http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/index.epolls.html

I tend to be pretty caustic on debates because I don't have much patience for people who confuse their personal experiences or their feelings as facts. I like statistics but I understand why many if not most people stay away from them. Statistics can be manipulated to come about to nearly any conclusion. So it often takes a lot of time and effort to sift through the crap to get to actual meaningful data.

Even exit polls are full of stuff that are useless.  For instance, they talk about things like "What class do you consider yourself part of"  Other than for its psychological value, it is fairly meaningless.  But demographic data is hard to twist.  Things like "How much do you make" or "Are you married". It's very hard to twist that around.

Some stats of interest from the last election.

Married people preferred Bush 53 to 38.

People who pay federal taxes (people making over $30k per year -- $28k and below generally get fed taxes back at tax refund time) supported Bush. Only reason why last election was close was because "the poor" overwhelmingly supported Gore.

People who didn't even graduate from high school overwhelmingly liked Gore.

You see the correlation though - people who don't finish high school end up poor and need public assistance and end up voting for the candidate of the party promising to take from the producers to give to them.

I don't pretend to care about fairness in results. When someone yelled that Gore won the popular vote, that meant nothing to me. I don't care. Because I knew these stats. The margin for Gore's popular vote came from people who are on the dole. My greatest fear for my country is that over time we will become a nation of dependents. Look at those stats. The people who don't finish high school and end up poor are overwhelmingly supportive of Democrats. Over time, as services creep up into the middle class, you will slowly erode our freedoms and end up with a nation of dependents.  Take the adults who actually work for a living and the election wasn't really that close. Take the people who finished high school on up (Even those in academia) put them together and Bush won there too.

If you go through all the exit polls and start thinking about what the numbers mean you start to get a pretty clear picture of things.  The nation isn't as evenly divided (not in 2000 anyway) as some say. You have a slight but definite majority of those who work for a living, finished high school, and are living responsible lives in support of Bush. And you have a massive majority of those who have made poor choices in life who have their hands out waiting for the government to be their mom voting for Gore. And because there's now enough people who fit into that category, it has the effect of making elections quite close.

Which puts the Democrats in a position of wanting people to fail because as people fail in life, they inevitably become dependents of the government and hence constituents of the Democrats.  The only major exception to that are those in Academia or others who are exquisitely well educated who, in my opinion, are divorced from practical reality who imagine the down-trodden as victims of the rich or victims of powerful interests.

There are lots of ways to fail in life. But if you actually meet 1000 people who fall into the poor/uneducated/dependent category you'll find that the majority of them (if you don't believe this, use Google, this data is readily available) did at least 2 of the following:

1) Got pregnant before marriage

2) Didn't finish high school

3) Became addicted to a controlled substance

Note that I said two, not one. Everyone makes mistakes, but those who end up dependents of the government are typically guilty of having made two of those mistakes.  Sure, there are plenty of exceptions to that (so don't write letters about how your 28 year old friend's husband died leaving her with 4 kids, yes, there are legitimate victims in this). But in generally this is what causes someone to be dependent.

But many people choose not to learn about these things. It's a lot easier to say that Republicans are just a bunch of cold heartless bastards who are so greedy with their money that they don't want to help the downtrodden. The reality is that you will always have a certain percentage of the population that are just..well frankly just a bunch of losers. Throw money at them and they'll squander it and end up losers anyway. And when 60% of federal outlays now are about taking money from one person to give to another, I think it's fair to say that conservatives are already giving a lot.

Let's look at the stats again:

15% of the voters  makes over $100,000. Bush got their votes 54-43. That's a 11% margin (a massive landslide). Those people pay 54% of the federal taxes in this country. Heck, 90+% of the taxes are paid by those who make $50,000 or more which are all overwhelmingly Bush voters.  Like it or not, the picture is pretty darn clear -- the ones who vote for politicians for free goodies are, by and large, not paying for those goodies. They are basically using the federal government as a tool for self-enrichment.  Next time someone calls conservatives greedy, keep that in mind. It's not conservative (generally) voting for politicians promising to confiscate other people's money to hand over to them.

Will the United States eventually become a nation of dependents? It sure seems we're heading down that path. Now we have Bush and the Democrats both trying to outbid one another to hand out freebies to people.