It's all bad.

It looks like the youth broke for Kerry, but may not have turned out in greatly increased numbers. It would also appear that Rove's 4-million+ legion of evangelical voters was real, and well distributed. "Moral Values" was a top issue among voters, and that shit is nowhere on the pre-election polls. The answer is that fucktons of people who weren't being polled who really cared about moral values showed. 9 anti-gay constitutional amendments passed through the states; these bills were part of the GOP strategy, and it all interlocks.

The mass media isn't liberal biased, but it is biased against fundimentalist christian subculture, if only because most of those folk think TV is Satan's medium (700 club excepted). So those of us -- I'm looking at you, liberal blogosphere -- who take their cues from Big Media never saw it coming. Never detected it. Neither did Zogby. There's a lot of us, fifty million or more, who didn't. But there it is.

This is America, and it belongs to the conservative movement for a while longer yet. I'm sad, ashamed and afraid, but life is also a lot bigger than politics. I'll be fine, and more likely than not so will you. The people who will get the squeeze soon are poorer, less educated and more marginalized than you or I. The question is whether or not I'll be happy living in a country like this.

It's an open question.