As for Ohio and Missouri, they were toss-ups to begin with but have been hemmoraging jobs like crazy. In all likelihood, that won't help Bush. To make matters worse, Bush's Treasury Secretary, John Snow, shot his boss in the foot the other day when he remarked that it was a good thing that American jobs were going overseas. Now Kerry is going to go around the Midwest repeating this statement. Dubya deserves to lose just for appointing loose cannons like Snow and O'Neil. That such dithering idiots got to be the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is incredible. ,p> Meanwhile, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are trending further away from Republicans. If Bush couldn't win Wisconsin and Michigan with movers and shakers like Tommy Thompson and John Engel pulling strings for him, I don't see how he'll win with popular Democrat governors and energized unions campaigning against him. Once again, we see the supposed genius Karl Rove spreading the word that Republicans are "exploring ways to win without Pennsylvania and Michigan." Good luck.
Then there's the South. Conventional wisdom is that this is solid Republican territory. Not so. So monolithically Democrat is the black vote that all a Democrat has to do to win a Deep South state like Mississippi is get 30% of the white vote. If Kerry wins one out of ten South Carolinians who voted for Bush, he's in like Flynn. That's not inconceivable: some of these Southern states - South Carolina in particular - have been crippled by free trade policies that this President supports.
As for the upper South, things just get worse. Bush barely won Arkansas and Tennessee the last time around. Even in Virginia, Bush only got 52% of the vote.
The outlook is bleak. The National Guard and WMD scandals have taken a toll on Bush's popularity. What propped up Bush's approval ratings even in the midst of corporate scandals, a recession, and the turmoil in Iraq - events that would've doomed any other President - was the perception that Bush was a man of integrity. If there are indictments over the leak that Ambassdor Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA agent, that could be the coup de grace for Bush's re-election hopes.
The bitter irony of all this is that the legacy of the first Republican-led government in 50 years will be an amnesty bill that will give Democrats a lock on the White House for generations.
The other is a slew of trade policies that have done harm to the natural constituency of conservatives and Republicans. White, male, middle class heads of households who have heretofore been the breadwinners of the traditional nuclear family, who may have lost their jobs and careers to offshoring and are being told by those they helped elect, "It's your own fault, screw you. Adapt or die." In my state, especially, and the professionals I know who have been harmed by the loss of their employment, who voted for Bush last time around, have indicated in no uncertain terms that they will not do so again. They're wrong to do that, of course, because President Kerry won't do anything other than raise taxes for a bunch of useless "retraining" programs, but it will be enough to swing those votes his way. Combine that with a shift in demographics and the ongoing hatred of Bush by traditional Rats, and you've got a close race going down to the wire, maybe tipping into the Kerry column if things don't get better. Very much like what has happened in IL and other plains states. GOP support in the heartland is being quickly eroded by by the Rats, and they'd better not get complacent about it because if they do they're going to lose, maybe big time.
These Hispanics coming in don't vote, they are near illiterate rateros. They are Mexicans at heart and don't give a flip about local politics. At least here in Nevada they are not a force.
Well, there is no amnesty plan. But hopefully Rove will ignore the hispanic haters and reach out to that demographic. That will help us shore up the hispanic vote in areas beyond the soutwest. Hispanics need to know they have a friend in the White House and the GOP. I think Bush has done a good job of putting out the welcome mat.