...

What can I say? I'm utterly depressed. I know it's not over, but I don't see Kerry winning Ohio, and he needs it to win.

I've been reading a few web sites to see how I was so completely wrong about this election. I'm sure there are many reasons, but one of the main ones is that it appears the polls were assuming a young voter turn-out that just didn't happen.

In response to this, I have a request. Mr. Bush, please: Bring back the draft.

A few of the reasons I was so confident is that it seemed that this time there were a lot of disparate forces banding together to defeat Bush, from celebrities to GOTV organizations such as MoveOn and ACT. His apporval ratings have been around 50, typically a ceiling for incumbents. And I assumed the stories of high-turnout out would benefit Kerry and give him the bump to win.

After I get over my depression, I'm going to be interested to learn just what happened here. I mean, I was extremely optimistic on Kerry's chances. But I'm obviously wrong about several of my asumptions and didn't account for a few trends. One of them is likely overestimating high turnout helping Kerry. I have a hunch both sides turned out in force.

Another shocker: Kerry losing Virginia by 8%. Just dumbfounds me. Every poll in the past few months had him between 3-6%. There was high turn-out in democratic-heavy Northern Virginia. After the polls closed, the announcers held off giving Virginia to Bush for a while because it was too close to call.

So what happened? My first guess is that there was a huge difference between the exit polls which the "too close to call" comments were based on and the actual results. But why such a dramatic difference betwwen the exit polls and the results

I'll read about it later. Right now, I need to go into a cocoon.