NASA, Florida and the 2000 presidential election

Archibald

Banned
In the 2000 presidential election Florida was decisive and of course, controversial.

Through the Kennedy Space Center NASA is a major jobmaker. NASA workers are also Florida voters.

I wonder if a smaller or bigger NASA, with more or less KSC workers (= voters) could influence the outcome of the Florida vote one way or another.

I ask this because a) Bush margin over Gore was very thin and b) as such, only a minimal butterfly could change the outcome

(yes I know, NASA won't change the crappy voting machines that confused the hell of so much people ;))
 
Ah yes, the infamous butterfly ballot. Design by the Dade County Clerk (a Democrat by the way). Signed off on all parties on the ballot. Fully comprehendeable by 1st graders in Chicago
 
During Apollo program at KSC working 26500 people.
After Skylab the number drop to 6000 people
During Shuttle worked around 15000 people.
source http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/history/story/ch18.html


with full scale Space program you get around 26000 people, who vote for that candidate that promote Spaceflight
and that was in 2000 this guy...

1404624660258.jpg
 
Ah yes, the infamous butterfly ballot. Design by the Dade County Clerk (a Democrat by the way). Signed off on all parties on the ballot. Fully comprehendeable by 1st graders in Chicago

That it did make a difference is pretty evident from the Herrrin and Lewis study. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/lewis/pdf/greenreform9.pdf

Instead of relying on exit polls, like earlier studies, Herrin and Lewis simply studied ballot images to determine how Nader and Buchanan voters in Florida *actually voted* for *other* offices (for which neither the Green nor the Reform Party ran candidates) and also how they voted in judicial retention elections, ballot propositions, etc. Admittedly, they have data from only ten counties (of which Miami-Dade is by far the largest) but at least this data shows how a substantial number of Nader and Buchanan voters voted in "straight" Democratic vs. Republican races.

They found that (judging by how they voted for other offices) Nader voters would have gone for Gore by about 60-40 and Buchanan voters *outside Palm Beach County* would have gone for Bush by about 58-42.

But look at their Table 4. In most of the counties, the Buchanan election-day vote was only mildly Bush-inclined (judging from down-ballot votes) but still it *was* Bush-inclined, whereas in PBC it was 83% Gore-inclined! It's really hard to explain that without the butterfly ballots--especially since there was no such huge gap between PBC and the other counties on *absentee* (non-butterfly) ballots. If you can find another explanation, let me know.

Again, I'm nor saying it was a Republican conspiracy or that voters should not have been able to understand it. (No doubt most voters *did* understand it--but in an extremely close race, those who didn't could make the difference. And probably a lot of elderly voters in Palm Brach County did not have as good eyesight as schoolchildren...) I *am* saying that the evidence is overwhelming that it made a difference.
 

Archibald

Banned
I do hope this thread won't end locked because of (recent and painful) politics. That wasn't the goal.

Michel: your numbers are interesting, thank you.

But I thought Al Gore was pro-spaceflight because of Triana (GoreSat) and the X-33. Bush 43 VSE only come in 2004, after Columbia.

so does the political experts here think NASA employment might make a difference - tipping the balance in Gore favor ? (note: I'm not american, so I'm neither pro-Republican or pro-Democrat.)

EDIT: didn't realized that Bush won Florida by only 537 votes !!
 
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I was not attempting to make this political. The whole dicussion of Florida in 2000 to me is over shaddowed by the fact that Gore failed to win Tennessee. He wins his home state he wins the election.
One of the first comments i heard the day after the election was the butterfly ballot was illegal. That is aside from the protesters "i was robbed because of........" and "Democrats, too dumb to vote". The 2000 election pissed me off but I also understood that you could win the election with a lower popular vote nationwide. Everybody always assumes that if Gore had won that 9/11 wouldn't of happened and all of the dumb mistakes that Bush made would be replaced by wise thoughtful decisions. Well 9/11 still probably would of happened and a Gore administration would of made its own incredibly stupid decisions.
 
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I was not attempting to make this political. The whole dicussion of Florida in 2000 to me is over shaddowed by the fact that Gore failed to win Tennessee. He wins his home state he wins the election.
One of the first comments i heard the day after the election was the butterfly ballot was illegal. That is aside from the protesters "i was robbed because of........" and "Democrats, too dumb to vote". The 2000 election pissed me off but I also understood that you could win the election with a lower popular vote nationwide. Everybody always assumes that if Gore had won that 9/11 wouldn't of happened and all of the dumb mistakes that Bush made would be replaced by wise thoughtful decisions. Well 9/11 still probably would of happened and a Gore administration would of made its own incredibly stupid decisions.

I agree about Gore and Tennessee. He also could've had Slick Willy campaign for him, which could've flipped his home state of Arkansas, or considering how close New Hampshire was, Clinton on the campaign trail might've been enough to flip that.

While I think 9/11 still would've happened regardless of who won, I still think Gore would've responded better than GW. At least Gore would've been paying attention to the briefings and would've had a better idea of what he was up against, nor do I think he would've allowed himself to be distracted from Al Qaeda to invade Iraq.
 
One of the elephants in the room in any discussion of Iraq is that regime change in Bahgdad had been a foreign policy goal of the US even during the Clinton Administration. I think Gore would of been more focused on Afghanistan but I also think some sort of military action against Iraq likely. One reason is Sadam's own inability to anything in his own interest. Somewhere along the line he would of twisted the tigers tail
 
One of the elephants in the room in any discussion of Iraq is that regime change in Bahgdad had been a foreign policy goal of the US even during the Clinton Administration. I think Gore would of been more focused on Afghanistan but I also think some sort of military action against Iraq likely. One reason is Sadam's own inability to anything in his own interest. Somewhere along the line he would of twisted the tigers tail

At most we would've seen an airstrike or something along the lines of Operation Desert Fox. Regime change was a goal of the Clinton administration, as they signed the Iraqi liberation act of 1998. In that act however, no where did it call for the U.S. to launch a full scale invasion to do it. It, if I remember correctly, focused more on backing people on the ground (which I think also would've backfired) to Saddam out.
 
All you need to do is sink Nadar (easy, more incompetent campaign=no FL ballot access) and voila, extremely narrow Gore victory.
 
Basically, the result in Florida was overdetermined. When a race is that close, any one of a thousand different things could reverse the result (or conversely, make Bush's margin, though still small, more or less clear). For example, if Elian Gonzalez had drowned, or his mother hadn't, Gore would almost certainly have carried the state. (It is true that polls nationwide showed a majority of Americans favored returning Elian to his father in Cuba, and that may well have been true of Floridians as well. But the voters in Florida who felt most intensely about the issue--the ones most likely to actually cast their vote based on this issue--were Cuban-Americans, and they gave Gore a much lower percent of their vote than they had given Clinton in 1996.)
 
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