Free Republic

DES MOINES, Iowa — As Democratic presidential candidates descended on the Iowa State Fair, a plane buzzed overhead, an ominous warning fluttering behind it on a banner: “Focus on Rural America.” Democrats hoping to win the White House in 2020 recognize how critical that advice is after 2016, when Hillary Clinton turned in strong performances in many cities and suburbs but lost rural voters 2-to-1, falling short to President Donald Trump by slim margins in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats clawed back some gains in rural counties in the 2018 midterm elections, and they want to build on that...

DEMOCRATIC POLLSTER PREDICTS BUSH VICTORY [Cliff May] “We simply do not defeat an incumbent president in wartime.” The quote above is from Mark Mellman. Mark is a Democratic pollster. And he’s very partisan. And he’s been working for Kerry this year. But Mark is no fool and he has a reputation to maintain. He explains his reasoning at some length in a column in The Hill this morning. He predicts that Bush will get 51.6% of the two-party vote. By contrast, Jay Cost is predicting Bush will get less than that: 48.63% to Kerry’s 46.24%. Posted at 10:12 AM

Where does this presidential race stand? Unfortunately the plethora of public polls does more to confuse than to clarify. Contorting and distorting the data with absurd “likely voter” models only makes matters worse. Cutting through the clutter, a few facts are clear: • Averaging the recent polls together gives George W. Bush a one-point lead, 47 percent for Bush to 46 percent for John Kerry. • About 5 percent of the electorate remains undecided. • Almost every poll that has released battleground-state results shows Kerry ahead there. For instance, the ABC/Washington Post poll that had Kerry four points behind nationally...

Attn. Dems: Dean can’t beat Bush A paradox is haunting Democrats. Commentators repeatedly note that, as much as anything else, Democrats want a candidate who can beat George Bush. Yet the current front-runner is the Democrat least likely to succeed in removing Bush from the White House. (OK, I work for one of his opponents, but facts are facts.) Howard Dean accomplished some amazing things last year for which he deserves tremendous credit, but they have come at a cost. While the former Vermont governor is turning Democrats on, he is turning off swing independents. Perhaps the pre-eminent symbol of...