As many young RepuGs truly believe, they spent the fall of '08, playing out a Mrs Robinson moment with St Sarah. They, even, remember the name of the hotel.

Well, I don't know if Jonah G qualifies as "young".

Only 33% voted for Bush? FRAUD AT THE POLLS!

What are these percentages of? Remember half or less of adults voted at all. Not to be morbid, but a lot of voters iin those electiions have died. Plus a lot of new voters were ineligible at the time.

funny how bush sorta wins one when "foolin' ourselves into thinkin'" isn't just plain ol' lyin'

sort of its own oxymoron, bush-wise. and reminds of the classic 3 stooges quote:
"I'm tryin' to think but nothing's happening."

indeed "foolin' into" and "think" in the same sentence is the terrain of stooges. and bush has put us all on his bozo bus...

1. This was a poll of adults, not "people who voted during both 2000 and 2004", so given our embarrassingly low turnout historically, not to mention immigration and young voters, it's perfectly plausible they were telling the truth. Not voting for anyone = not voting for Bush.

2. I clicked through to the poll results PDF and couldn't find that question anywhere. What is Mike Madden talking about?

Yeah and everyone I know seems to have been at Woodstock.

I'm guessing the number who are outright lying to avoid embarrassment far exceeds the number who have successfully deluded themselves into believing they didn't vote for Bush.

Those numbers... I'm suspicious about their validity. Normally, polls take into account a persons likelihood of voting. Since plenty of eligible Americans pass up their voting right, if this poll didn't screen out people who hadn't voted in the first place, the numbers would be skewed.

Sadly, with Diebold and our media? They may not be lying.

Old people voted for Bush. They died off.

Also, people too young to vote certainly didn't vote for Bush. And they're now voting age (did the study take this into account?).

steve b.: in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 33 percent of respondents admit to having voted for the guy twice, while 52 percent said they'd never voted for him at all.

well...

they do excel at delusion...

Republicans Report Having Better Mental Health Than Democrats, Poll Finds
Fox News
Saturday, December 01, 2007

A roundup of Gallup health polls over the past four years finds that Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to report having excellent mental health.

The survey found that 58 percent of Republicans polled reported having excellent mental health. Only 38 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Independents reported the same.

ouch...

Who was polled is a good question. Given the small percentage of people who actually voted in 2000 and 2004, it does seem likely that if you included people who didn't vote into the most recent poll, you would get those numbers.

That being said, there probably are a lot of people for whom hingsight has proved shaming.

This is the hapless souls who either bought Michael Bolton's "Time, Love, and Tenderness" or Vanilla Ice's "To the Extreme." Each album sold more than 8 million copies in their day, but good luck getting 8,000 of the buyers to admit to it today. And you know that somewhere out there a deeply ashamed individual has both cds, probably gathering dust in the back of the basement storeroom along with a Cheney '08 bumper sticker.

Yeah, I like to make fun of Bush as much as the next guy, but this survey doesn't necessarily indicate people are embarrassed to admit they voted for Bush. That would only be true if this was a survey held only among people who voted in both '00 and '04. And even then you couldn't account for the people who've died since then. If you held this survey asking the same question about Nixon, the number of people saying they voted for him twice probably wouldn't top the single digits, but that's not due to faulty memory.

By August 1974 when Nixon resigned in disgrace, you couldn't find anyone -- not a single person -- who would admit to having voted for him, ever. "Who me? No way," they would say. It will soon be the same for Bush.

angler, probably a few Barry Manilow buyers, as well.

Okay, I can see - maybe - voting for Bush in 2000. "Compassionate conservative", "the country's in fine shape, what could go wrong?", "I'm sick of Bill and Monica", "I just don't like Al Gore", etc. Lots of reasons for otherwise smart people to vote for Bush in 2000.

BUT, for any otherwise smart, sane, thinking person, to vote for Bush in 2004, after knowing what we knew then, was a travesty.

And I know several people who did vote for Bush twice. One is my Harvard Law School-trained brother-in-law. When I asked him "why", he said, "taxes and Israel". Even this year, after seeing the carnage around him, he was uncertain who he was voting for til the last month or so, when he decided to vote for Obama. More out of disgust with Sarah Palin's nomination than anything else.
Luckily, he and my sister live in Chicago, where his votes in 2000 and 2004 didn't "count".

I have long said that anyone who voted for Bush in 2004 should - voluntarily and honorably - take themselves out of voting in at least two Presidential cycles so we can "catch up" with good governance.

For the record, I voted Dem in 2000 and 2004 and every election since 1972, except for 1976 when I voted for Ford, because I thought he was doing a good job and that the country needed a sustained period of unchanged governing after the ups-and-downs of Watergate.

there are a lot of good explanations in other comments here, so i'll just say i don't think the poll result is surprising & would find it easy to believe that it's accurate (as polls go).

the thing i'm reacting to is this: "So popular, in fact, that he easily won re-election four years ago, racking up what was the largest popular vote total for any presidential candidate until Barack Obama shattered it this year." Easily? Weren't there several scenarios where if fewer than 60,000 voters had gone the other way in Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico or a few other states, Kerry would've won? 2004 was one of the closest elections in our history, and the way the polls were going, if the vote had been taken in December Bush likely would've lost. There was a time in 2002-2003 when Bush was extremely popular, and maybe you could credit the GOP victory in the 2002 midterms to his popularity then; but he never won a solid victory at the polls on his own behalf.

That's not to let anybody off the hook for votes they've cast, but it's a fact. The real story of the past 8 years wasn't the crazy mandate that the voters gave Bush, but the incredible (and incredibly stupid) lengths to which he was able to take a scant-to-nonexistent consensus. And the way he was able to do it was through the GOP-controlled, DeLay dominated Congress, abetted by a compliant press & a divided, poorly-coordinated opposition party.

shortstop and I claimed that precisely this would happen. But not even we thought it would happen this fast.

Actually, it wouldn't account for these latest op-poll numbers (already raked for not clearly IDing who voted at all, new young people, etc.) but Bush likely really didn't get as many votes as were attributed to him. It could well have been enough to sway the election. Instead of a dismissive snooty-centrist-hale-fellow attitude, I suggest reading http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and reflecting on it.

They all live buy the Bart Simpson Credo
I didn't do it!

You didn't see me do it!

You can't prove I did it!

I have personally met over well 2 million people who were at the original Woodstock- near the front. I swear. Who knew there were so many people there.

I can't recall ever meeting anybody who ever attended a New Kids on the Block concert. Not a single soul. I wonder how they made all that money.

To be honest, a majority of Americans aren't registered to vote, and a majority of registered voters still didn't vote for the guy.

But I think your point still stands.

To give him the credit he is due, Stefan predicted this very phenomenon just a few weeks ago:

As time goes on, we are going to find fewer and fewer people willing to admit that they ever voted for Bush in 2004. It'll eventually be as if he was elected by magic!

Posted by: Stefan on November 25, 2008 at 12:50 PM | PERMALINK

[I realize that you have no tolerance for anyone who is more than one degree outside your personal parameters but after two years of reading your bile, I am done. Every comment you post that includes anything I can even remotely spin into a slam rooted in intolerance will be deleted. Let me put it this way: You can't tolerate anyone, and I will no longer tolerate you. -Mod]

There is a lot of evidence to support the fact that fewer people voted of Bush in 2004 than voted for him in 2000. There is a race on between those who are trying to destroy that evidence and those who are trying to preserve it. Unfortunately, the courts are on the side of the ones who are destroying it.

I'm a bit stumped as to why South Floridians would "remember so fondly" a game the Fins lost.

Wow! I missed it, but the torch is now passed from the 150,000 people who "saw" Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points in an NBA game.

And, add me to the crowd who wants the numbers corrected for self-reporting "I voted in '04 and '08" respondents.

Much like OJ fooled himself into thinking he didn't kill Nicole. Self-delusion is a powerful fail-safe.

the famous Dolphins-Charges playoff game in 1982

Wasn't there, but I watched every minute of it on NBC when I was eighteen. Kellen Winslow, in addition to setting an NFL playoff record for receiving, blocked the field goal that sent the game into overtime. All while fighting off dehydration, cramps, a pinched nerve and a split lip. His teammates had to help him off the field at the end of the game.

He gave his all.

In February of 2005 I told my husband that within five years no one would admit that they voted for Bush. I wasn't off by much...

Old people voted for Bush. They died off. ... Posted by: Franklin on December 12, 2008

See what it gets you to vote for a Bush? You die!
Remember that when John Ellis "JEB" Bush runs.