Bush Camp Confident Amid Count
Tested by terrorism and a long, bitter re-election campaign, President Bush crept close to victory against Sen. John Kerry in a roiling contest that came down to a heart-stopper in the heartland — a battle over Ohio.
Kerry faced a daunting road to an electoral majority but nothing was settled or conceded as election night slipped away. The Democratic nominee went to bed Wednesday morning with the fate of his candidacy still in doubt. Mr. Bush was up until 5 a.m. watching the tally.
"We are convinced that President Bush has won re-election," said White House chief of staff Andy Card. But that conviction did not sway Democrats, who insisted Kerry was still in contention for Ohio's decisive cache of 20 electoral votes.
And so the nation faced another mystery at sunrise, just as it had in the tangled dawn of Election 2000.
"We will fight for every vote," John Edwards, Kerry's running mate, told supporters in Boston in the wee hours Wednesday in the first stirrings of a legal struggle. "We've waited four years for this victory. We can wait one more night."
Mr. Bush himself planned to declare victory before long. Card, speaking shortly before dawn, said the president delayed that statement to "give Senator Kerry the respect of more time to reflect on the results of this election."
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According to CBS News estimates, Mr. Bush is 16 electoral votes shy of the magic number of 270. With the final outcome in several states still in doubt, a winner may not emerge for some time for the second election in a row.
CBS News does not expect to project a winner in the presidential race until the electoral situation in four contested states is clarified:
Mr. Bush now has a total of 254 electoral votes, compared to 242 for his Democratic challenger. In the popular vote, Mr. Bush leads Kerry 51 percent to 48 percent.
Continuity was the result elsewhere in government, with the GOP padding its Senate majority — knocking out Democratic leader Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota in the process — and easily hanging on to the House. That will be the state of play on Capitol Hill for the next two years, with the chance of a Supreme Court nomination fight looming along with legislative battles. Eleven gubernatorial contests were also decided Tuesday, along with 5,800 legislative seats in 44 states.
Glitches galore cropped up in overwhelmed polling places as Americans voted in high numbers, fired up by unprecedented registration drives, the excruciatingly close contest and the sense that these were unusually consequential times.
The electoral map Wednesday looked much like it did before; the question mark had moved and little else.
Mr. Bush built a solid foundation by hanging on to almost all the battleground states he got last time. Facing the cruel arithmetic of attrition, Kerry needed to do more than go one state better than Al Gore four years ago; redistricting since then had left those 2000 Democratic prizes 10 electoral votes short of the total needed to win the presidency.
Florida fell to Mr. Bush again — close but no argument about it.
And so all eyes turned to Ohio, where Democrats clung to hopes that provisional ballots would overcome Mr. Bush's lead. With Mr. Bush leading by 145,000 votes and roughly 190,000 yet to be counted, one top Kerry adviser said the Democrat's chances of winning Ohio were difficult at best.
Even if Kerry won Ohio, by CBS News estimates he would also have to win either Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes or both Iowa's seven votes and New Mexico's four. All three states went to Gore last time, but Mr. Bush had narrow leads in Iowa and New Mexico on Wednesday morning.
But Ohio was the linchpin: Kerry cannot win without it, and Mr. Bush is assured victory if he prevails there. The dispute in Ohio concerned provisional ballots — those cast by people whose qualifications to vote were challenged or whose names were missing from the voter rolls.
Card called Mr. Bush's lead in Ohio "statistically insurmountable, even after provisional ballots are considered."
However, the number of outstanding provisional ballots exceeded Mr. Bush's margin.
Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot told the CBS News Early Show that the provisional ballots that Kerry is counting on to win Ohio are likely to be mostly invalid, pointing to a high rate of discounted ballots in Illinois as an example.
CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen says he doubts Kerry can win Ohio, but notes, "In Ohio in the last election, where they used provisional ballots, 90 percent of them ended up being accurate."
Ohio has 11 days to verify the eligibility of voters who used provisional ballots, and cannot start counting them until Nov. 13.
The Bush strategy, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Bill Plante, is simply for the president to assert his legitimacy and leave the fighting to others but the White House and the campaign are taking no chances. They're sending a 10-person legal team to Ohio.
A sideline issue in the national presidential campaign, gay civil unions may have been a sleeper that hurt Kerry — who strongly supports that right — in Ohio and elsewhere. Ohioans expanded their law banning gay marriage, already considered the toughest in the country, with an even broader constitutional amendment against civil unions.
In all, voters in 11 states approved constitutional amendments limiting marriage to one man and one woman.
In one of the other battleground states, Mr. Bush's relentless effort to wrest Pennsylvania from the Democratic column fell short. He had visited the state 44 times, more than any other. Kerry picked up New Hampshire in perhaps the election's only turnover.
In Florida, Kerry again won only among voters under age 30. Six in 10 voters said Florida's economy was in good shape, and they voted heavily for Mr. Bush. Voters also gave the edge to Mr. Bush's handling of terrorism.
In the presidential race, exit poll data suggests that Mr. Bush's emphasis on two themes - the war on terror and moral values - resonated with voters and negated voter unhappiness with the state of the economy and the war in Iraq.
The exit polls also suggest that young people played a greater role in this year's presidential race than four years earlier. In 200 they split evenly, but this year they heavily favored Kerry. Older voters went for the president.
[CBS News National Exit Poll results are based on interviews with 11,027 voters. The sampling error is plus or minus 1 point. Exit Polls from specific states are based on interviews with at least 1930 voters, and could have a sampling error of as much as plus or minus 2 points.]