Well that's an interesting take. It does seem to me that Rasmussen, for whatever reason, has been polling more Dem than the other polls. I was expecting the FL poll to come out +Kerry before it was released, even with the Mason-Dixon poll showing Bush +6. I can't see how Kerry could be competitive in Florida. At least Ohio makes some sense if it's competetive, due to the job situation, but Florida being a dead heat doesn't make sense to me. I guess we'll have to wait for some more polls to see.
Not quite. I'm assigning each pseudo-voter in Texas a 60% probability of voting for Bush for example; this gives Bush about 99.9% chance of winning. Note that the original post says that "safe" = 20% advantage. I could run with actual preference polls if these were available. It's just a text input file; it takes about 5 minutes to change the state numbers. (Right now I'm ignoring third parties; this can be changed easily.) I'm using 60*EV+1 pseudo-voters in each state.
I can do this with any numbers. I just tried to pick those in Dales analysis. Also, I'm only modeling the effect of the Electoral College. The EC boosts a small % advantage in a state although it separates the states from each other.
Voter fraud is an interesting topic. The Democrats generally believe that the GOP trys to fix every election. They are as paranoid about fraud (by the GOP) as the GOP is about fraud by the Democrats. I have heard fraud charges (by one side or the other) since 1960. Of course, such fraud did exist in Texas 1948 and probably since before 1800 anyway.
You just have to laugh when you read any of these polls because we know that when Bush wins this fall (from my lips to God's ears), we will immediately see another poll distributed on November 2nd at midnight- denoting Hillary as the winner of the upcoming 2008 election.
We will never know for sure, but if it had been only 2,000 Gore might not have taken back his first concession. Bush had a lead of 1,000+ (after the first mandatory recount), so 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 more votes for Bush would have prevented the Florida fiasco.
Well, Iowa electronic markets currently have Bush vs Kerry predicted to be 53-47 to 52-48, favor Bush, in share of the popular vote. The way it is set up, the contracts pay off the share of the combined popular vote those two get (ignoring Nader votes etc) going to each of them. And they have traded at 53-47 with slight moves to 52-48 occasionally, for the last month or two, with little overall movement.
Bush was ahead by about 1700 before the mandatory recount, which diminished his lead (I don't know how, but it happened) to much less, around 300 I think.
What markets are these? tradesports.com has Iowa at about 42 (meaning Bush is viewed as having a 42% chance of winning the election)
Diverting subject to rant, yesterday O'Reilly repeated the malarky about Bush being down 9 points in the polls. Geez, get a clue! Someone wake the guy up.
IIRC, Bush still had 1,000+ after the first (machine) recount. It fell to 200 - 300 when the shenanigans started: the hanging chads, etc. Then it went up to 900+ after the military absentee ballots were counted. It officially ended at 537. A few more thousand votes would have made a big difference.
Sorry, I misread. Bush took 41% in NJ in '00 acc to CNN.
Bob Beckel was the Democrat pollster who estimated that the early call of Florida to Gore cost Bush 8,000 votes in the Panhandle. John Lott said that John McLaughlin & Associates (a GOP firm) estimated the number at 10,000, but Bill Sammon stated that McLaughlin estimated the number at 11,500.
This is what John Lott wrote on the subject for National Review:
"Florida polls were open until 8 P.M. on election night. The problem was that Florida's ten heavily Republican western-panhandle counties are on Central, not Eastern, time. When polls closed at 8 P.M. EST in most of the state, the western-panhandle polling places were still open for another hour. Yet, at 8 Eastern, all the networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and NBC) incorrectly announced many times over the next hour that the polls were closed in the entire state. CBS national news made 18 direct statements that the polls had closed.
Polling conducted after the election indicates that the media had an impact on voter behavior, and that the perception of Democratic wins discouraged Republican voters. Democratic strategist Bob Beckel concluded Mr. Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the panhandle after Florida was called early for Gore. Another survey of western-panhandle voters conducted by John McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican polling company, immediately after the election estimated that the early call cost Bush approximately 10,000 votes."
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/lott200312100915.asp And this is a book review of Sammon's book:
"New Book: TV Networks Cost Bush 10,000 Votes in Florida Election
NewsMax.com
Wednesday, May 9, 2001
The TV networks almost cost George W. Bush the presidency when their wrong call stopped hordes of Bush voters in Florida from going to the polls election night.
So says the Washington Times' Bill Sammon in his blockbuster new book, "At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election," published by Regnery.
The book, which has already hit No. 1 on the Amazon best-seller list, is available to NewsMax.com readers at a price cheaper than Amazon or anywhere else on the Web. Click here to get it.
Sammon, the Times' senior White House correspondent, spent months in Florida digging into the facts surrounding Gore's underhanded efforts to twist the results in the Sunshine State in his favor even though several recounts showed that Bush had won a narrow victory that gave him Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency.
In the first of a three-part series in the Times, Sammon zeroed in on the networks' call on election night that erroneously gave the state to Gore - even though the polls were still open and the votes uncounted in 10 of Florida's heavily pro-Bush counties in the state's Panhandle.
"Supporters of Texas Gov. George W. Bush for president outnumbered supporters of Vice President Al Gore by more than 2-to-1 in the Panhandle´s 10 westernmost counties, which collectively form the only region of Florida that falls within the Central Time Zone," Sammon wrote.
And because those 10 counties are on Central Time, the polls stay open an hour later than those in the other 57 counties of the state where Bush and Gore were neck and neck in the voting.
Either ignoring the fact that the polls were still open, or inexcusably ignorant of it, the networks fell into line behind NBC, which called the state for Gore at 6:49 p.m. CST.
As Sammon reports, even though there were only 11 minutes to go before the polls closed in the Panhandle, voters in line would be allowed to cast their votes after the 7 p.m. closing time.
But when many heard that the state had gone to Gore, they simply walked away, believing their votes wouldn't help Bush. Some stayed and voted anyway, but, as Sammon reveals, "tens of thousands of others were dissuaded by the premature, erroneous declaration of a Gore victory, according to studies conducted by Democrats, independents and Republicans. Taken together, these surveys show the bad call caused Mr. Bush a net loss of about 10,000 votes."
"By prematurely declaring Gore the winner shortly before the polls had closed in Florida's conservative western Panhandle, the media ended up suppressing the Republican vote," John R. Lott Jr., senior research scholar at Yale University Law School, told Sammon.
Lott, he writes, put Bush´s net loss at a "conservative estimate of 10,000 votes."
John McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican polling firm in Washington, pegged the loss at 11,500 votes. "Its poll, conducted Nov. 15 and 16, showed the premature calling of Florida for Mr. Gore dissuaded 28,050 voters from casting ballots. Although 23 percent were Gore supporters, 64 percent - or nearly three times as many - would have voted for Mr. Bush."
"The premature announcement discouraged many registered voters who, according to our survey´s results, would have voted like the rest of their neighbors - overwhelmingly for George W. Bush," said the survey´s authors, senior analyst Stuart Polk and data specialist Charlie Banks.
"If only a few thousand of these disenfranchised voters had heard that the polls were still open, and the race in Florida was still too close to call - and then voted - George W. Bush would have gained a decisive, net positive margin of votes over Al Gore.
"These votes would have helped Bush carry the popular vote statewide," the pollsters concluded, "without uncertainty."
According to Sammon, a study commissioned by Democrat strategist Bob Beckel admitted that Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the Panhandle after the networks called Florida for Gore.
The McLaughlin survey revealed that two-thirds of the Panhandle voters had heard of the networks' false call in the 11 minutes that elapsed between the announcement that Gore had won the state and the polls closed, Sammon reports. Sammon notes that the significance of the network call and the suppressed turnout in the Panhandle that resulted cannot be overstated.
Simply stated, if the networks had not made their premature call, Bush would have gained something like 10,000 more votes in the Florida results, and the election would not have ended up being decided by the razor-thin margin of less than 1,000 votes.
Sammon notes that had Bush gotten those 10,000 or so votes he would have gotten if the networks hadn't made the false call, Gore would have faced a far more formidable task in trying to overturn the election results.
"Indeed, one crucial calculation that convinced Mr. Gore to fight so tenaciously for 36 days after the election was that he was only a few hundred votes shy of victory," Sammon observes.
"His lawyers and spinners constantly laid out scenarios in which they cobbled together enough votes in this county and that county to overcome Mr. Bush´s razor-thin margin of victory. A five-digit margin would have been much more daunting than a three-digit one."
Incredibly, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary Sammon cites, the networks stubbornly refuse to admit that their premature call so much as influenced a single Panhandle voter."
And this is the account by a Republican interviewed by Bill Sammon who did not vote because of the early call for Gore:
"Networks' early call kept many from polls
Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published 5/7/01
The Democratic nominee for president wielded more raw power than anyone else in the nation during the five weeks after Election Day, according to "At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election" (Regnery), the new book by Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent of The Washington Times.
In the first of three excerpts, he details how the TV networks helped Mr. Gore exploit the debacle in Florida with a bad call that pre-empted Bush voters in the western panhandle.
Bob Glass was running late. He hustled his little red Geo past Bubba´s Bar-B-Q Pit and the 4-H Club and the Lots O´ Snacks on his way toward Interstate 10 and his polling place.
Mr. Glass was at the westernmost tip of the Florida panhandle and had to get clear to the other side of Pensacola in less than half an hour. Traffic would be murder, what with all the military personnel streaming out of installations to vote for a new commander in chief.
But Mr. Glass, 50, had never failed to cast a ballot in a presidential election -- and he wasn´t about to now.
Mr. Glass sells, well, glass. Don´t bother with the wisecracks; he´s heard them all. People ask if he legally changed his name as a promotional gimmick for his windshield-replacement business, which he runs from the back room of his brother´s house six miles from the Alabama border."
"No, I´ve had this name since 1950," Mr. Glass says with a weary chuckle. "For as far back as I can remember."
Mr. Glass swung the 1996 Geo onto the highway entrance ramp. The words "WINDSHIELD EXPRESS" fan across the tinted top of the windshield in white vinyl letters, slightly askew. The left and right sides of the car are adorned with white magnetic signs that say: "Windshield Express: Keep it local, keep it fast; let us repair your auto glass."
Mr. Glass came up with that slogan himself. To anyone who makes fun of it, he points out that the traveling billboard generates quite a few cold calls from fellow motorists who end up as paying customers. Oh, and it doesn´t hurt that a "Bush-Cheney" sticker is affixed to the back bumper.
Out here in Escambia County, people like to say Florida is the only state in which north is south and south is north.
What they mean is that in northern Florida, where the Panhandle runs right along the Georgia and Alabama borders, folks consider themselves Southerners. It´s the kind of place where waitresses in even the finest restaurants think nothing of addressing middle-age businessmen they´ve never met before as "honey," "sugar," "sweetie" and even "baby." This isn´t just the South; it´s the Deep South.
Supporters of Texas Gov. George W. Bush for president outnumbered supporters of Vice President Al Gore by more than 2-to-1 in the Panhandle´s 10 westernmost counties, which collectively form the only region of Florida that falls within the Central Time Zone.
Florida´s remaining 57 counties are in the Eastern Time Zone. As far as Mr. Glass is concerned, they might as well be in the Twilight Zone. For starters, fully half the voters of the eastern 57 counties supported Al Gore.
And every time Mr. Glass crossed the time line, he says, it seemed to get worse. The farther he traveled east and then south down the peninsula, the more he ran into liberal Democrats, who continued to invade these warmer climes from up north, particularly New York and New England.
"I´m a firm believer that everyone from Orlando south is not a native Floridian," harrumphs Mr. Glass, who once endured a year in Orlando before retreating to his beloved Panhandle.
Highly motivated
The little red car chugged east along the northern edge of Pensacola. Mr. Glass still had 20 minutes to make it to his polling place, Scenic Heights Baptist Church. He knew all he had to do was get into line by 7 p.m. Central Time (8 p.m. Eastern) and he couldn´t be turned away.
Even if the line stretched outside the church and around the block, he would be able to vote for president. He might not actually cast his ballot until 7:15 or 7:30 or even 7:45, but he was determined to stand up and be counted for George W. Bush.
Mr. Glass is what pollsters call a "highly motivated voter." A rock-ribbed Republican all his life, he had cast ballots for Richard Nixon in 1972; Gerald Ford in 1976; Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984; George Bush in 1988 and 1992; and Bob Dole in 1996.
He considers it a travesty that Bill Clinton and Al Gore evicted the elder Bush from the White House in 1992. For eight years, he watched with growing frustration as the Clinton-Gore team took the nation down what he considered the wrong path.
For Mr. Glass, a Southern Baptist, the final straw came when Mr. Clinton, also a Baptist, had sex with a White House intern young enough to be his daughter -- and then lied under oath to cover it up. Mr. Glass believed the only honorable thing for Mr. Clinton to do was resign and spare the nation the wrenching ordeal of impeachment.
But he says the crowning insult came just hours after Mr. Clinton was impeached, when Mr. Gore stood on the South Lawn of the White House and pronounced his boss one of the greatest presidents in history.
Now Mr. Gore himself was running for president. He specifically talked about his presidency as one that would last eight years, not four. The colossal presumptuousness sickened Mr. Glass. And if anything, Mr. Gore was more of a liberal, tax-and-spend Democrat than Mr. Clinton.
"I´d had it up to here with Clinton-Gore," Mr. Glass recalls, flattening a palm and raising it dead level to his blue eyes.
Although he never had been active in party politics, he began attending meetings of the Escambia County Republican Party. As the election drew near, he agreed to help run a phone bank.
Unlike some younger volunteers, who used a script in placing their calls, the 50-year-old Mr. Glass spoke from his heart. With a soft Southern affability, he tried to impart to fellow Republicans the importance of voter turnout. He even offered to drive them to the polls.
The day before the election, Mr. Glass and other volunteers stood on street corners, clutching Bush-Cheney signs and waving to motorists.
"I was -- ," Mr. Glass grasped for words, " -- on fire. You know, for the cause. Oh, I was highly motivated."
'Slipping away'
Mr. Glass spent more and more time on the Internet, visiting conservative chat rooms to share his passion. He sensed a unity not just in Florida, but in other states.
"It was a feeling Republicans hadn´t felt in a long time," he says.
And yet, in the closing days of the campaign, Mr. Glass began to fret that Mr. Gore was somehow pulling ahead.
He winced when the media went ballistic over the 11th-hour revelation that Mr. Bush had been cited for drunken driving 24 years earlier. The story, leaked by a Gore supporter, dominated TV news coverage the weekend before the election.
"I could see it falling away from G.W. Bush, I really could. I mean, those last-minute tactics like the DUI thing. Oh, it was just horrible. I could just see it slipping away.
"Granted, I think he should have been more upfront with it sooner," adds Mr. Glass, a teetotaler. "Then they wouldn´t have made such a big deal out of it."
Like anyone else who had paid even passing attention to the campaign in its final hundred hours, Mr. Glass was aware that after months of speculation about this state or that being a "battleground," the polls and conventional wisdom coalesced around three as most crucial: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida.
Mr. Gore, the underdog, could win the election only if he swept the "trifecta," as these states were being called by conservative and liberal pundits alike. The flip side of this theory was that Mr. Bush had to retain at least one of the three -- preferably Florida, the largest -- to become the next president.
Mr. Glass became alarmed by indications that Mr. Gore was firming up his numbers in Michigan and Pennsylvania. If these warning signs proved true, the election might well come down to the Sunshine State. His fears were confirmed when Mr. Gore chose Florida in which to end the campaign he had begun 18 months earlier. The vice president´s confident optimism troubled Mr. Glass.
"Tonight, when the vote comes in, we´re going to win Florida and we´re going to win the White House," Mr. Gore vowed during a televised rally in Tampa only minutes before polls opened Election Day. "It´s almost 5:30 a.m., Texas time, and George W. Bush is still asleep. And I´m still speaking to people here in Florida."
Mr. Glass couldn´t help but worry that Mr. Gore was right. The rally was merely the capstone of a furious get-out-the-vote effort by Florida Democrats. It was the kind of ground war that Democrats usually win.
But Mr. Glass also knew that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the Republican nominee´s younger brother, had spent years cultivating a remarkably effective, county-by-county Republican machine. As one of the innumerable cogs in Jeb´s machine, Mr. Glass had done his best to kick things into overdrive. Yet he now entertained serious doubts.
The bad call
Having driven as far east as he could without actually leaving Pensacola, Mr. Glass swung onto Scenic Highway and headed south along Pensacola Bay. Expensive, waterfront homes with spectacular views lined the left side of the road.
He planned to cut through a subdivision to get to the church on time. He was less than half a mile from the turnoff and it was only 6:50. Plenty of time.
On previous election days Mr. Glass had voted early, on his way into work. But he had felt compelled to attend a breakfast meeting of the Pensacola Chamber of Commerce; he considered "networking" important for his fledgling business.
Mr. Glass listened to the radio as he neared the church. He was a big fan of talk radio, which he considered the only sector of the American news media not completely overrun by liberal Democrats.
That afternoon he had tuned in a show hosted by local conservative Luke McCoy, who lived just three town houses away from him on a cul-de-sac off Scenic Highway. Mr. McCoy got an on-air call from Jeb Bush, who had just arrived in Austin, Texas, to monitor election returns with his brother.
"Hey, Luke -- Jeb Bush," the Florida governor had said. "I just want to urge you to do everything you can to get the vote out. It´s going to be very tight, and we need the people of the Panhandle."
As Mr. Glass neared the turnoff for his polling place, he flitted from station to station in hopes of catching a little election coverage.
". . . and so Al Gore has won Florida´s 25 electoral votes," a voice crackled from the radio.
Alone in his Geo, Mr. Glass cursed aloud.
"How can this be?" he remembers thinking. "We´re not through voting yet."
The fire goes out
Sure, polls had closed nearly an hour ago in the Eastern Time Zone. But here in the Central Time Zone, where Bush supporters outnumbered Gore supporters by more than 2-to-1, voters were lined up outside polling places from Pensacola to Panama City. They could show up for another 10 minutes. And those in line by the stroke of 7 could vote no matter how long it took.
Voters have been known to stand in line for up to two hours in presidential elections. Military personnel are notorious for crowding into polling places on the way home from work. The western Panhandle teemed with military installations. The Naval Air Station was right there on Pensacola Bay. This was the very cradle of naval aviation, the storied home of the legendary Blue Angels.
These were not the kind of voters who were going to support Al Gore. But would they be willing to continue standing in line now that Mr. Gore already had won Florida?
Mr. Glass´ mind raced. He understood how the Electoral College functioned. He knew all too well that the presidential race would be determined by electoral votes, not popular votes.
Florida´s 25 electoral votes would not be divvied up to reflect each man´s share of the popular vote. It was winner-take-all and loser-take-nothing.
And although the presidential election is widely regarded as America´s only national political race, no person´s vote has the slightest practical impact whatsoever outside of his or her own state.
Flush with anger and a sense of dread that Mr. Gore´s win in Florida would put him over the top nationally, Mr. Glass drove straight past the turnoff for his polling place at the church. Although other Republicans were on the ballot, including an acquaintance running for sheriff, those candidates vanished from his radar screen.
Bob Glass suddenly felt the fire in his belly go out. For the first time in his adult life, he decided not to exercise his sacred right to vote for president of the United States.
"What´s the use?" he recalls reasoning. "I mean, if Gore´s already won the state, there´s no use in voting for Bush.
"I was so infuriated. I was distraught. And I just went home."
Bush's net loss
Mr. Glass was among 187,000 registered voters in the Central Time Zone of Florida who did not cast ballots in the 2000 election. The overwhelming majority failed to vote because of good old-fashioned, garden-variety apathy.
But tens of thousands of others were dissuaded by the premature, erroneous declaration of a Gore victory, according to studies conducted by Democrats, independents and Republicans. Taken together, these surveys show the bad call caused Mr. Bush a net loss of about 10,000 votes.
"By prematurely declaring Gore the winner shortly before the polls had closed in Florida´s conservative western Panhandle, the media ended up suppressing the Republican vote," concluded John R. Lott Jr., senior research scholar at Yale University Law School.
Mr. Lott put Mr. Bush´s net loss at a "conservative estimate of 10,000 votes."
John McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican polling firm based in Washington, D.C., pegged the loss at 11,500 votes. Its poll, conducted Nov. 15 and 16, showed the premature calling of Florida for Mr. Gore dissuaded 28,050 voters from casting ballots. Although 23 percent were Gore supporters, 64 percent -- or nearly three times as many -- would have voted for Mr. Bush.
"The premature announcement discouraged many registered voters who, according to our survey´s results, would have voted like the rest of their neighbors -- overwhelmingly for George W. Bush," said the survey´s authors, senior analyst Stuart Polk and data specialist Charlie Banks. "If only a few thousand of these disenfranchised voters had heard that the polls were still open, and the race in Florida was still too close to call -- and then voted -- George W. Bush would have gained a decisive, net positive margin of votes over Al Gore.
"These votes would have helped Bush carry the popular vote statewide," the pollsters concluded, "without uncertainty."
Even a study commissioned by Democratic strategist Bob Beckel concluded Mr. Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the western Panhandle after Florida was called for Mr. Gore.
These surveys, like others conducted after previous elections, demonstrated that early projections of victory generally dissuade supporters of the losing candidate more than the winning candidate.
Indeed, Mr. Glass later would learn that many voters standing in line at Scenic Heights Baptist Church and elsewhere went home after hearing the news.
Networks' denial
News travels fast in the Information Age. In the 11-minute interval between NBC News calling Florida for Mr. Gore and the polls "closing," fully two-thirds of all voters in the western Panhandle heard about it, the McLaughlin survey found.
It is difficult to overstate the political and historical significance of the suppressed turnout in the western Panhandle. If the network news had not jumped the gun, Mr. Bush would have netted roughly 10,000 more votes in the Florida results, an election that ended up being decided by fewer than 1,000 votes.
Those 10,000 votes would not have been enough to prevent the automatic recount mandated by Florida law when the statewide margin of victory is less than one-half of 1 percent. But they certainly would have presented the Gore team with a much higher mountain to climb.
Indeed, one crucial calculation that convinced Mr. Gore to fight so tenaciously for 36 days after the election was that he was only a few hundred votes shy of victory.
His lawyers and spinners constantly laid out scenarios in which they cobbled together enough votes in this county and that county to overcome Mr. Bush´s razor-thin margin of victory. A five-digit margin would have been much more daunting than a three-digit one.
NBC´s premature and erroneous announcement at 6:49 p.m. set off a stampede among the other networks. Although virtually all the network executives later admitted they were wrong, they refused to acknowledge having influenced as much as a single voter in the western Panhandle.
"In the case of Florida, it would be extremely difficult to argue any impact on turnout," CBS News President Andrew Heyward insisted. "The polls were closed in all but 5.8 percent of the state´s precincts, with the rest closing just 10 minutes later."
Mr. Heyward didn´t mention that those precincts contained half a million registered voters.
ABC News President David Westin was even more dismissive.
"There was no point during the evening when it was likely or even possible that voters would decide not to vote simply because of the erroneous projection of the presidential race in Florida," Mr. Westin declared.
Mr. Glass calls these assertions arrogant.
"When you give out information that directly impacts people´s behavior, that is just wrong, wrong, wrong," he says. "By anybody´s standards, it´s wrong.
"You know, a lot of people take the news as gospel," he adds. "Course, I realize you have to rely on yourself to discern the truth in what the media says. There´s a fine line between the news and what you get out of the news.
"But even then, you depend on news almost as gospel. Somebody´s got to be responsible for this."
Copyright © 2001 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved."
I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll
Unsustainable Contradictions
The best national poll for my money is the Battleground Poll. Produced by a joint effort between Democrat pollster Celinda Lake of Snell, Lake, Perry and Associates, and Republican pollster Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group, it avoids the partisanship that sometimes can slip into the sampling methods of other polls. The partisanship can come out in the strategic analysis each does for the respective parties, although the spin presented is usually substantive. This year's springtime Battleground Poll, released this week, is excellent as always.
Ms. Lake takes an optimistic look for the Democrats, saying “it is difficult to find a precedent for an incumbent with such anemic numbers who has gone on to win re-election.” However, Ms. Lake’s analysis contains a significant error which is both unusual for her and could possibly have impacted her optimism; she states “Consequently, voters are unhappy with the job Bush is doing; fully half now disapprove of his performance in office (50 percent disapprove to 45 percent approve)” while in actuality the polling numbers presented show that she has those numbers transposed. Her prescription for Kerry is “to minimize or neutralize Bush’s dominance on the critical dimension of security… and turn the agenda to the economy.”
Mr. Goeas starts his analysis by focusing on the partisan divide in America. One side “clearly identifies with President Bush as a strong, moral, decisive leader,” “views America’s economy on the rebound and credits President George W. Bush.” The other side “sees Bush as an ineffectual leader who has ignored the war on terrorism to pursue a vendetta against Saddam Hussein in Iraq” and “is largely focused on the economic downturn and job loss.” His conclusion is one that I have been asserting for weeks (but am now questioning): “This presidential election truly appears to be starting exactly where it left off in November of 2000… In that election, turnout (not polling) was the final determinant of the election!”
The poll has some interesting results. The unaided ballot question, which Mr. Goeas points out is one of the strongest predictors of the coming election, yields a 4-point Bush lead. However, when voters are given the names and are queried, “if you had to make a choice”, the gap closes to a 1 point Kerry lead (Nader is not a factor, scoring a meager 1%). The numbers are as close as can be here too, as both get 41% saying “definitely”, 1% saying “leaning”, and the remainder saying “probably.” Another way of looking at this is that voters who need to be reminded who the candidates are break 2-1 in favor of John Kerry.
The country is decidedly pessimistic. Well over half of all voters (57%) think that the country is off the right track, compared to just 38% who think we are heading in the right direction. Strikingly, most are not ambivalent about this question. Nearly three quarters of those polled feel strongly about their answer to this question, and those who do take the negative view twice as frequently (47% to 26%). With this in mind, it is very surprising that the President is running even with Kerry; one would expect that if that many people think we need to change direction, that the challenger would be winning comfortably, unless the challenger was viewed so negatively that voters would shun him. However, Kerry has a net favorable rating of +13. The current state of the electorate is contradictory.
Is such a disparity sustainable? There always is that possibility; if something is measured a particular way at one point in time, it can certainly be measured that way at another point in time. However, it is unlikely. As people focus more on the election, the contradictions tend to fade away. However, should this status quo be maintained, then Kerry has very little room for growth. A full 93% of those who think the country is on the wrong track support him, which is about as close to unanimity as one can get in a poll. He also would need to retain his two to one advantage among those who are currently so unfocused on the election that they need the candidate names given to them in order to name a preference. Further, if this status quo does somehow remain, then Kerry faces another challenge, for it would mean another election where turnout is everything. The Democrat base, which energizes the get-out-the-vote machine, is significantly to the left of the country and is angry. Howard Dean angry. Al Gore “he played upon our fears” angry. Moveon.com angry. But the public is not angry; only 10% said they are angered by the state of affairs. The overwhelming sentiment (33%) is that of worry, which is a much weaker emotion at driving turnout, and playing to the angry base is likely to turn off those who do not share that emotion.
Much more likely is that there will be a change, in one of three forms. Either the Bush campaign will manage to drive up Kerry’s negatives to where he is not a viable option for the pessimistic (or Kerry does so himself with some unbelievable gaffes), or people will decide that things are not going so bad after all, or Kerry will pull away.
Of these three possibilities, the least likely to happen is that voters will become so disdainful of Kerry that they would ignore their dour outlook of the nation’s outlook and vote for the President. Even should there be a 20 point swing in Kerry’s net approval rating, it still would unlikely be enough to overcome a 19 point gap in voter optimism, especially when the pessimistic feel so strongly about it. In all likelihood, this probably played into the calculation by the Bush campaign when they decided to decrease current advertising levels by 30%.
There is reason for the Bush campaign to feel optimistic about changing people’s views of the direction of the country. Merely 8% of those polled think they will be worse off financially a year from now. And on matters of national security, terrorism, and Iraq, Bush enjoys substantial leads over Kerry. Again there is a contradiction; people feel we are moving in the wrong direction, but do not think they will be worse of economically and think that Bush’s plans on foreign affairs and terror are right. It is possible that this dichotomy will remain, but much more likely that people will change one of these views.
Further, it is very unlikely that the current disconnect over the state of the economy is going to continue. Either the economy is improving, or it is not. If it is improving, then there will be many months’ worth of evidence to back up that perception, and fewer will believe we are on the wrong path. This would be a disaster for the Kerry campaign, which they clearly realize as indicated by their attempt to redefine the Misery Index, including in it components that cannot be changed by November. It is a valiant effort, but if the economy is truly improving, efforts to portray it as not improving will be fruitless. And if the economy sputters, then the President is in serious trouble.
Iraq is also going to be clarified by November. Bush has a timeline out which will either be made, or it will not. Things will have deteriorated as some fear will happen, or they will not have. There will be spin, and there will be some ambiguity, but by and large the direction will be more readily discernable than it is right now.
Which will it be? Will the delicate status quo, unbalanced and contradictory as it is, hold through November? Will things be better than they are now? Or worse? The quandary for Kerry is that he likely loses the first two cases. If things remain the same, he has to maintain his near-unanimous hammerlock on those who think the country is on the wrong track while simultaneously exciting the angry left base (for turnout) without alienating those who are worried, not angry, and who generally like the President as a person. And if things are better, the pool of those who think the country is heading in the wrong direction will not be large enough. His entire election hinges on the coming events of the next several months validating the pessimists’ view that the country is heading in the wrong direction. He has the unenviable task of having to hope for misery and for death.
For the past few weeks, I have been stating that I believed this election would play out much as 2000’s did. I no longer have that opinion, and am back to the stance I had at the start of the year. Things are close now, but are unlikely to remain that way. The contradictions that exist within the opinions of the electorate will be resolved, and the underlying issues that right now are so unclear (such as if the economy is recovering, and which way things will go in Iraq) will have clarified. The popular vote will probably never open up all that much due to the partisan divide of the country, but the bet here is that most of the battleground states, and possibly some others, will move together to one candidate. And since I believe that the rainy outlook on the economy is based on false beliefs-- fully a third of voters think we are currently in a recession according to a recent Rasmussen poll, when in reality we have been out of a recession for many months)—the money here says that by October it will be clear that President Bush will be re-elected.
This Week's Polling Updates Overview
For most of the week, it appeared as if the pollsters had decided to go on spring break, as no state polls came out until Sunday. We ended up getting a few, with the majority just reinforcing what we already knew. The biggest surprise was, ironically, just such a case, where New Jersey validated previous results showing that to be a horse race. New York opened back up for Kerry, but the gap is still about 15 points less than it was in 2000, which again validates the New Jersey result (since Gore won the Garden State by 16).Just before publication, Rasmussen released a new result for Florida, showing it to be neck and neck.
Background: Republicans have won every election here since LBJ.
Polling Data:
Punditry: Much to my surprise, Oklahoma is still relatively competitive for a southern state. The Insider Advantage poll may have an explanation: Governor Brad Henry's approval ratings are through the roof. Insider Advantage suggests that Kerry may want to look to Henry as a running mate. I think that would likely cause Henry's approval ratings to plummet, since he has been able to avoid many of the positions of the national Democratic party so far. Strong Advantage for Bush.
Background: They like them liberal in Massachusetts. Reagan did carry the state twice (barely), and Ike took it twice, but that's about it since 1924. Most of the time it has not been very close at all.
Polling Data:
Punditry: They love Kerry in Massachusetts. Safe for Kerry.
Background: Louisiana votes for southerners in Presidential elections. George Wallace won here. Carter beat Ford. Clinton beat Dole. And Clinton beat Bush (with a big help from Perot). All others since JFK were won by Republicans.
Polling Data:
Punditry: Even after the Kerry surge, Louisiana is sitting pretty for President Bush. One bright spot for the Democrats is that Jindal was leading Blanco by almost as impressive margins just a few weeks before losing the election to the current Governor. One thing to keep an eye on is the retirement of popular Senator John Breaux, who is looking to move into the private sector. Should there be a Kerry/Breaux ticket, then Louisiana may end up being not so comfortable.Strong Advantage for Bush.
Background: New Jersey used to be considered a Republican state. Those days have passed, although there are still some signs of life. In the last 10 Presidential elections it has gone 1-6-3 with the Republican wins coming in the middle, the last Clinton win and the Gore win were by such substantial margins that it is hard to avoid the feeling that New Jersey is trending leftward.
If New Jersey remains tight enough to stay in the battleground, it is a case of back to the future. ECB2000 started with it leaning Gore's way. The Democrats have 7 of 13 Representatives and both Senate seats, control both chambers of the state legislature, hold all of the important executive offices, and have a 25%-19% advantage in voter registration.
Polling Data:
Punditry: Can we finally stop telling me how nuts I am to think that New Jersey is competitive? It is. Slight Advantage for Bush.
Now if it will be by election day is anyone's guess. But the decision to hold the convention in nearby New York City doesn't seem so nutty any longer, does it?
Background: From 1960 onward, Republicans have carried the Empire State only three times. Nixon beat McGovern, Reagan beat Carter, and Reagan beat Mondale. Even Dukakis won here.
Polling Data:
Punditry: In March, I said "I fully expect the Empire State to move strongly to the left in the next poll for the state." I am originally from New York. I know my home state.
The most interesting thing to me about this poll is how unbelievably popular in New York Mayor Giuliani is. Sen. Chuck Schumer enjoys a 61-19 approval/disapproval rating split, indicative of a very popular politician. However, when he is matched up against Rudy? Mayor Giuliani beats Sen. Schumer 56 -- 36 percent.
Background: Despite the best efforts of the results-oriented Florida Supreme Court, Bush held on to win the state in 2000, just as every recount conducted afterwards validated. Did you know that since 1948, though, that only three times has Florida gone for the Democrat candidate? Johnson got 51%, Carter got 52%, and Clinton (2nd term) got 48% (with Perot taking 9%). More times than not, the Republican has come closer to 60%. Why Bush underperformed here to such a degree is something his campaign must rectify.
In the first ECB of 2000, Florida was listed as a battleground with a slight advantage to Gore. This time around, it is starting with a slight advantage for Bush. Florida has 6 Democrat Representatives and 18 Republicans. Both chambers of the state legislature are controlled by the Republicans. Republicans control most of the executive branch. However, both Senate seats are held by Democrats. As of Dec. 1, 2003, the state registration was 41.9% Democrat and 38.6% Republican.
Polling Data:
Punditry: Rasmussen says Florida will be 2000 redux. Seems fitting at this stage of the game. Tossup.
K53-B44
3/11/04
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3/24/04
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3/29/04
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7/28/03
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10/2/03
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3/23/04
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2/4/04
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5/16/03
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