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.

I talked to my dad today and he was leaning towards Kerry. He's a really smart guy. One of the smartest people I know. But he doesn't follow politics that much, he's very busy doing other things. So he gets his info from the mainstream media which has done a pretty good job convincing him that Bush is a bad guy.

So what were his issues and how did I counter act them?

Outsourcing. If you're really worried about out-sourcing then don't vote for the candidate whose party and policies have largely created it -- The Democrats and their supporters.

When you think of two groups that make the cost of doing business in America higher you think Unions and Lawyers. And who do they support? Kerry. And it's Kerry and his kind that not only oppose legal reform but are ones pushing for increasing minimum wage, putting more regulations on business, otherwise making it less attractive to do business in America.

In 10 years of running a small business, I've paid over half a million dollars in legal costs in frivolous lawsuits. If there had been a simple "loser pays" type reform none of those lawsuits would have ever happened. Kerry opposes that kind of thing. And when a tiny company like ours is paying those kinds of legal expenses, you can only imagine the expenses larger companies pay. Lawsuits are really out of control in this country. And it makes it harder to run a business here.

How much expense or hassle does it take before a company says "To hell with it, let's just move the operation to Mexico" or "Let's just outsource that department to India."

And do the unions and the lawyers and the politicians who push these policies take any responsibility what happens? No. they have the audacity to turn around and blame the Republicans!

Abortion. The next President may pick some of the supreme court justices. My dad doesn't want abortion to be illegal. But that's not how it works. Even if somehow Bush managed to get right wing conservative judges appointed (which is unlikely). But let's say he did, if Roe vs. Wade got overturned it would merely allow the states to decide through their legally elected representatives.

I'm pro-choice but it rankles me that some judge decided that abortion should be legal. We're a democracy. The will of the people should be paramount. Judges shouldn't be making laws, only interpreting the ones that exist. Roe vs. Wade is bad constitutional law. But I don't think Roe vs. Wade will be overturned regardless.

What I do worry about is more activist judges. Ones who think they should be able to legislate from the bench. Liberal judges tend to do that. Conservative judges tend not to. Hence I prefer Bush to Kerry on this.  I'd rather have my elected officials writing laws than an unelected judge. Hence my support for Bush.

War in Iraq.  Iraq seems to be quite a mess - at least if you listen to the media.  But how bad is it really? The wonderful UN only recently managed to get elections scheduled in Bosnia after what? 9 years? Meanwhile, less than 2 years after the invasion of Iraq we're getting ready to hold democratic elections there. Not bad. Especially considering the size and location of Iraq.

And while we have lost 1,200 troops there, that is actually amazingly low in real numbers. Fewer than died on September 11th.

But let's say you think Iraq is a mess. Is Kerry the answer? He's the one complaining that we needed more troops there but at the same time believes we're stretched too thin as is. Well, which is it?

The simple question to ask is this: If you think Iraq is a mess, would you vote for Jimmy Carter if he were running? No? Then why vote for a man who is even more anti-military, more dove-ish than Carter ever was? Kerry's campaign rhetoric may sound hawkish but that belies his entire career starting with his anti-war activities, his denouncements of US soldiers in Vietnam, his voting against every Cold War effort during the Reagan period, and even voting against liberating Kuwait even after the UN had formally authorized force to free Kuwait. Clearly there is no "global test" that will satisfy a dove like Kerry.

Compared to Kerry, Jimmy Carter is a war hawk. Do you want someone like that running the war on terror? A man whose goal is to put terrorism back to a "nuisance"?

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So those were the 3 points I hammered home to my dad. I did talk about other things such as the causes of the recession (dot-com bubble finally burst coupled by the 9/11 attacks -- remember the US being basically shut down for that whole month? That sunk a ton of marginal companies who then lay off people).

It may not convince a die hard Kerry supporter or someone who is a Bush hater, but for that undecided voter, it worked on my dad who was leaning Kerry.

If you want to check out the new WinCustomize site that is in BETA right now (that means it's not done) to see what you think, go right ahead. Let us know what you think and what changes you'd like to see.

You have to be either a WinCustomize subscriber or a Stardock customer to see it. Next week it'll be available to users with Apprentice access or higher.