. The operatives on the ground almost certainly felt pretty deflated as the early exit polling came out. Maybe deflated enough not to bother going out as hard to get voters to the polls in those key states.

Who knows, so what do you think?

The call has been made. Bush has won the election. It was more decisive than anyone would have believed.

Bush: 286 Electoral Votes to Kerry's 252.

Bush also won 51% of the overall popular vote, a definite majority of the overall vote. What's also significant is that turn out was very high this year. More people voted this year than any previous election by a significant margin (about 115,000,000 votes).  Bush won by almost 4 million votes overall.

For those who dislike the Republicans and Bush, the news is actually much worse than that, however.  Bush's party amazingly picked up FOUR senate seats (which is really remarkable). The Democratic leader of the senate was even defeated which is the first time in over 50 years that something like that has happened.  Bush now appears to have a 55 to 44 Senate advantage.

And to pile it on, Bush's party also picked up seats in the House of Representatives.  What that means is that Bush policies will be much more easy to get through than previous.

It's not what I predicted. On October 15th, The Political Machine simulated AI vs. AI with the issues as we tweaked them and it showed a 274 to 264 Kerry advantage.  TPM had narrowly given Ohio, New Mexico and Iowa to Kerry. (47 out of 50 ain't bad for a video game).

Bush picked up two states that were Gore states in 2000 - Iowa and New Mexico.  And Kerry picked up New Hampshire, which borders Kerry's home state which had gone for Bush in 2000.

So now the question is, what happened? And for non-Americans, what does this mean? I'll be writing about that in the coming days.

FoxNews has just called Ohio to Bush.

That essentially means it's over. Bush has won.

Zogby's prediction may be the worst of them all:

Tsk tsk. 

Score: Political Machine 1, Zogby 0.

Everyone hopes that their game will win. But right now, no one knows. Exit polls won't be useful in any remotely close states until the end of the day (beware of anyone trying to toss around any exit polls in battle ground states until the end of the day - whether they be for Bush or Kerry).

We'll keep this blog running throughout the day and see how things go.

5pm EST: Only a couple hours left until the polls close in a few states. At that point, we'll be able to start looking and seeing the results. Even in states that are solid Bush or Kerry, we can compare the results with the various polls on-line to see how close they are. If a solid Bush state leans Kerry or a solid Kerry state leans Bush, we may get an early idea of what is going to be the result.

8pm EST: Projected final result: Kerry victory by 3% (51% to 48%) nationally (from looking at a ton of exit polls). Let's see how close they are.

9pm EST: Not a land slide that's for sure.  Bush has taken Bush states and Kerry has taken Kerry states. Florida and Ohio are still unknown. Feeling a little bit better about Bush as it appears exit polling may not be quite as on as originally expected and absentee ballots going more heavily in favor of Bush. Stay tuned...

10pm EST: Looking at the various states ACTUAL vote the news for Bush is pretty good. I'm not going to talk about states that only have partial returns in (like Florida). Let's go with a state that has 100% in: Kentucky

2000: Bush:57% Gore: 41%
2004: Bush: 60% Kerry: 40%

So in Kentucky, a Bush state, he gained over 2000. If nationally Bush bumped himself up by this amount then that's good.  The same is true in Virginia.  From a statistical analysis point of view this is good news for Bush. But still way too early.

I remember back in 2000 when they predicted Florida for Gore how mad I was because they had something like 60% of vote in and Bush had a 200,000 vote lead. Same is happening this time. So don't get too excited that Bush has a lead in Florida early on because it'll tighten up.

11pm EST: At some point they're going to have to call Florida for Bush at this rate. Which will be the first error in The Political Machine projection. It's got 93% in and Bush has a 5 point lead. Barring a miracle, it's going to be hard for Kery to come back.

Bush already has 400,000 more votes in 2004 than he got total in 2000 in Florida.

Midnight: Looks like Florida is going for Bush. Ohio is very close.  So my personal prediction is wrong (yay!).

But the official PoliticalMachine.com prediction is still alive:

https://www.politicalmachine.com/forums.asp?cmd=ShowComments&MID=122&CMID=122&AID=31475

Hoping it's wrong too!

12:15am: Ohio Ohio Ohio. It's all up to Ohio. If Bush gets Ohio, it's over. It's 51% to 49%. It's very close. I'm looking at it county by county and there's only one really big Democratic county left there and Kerry will pick up a net 40,000 vote advantage once that gets in. But that will still leave Bush with a 75,000 vote advantage and there's other Republican votes coming in.

And Absentee ballots tend to favor Republicans traditionally. So if Kerry can't get it under 40,000 soon, it's all over.

12:40am: For those who wanted to see what PoliticalMachine.com had predicted back on October 15th for the race:

Conventional wisdom says that high turn out means victory for Democrats.

While it is possible Kerry may win still, I don't think the pollsters have adequately taken into account just how high the turn-out is amongst Bush voters.

Today my wife and I voted. And unlike 4 years ago, the lines were long. Not only were they long but looking at the pages of marked off voters, even at 10am this morning, most registered voters on the pages I saw had already voted. Incredible. Never seen anything like it. And our precinct is probably 90% Republican.

I did notice one other thing - I didn't see anyone under 30 voting. So the much discussed "youth vote" may not turn out and without that, Bush has an advantage.

Unfortunately, my vote may be countered by someone's pet or a dead person since I live in Michigan where the UAW and MoveOn.org are likely doing some very bad things based on reports.

Well I don't know about you guys but I'm sick of politics. I'm predicting a Kerry win for whatever it's worth with 306 to 232 electoral votes. But frankly, as a political junkie, I'm just tired of it. Make it stop!

WinCustomize Magazine is being sent out. It takes forever to get fully sent out now with so many subscribers.  I think it's at M's now in the alphabetically sorted list.  The Utopia icons are mentioned in there. The official announcement comes next week.

I have to say that I'm a little disappointed with the DesktopX widget content. In fact, I'm pretty disappointed with the quality of widgets all around these days. Weather. Yea, we get it. Everytime I demo DesktopX people are amazed. I show how easy it is to create stuff for it and people are even more amazed. And yet the cool new content for it is a bit underwhelming.  It's the same for Kapsules and Samurize.

It's made me tempted to write an article about maybe all this widget stuff is only being used by such a tiny niche of users that it hasn't caught on beyond those of us who are really into this stuff.  I've looked at Konfabulator's widgets and numbers and they're pretty depressing too.  Weather, clocks, RSS feeds, MP3 players and calendars. That's the widget story at this point. 

One might argue that a smarter strategy would be to simply make a program that has highly skinnable simple programs that do those kinds of things and let people just make skins for them. It's a lot easier to skin things that already exist than to try to modify an existing widget. Maybe I'm just cynical but I am curious what you guys think.

I can think of quite a few widgets I would like to see: Currency conversion widget, Site meter web monitor widget, Google API based widgets, Printer widget, ImageShack widget. Just to name a few.

I don't want to sound like I'm dissing all the recent widgets. I can name quite a few cool ones too. But just the overall trend is a bit down. Martin created a ton of templates of interesting widgets and there's not much being done with them. So you tell me, people want this stuff? I thought with the hot keys to bring widgets to top people would use this more. I know I do. I use the talk radio widget a ton for instance. Plus a bunch of custom widgets I made.

The WindowBlinds contest has definitely gotten things moving along. It's really a close call right now.