Permanent Fatal Errors (Did the Voters Send a Message?) How Voters really choose the candidates. by Louis Menand, 06-DEC-2004, New Yorker, (Postcard From Stanford)
It looks like this piece is not yet available online (New Yorker)
perhaps it might be in a a week or two?
The money quote in this article, was for me anyway, from Gary Langer, polling director at ABC,
"I would suggest that the answer can be expressed in a single phrase, 9/11. ... Fifty-four percent of voters on
Election Day said that the country was safer now than it was before September 11, 2001.
And perhaps I would suggest, more important, forty-nine per cent of voters said they trusted only President Bush to handle terrorism, eighteen points more than said they trusted only John Kerry. ...
Among those who trust only Bush to handle terrorism, ninety-seven per cent, quite logically, voted for him.
Now, right there, if forty-nine per cent of Americans trust only Bush to handle terrorism, and ninety-seven of them voted for him, those are forty-eight of his total fifty-one percentage points in this election.
Throw in a few more ancilliary issues, and that's all she wrote.