Kerry Concedes; Bush Wins

Nov. 3, 2004



Kerry Calls It Quits

Sen. John Kerry has lunch at the Union Oyster House after voting on Election Day in Boston. Left is his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, and right is longtime friend and former campaign manager Chris Greeley. (Photo: CBS/AP)



Mr. Bush built a solid foundation by hanging on to almost all the battleground states he got last time.

Supporters react as they wait for results during the election night rally for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry in Boston, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004. (Photo: AP)

President Bush with his family at the White House on Election Day. (Photo: AP)


(CBS/AP) Sen. John Kerry called President Bush on Wednesday to concede the presidential race, CBS News has learned.

The Massachusetts senator planned a concession speech for 1 p.m. ET at Boston's Faneuil Hall, and the president was expected to accept victory at around 3 p.m. Supporters of the president were to gather at the headquarters where the close call in Ohio delayed a celebration overnight.

CBSNews.com will provide a live Webcast of those events, and CBS television stations will broadcast them live.

At about 11 a.m. Kerry called Mr. Bush to concede, Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart told CBSNews.com's David Paul Kuhn.

White House chief of staff Andrew Card claimed victory for Mr. Bush hours earlier, and indicated Mr. Bush would not wait long to declare victory himself.

Kerry had delayed conceding because of the tight race in Ohio. Mr. Bush was leading in the state, but there were thousands of provisional ballots outstanding.

After seniors advisers to Kerry met all morning, they decided that even if provisional ballots swung heavily in the Democrat's favor, the 130,650 lead by Mr. Bush was simply too large to overcome.

One senior Democrat familiar with the discussions said Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards was suggesting to Kerry that he shouldn't concede. The official said Edwards, a trial lawyer, wanted to make sure all options were explored and that Democrats pursued them as thoroughly as Republicans would if the positions were reversed.

Besides getting Ohio's 20 electoral votes, Kerry would also need to have won in Wisconsin, which CBS News deemed too close to estimate, or in both New Mexico — where uncounted absentee ballots loomed large — and Iowa, where technical issues halted counting overnight. Kerry was leading in Wisconsin but behind in the other two states. Al Gore won all three in 2000.

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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.

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: Kerry could not win without it, and Mr. Bush was assured victory if he prevailed 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.

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.

Card called Mr. Bush's lead in Ohio "statistically insurmountable, even after provisional ballots are considered." 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.

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, was simply for the president to assert his legitimacy and leave the fighting to others but the White House and the campaign took no chances. They were sending a 10-person legal team to Ohio.

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.

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.

[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.]