...and the winner is...

...definitely the Christian Right. I think that John Kerry is right to hold off on conceding, just in case, but at this point it would take a miracle for him to win the election. It's time for me to gradually start reconciling myself with the idea of a second Bush term. There are a lot of things I'm afraid of, but I'll start facing them in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, I'm reeling. I invested a lot in John Kerry, in terms of time, energy, and emotional capital. And, for a poor grad student, a non-trivial amount of money. What a depressing night. For now, here's what I took from the election itself: the clearest thing to me is, 2004 represented a *tremendous* victory for the Religious Right. It turned out in droves, and it elected its man. (It also emphatically banned gay marriage in eleven states.) At one point in the evening, I heard the CNN people saying that Kerry won convincingly among moderate voters. In an election with record turnout, Kerry won convincingly among moderate voters, and did not convincingly win the election. The Christian Right demonstrated yesterday that it is powerful enough to determine a nation-wide election, more or less all by itself. This could change everything.