If you look at anybody's poll internals, you'll see that measures of things like "satisfaction if X gets elected" skew heavily against Bush. They all show that more Bush-voters will be content with a Kerry vitory, than Kerry-voters with a Bush-victory.

So you can treat that as a fundamental character difference (as you seem to be), or you can treat that as something far more pragmatic. People know Bush more than they know Kerry. People are more comfortable with an "evil" they don't really know than an "evil" they do know. And in this case, whomever somebody didn't vote for is "evil". So to Bush voters, Kerry is an "evil" they don't know. They're pretty sure it would suck if he won, but maybe it'd be tolerable for four years. On the other hand, Kerry voters see Bush as an "evil" that they do know. They're pretty sure of exactly what it would be like if he won, and they're dead set against it.

So while this guy is trying to be witty or observant or whatever, he's really just catching on to something pretty simple and universal.

Oh geez. And after reading his article, it only looks worse. I live in Los Angeles, so I know all the places he's talking about. Forget what I said earlier, you know what the difference is? Maturity/Staidness!

To bring it to your NYC terms, consider if he went to Williamsburg and SoHo (is that still young, hip, and blue?), and then followed it up with a trip to Bergen County, NJ. Of course reasonably mature adults are going to be nice to him and shrug off whatever political idiocy he promotes, and of course young wannabe-activist/starving-artists are going to throw stuff at him.

If Slate would have paid for him to take a trip to Lubbock, TX or a sports bar in Omaha or something, the article might have been a bit more interesting. Instead, he just trotted around SoCal...

This article showed that Republicans are clean, kind, considerate, optimistic, interesting and fun to be with and have jobs.

Democrats were proven to be dirty, hostile, unkempt, snotty, intolerant, angry and do not want a job.

That pretty much sums up my experience with Republicans and Democrats also.

waaa. Call me when Bush supporters are THROWN IN JAIL for wearing a Bush T-shirt or a Bush/Cheney pin.

An observation about the places he chose.
Newport Beach CA, WTF? I agree with Andrew on the way people would act there. Plus it's only 61.6 republican anyway.
Go to a southern state in a military town to do this experiment and the results would be different.

Also, the t-shirt he wears for Kerry is harder to reckognize, people have to actually stare and look to notice it. The one he wears for Bush is immediatly obvious.

Also, and Andrew touched upon this a little in his first comment I think, many people (including Republicans) believe Bush and Cheney have done really awful things, betrayed the trust of the American people, sullied their offices, stolen from the American people, etc. Many believe Bush and Cheney are responsible for needless deaths and injuries (including those of American soldiers). Many believe Bush and Cheney have acted unforgivably and in a way that has wrought untold and immeasurable damage on the United States.

The complaints people have about Kerry, on the other hand, are on the order of "He's a pandering flip-flopper who wasn't as big a war hero as he says he was." And Edwards is a lazy trial lawyer.

So one can see why anti-Bush people tend to get a bit more worked up about it than anti-Kerry people.

Also, add these to Dawn's example of Bushies crushing dissent, even from their own.