Unfortunately, that's the problem. It wasn't a low year for voter turnout, at least comparitively speaking. Nationally, voter turnout has hovered in the 50%-55% range in every presidential election since at least 1980.

I agree. And where RC says: "there is no reason to think the non-voting population is distributed differently from the voting population, is there?", I would say that one could reasonably guess that the distribution of Bush supporters might be higher among the non-voting population compared to the voting population. One could reasonably speculate that the reason some of these lazy bums didn't vote is because they were relatively satisfied with the status quo -- in this case, Bush -- and weren't as motivated as those who wanted to throw Bush out.

I'm pretty sure that statistics on non-voters show that most are younger and lean more liberal. Therefore, I would say that if all eligible Americans were forced to vote, things would have turned out very different.

Hahh.....well shoot. 2004 was the first election that I was able to vote in......so I guess I never really paid attention to the statistics before then.

I don't know if I would say that it would have turned out different for Bush vs. Kerry. I know plenty of people who generally vote Democrat that thought Kerry was nothing short of awful. Obviously that shouldn't be taken as a representation of every non-voter.......but I'm just saying.

Point taken. I guess I should have spesified that "if the Dems had put up a decent candidate, the non-voters forced to vote chould change things".

From a demographic point of view, the liberal tendencies of the young is kind of overplayed at this point in time - one of the amazing things to come from recent generational research surrounding Gen Y is that it is actually skewing more conservative on many issues. This would be something where 'common knowledge' (ie young people don't vote plus young people are more liberal) doesn't necessarily hold . . . the actual statistics would be interesting, though.

I have lost a brother and 2 good friends there...so I am keeping my comments to myself because I may wind up saying things liable to get me banned....but thank you all for those that did comment on the topic at hand.