Hope and Despair

Daily Reality Check

Hope and Despair
By Mike Lux
11/5/2004

As part of our ongoing effort to keep you fully informed of current political events and their consequences, The Daily Reality Check is featuring a weekly political analysis column by political strategist Mike Lux that will appear each Friday.

I usually am pretty philosophical about being wrong, but not today. I was convinced we were going to win this election, as were almost all of my fellow Democratic analysts, activists, and operatives. We really thought we were going to win this thing, and to be wrong about this is making me as fundamentally depressed as I have ever been.

I haven't yet had a chance to climb out of my funk to really go deep into the numbers to try to figure out what happened, but here are some initial thoughts coming out of this most deeply disappointing of all elections: