“It just made me cry,” Terry Mitchell, 54, an audiologist in Oakland, said of Mr. Bush’s re-election. “I am sad that America is asleep at the wheel.”

“I am depressed, but I am also just really angry at the rest of the country’s ignorance,” [Jennifer] Sloan said.

Mr. Rubin had been convinced that after four years of the Bush presidency, the country would come around and see things as he and other[‘s do].