<But that's OK, I'll step up to the plate. You know who got a mandate in the 2002 elections? Mr. Low Voter Turnout, that's who. Only around half the electorate turned out nationwide, and in places like California, it was more like 40%.

The Democrats have seized on this floating straw--repeated pretty much word for word all over the media and academia--to avoid at all costs the inconceivable idea that maybe more voters liked the Republican ideas better than those of the Democrats.

Nice try, but nobody's buying it.

First of all, the statistic is 40 percent of all voting age citizens. This statistic is repeated endlessly, and I found no shortage of references for it. Now, I ask myself, what was the turnout in registered voters, i.e. citizens who give enough of a rat's ass to even register in the first place?

Whoa. I killed about thirty minutes trying to find a national statistic for this. The Federal Elections Commission has nothing. One article in Australia mentioned "roughly half" of registered voters. It may be that the statistics haven't been officially compiled yet. There were many local and state statistics scattered across the Web, though. Turnout numbers for registered voters varied widely, but generally floated in the 50 to 70 percent range. Not conclusive, since the data is scattered, but certainly a bit better than 40 percent.

And second, if after the 2000 election, when every damn vote was counted with a microscope, the Democrats STILL couldn't be bothered to come out for an election that would decide many important seats and maybe the Supreme Court, then maybe the Democratic Party should be asking themselves why their own electoral base thinks they're not worth voting for.

The blowout in Florida, with an easy win by a Republican candidate targeted specifically for destruction and vengeance by every weapon the Democrats could bring to bear, and in a state where the individual vote was found to be worth its weight in gold in 2000, cannot be interpreted as anything less than some sort of a mandate. Even voters staying home under these circumstances "vote" in their own way.

The election runoff this weekend in Louisiana will be instructive. Will the Democrats turn out finally? Will the Republicans? Again, the pundits are predicting a dead heat. Like they did in Florida. We'll see.