Some Gallup poll numbers from some key battleground states (MO, WA, PA and OH) show good things for President Bush:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/polls/2004-09-08-poll.htm
Key Summary:
Missouri: Bush 55, Kerry 41. Pennsylvania: Bush 48, Kerry 47. Washington: Bush 52, Kerry 41, Nader 1. Ohio: Bush 52, Kerry 43, Nader 2.
National: Bush 52, Kerry 45.
If Bush wins Ohio, PA., and Fla. it’s all over for Kerry. That’s how important those three states are.
Some insight from political guru and toe-sucker Dick Morris:
BEYOND THE BUSH BOUNCE
BY DICK MORRIS
September 9, 2004 – PRESIDENT Bush enters Sep tember with a remarkable double-digit lead as a result of one of the most successful conventions in recent years. The key to the GOP success was, of course, its focus on terrorism, reminding Americans what a dangerous world we inhabit. The Republicans also moved to the center, featuring pro-choice and socially moderate orators like Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Zell Miller and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Democrats don’t understand the need to move to the center. Bob Shrum, Kerry’s ? and Ted Kennedy’s ? key strategist, makes his living by appealing to the party’s base. The addition of James Carville and Paul Begala to the team just reinforces the tendency to tack to the left, embracing an economic populism that resonates with 40 percent of the voters but leaves the rest cold.
After all, when Clinton needed to win 43 percent of the vote to get elected in 1992 against Bush, as Ross Perot split the Republican vote, he relied on Carville and Begala. But when he needed to win half the voters in the 1996 campaign, as Perot’s appeal diminished, they were nowhere to be seen.
Carville and Begala will likely focus on “the economy, stupid,” which is a needed correction for Kerry ? whose current strategy of trying to beat Bush on terrorism brings to mind Winston Churchill’s characterization of fighting a land war in Asia against Japan in World War II: “Going into the water to fight the shark.”
But in its focus on the economy, the Kerry team is likely to lose sight of one basic problem: In running against a bad economy, it is helpful if the economy is bad. With an unemployment rate approaching 5 percent, they’ll have a hard time making the case.
The decision to bring in Carville and Begala also begs a more fundamental question: Do they want Kerry to win?
Both men are primarily loyal to the Clintons ? Bill and Hillary. Clearly, the former president would like the former first lady to be president in 2008. And a Kerry victory would stand in the way.
An axiom of politics is that generally you want your campaign advisers to hope that you win ? and Carville and Begala may not pass that standard.
Bush’s post convention bounce is likely to linger until the debates. He will get another boost this weekend as we mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, reminding Americans, once more, how important it is to keep Bush at the helm.
How big is Bush’s lead? Don’t believe the surveys that show it in the 5- to 7-point range. Believe the surveys of Time and Newsweek, which show a lead in excess of 10 points.
The difference is because pollsters disagree about whether or not to weight their results to keep constant the ratio of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in their sample. Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response.
But other polling firms ? and I ? disagree. We feel that political party is not a demographic, like gender or race or age. If the survey finds more Republicans than usual, we think it’s because the country has become more Republican, so we treat the result as a indicator of national mood, not of statistical error.
Time and Newsweek both picked up major moves toward the GOP in the wake of the convention. Likely the other firms did too, but they treated the finding as a mistake and weighed down the Republican interviews, making the race appear to be closer than it really is.
The debates are likely to help Bush, since Kerry’s supporters are so divided on the war and on terrorism. Almost whatever Kerry says is likely to lose him a share of his voters. For example, 37 percent of his supporters told the Rasmussen Poll that they want America to give priority to making democracy work in Iraq, while 54 percent want Kerry to emphasize troop withdrawal. So when Kerry said Monday that he’d prioritize bringing the troops home, his comments appealed to the majority of his voters but alienated more than a third of them. The debates are fraught with such traps.
So look for September to be a good Bush month. But, in October, Kerry will close at least part of the gap. Democrats always do.
BB:
“Toe sucker.” Whahaha. I bet most have forgotten about the mans experience in that area.
Thanks for the laugh!
To the extent there is a message to all of this polling data, it is that Kerry has suffered in Americans’ perception of his leadership abilities. The trend from after the Democratic convention has clearly been Kerry losing ground.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9060-2004Sep9.html
(registration required to follow link)
Executive Summary:
Overall, Bush leads Kerry 52-43 among likely voters in the Washington Post/ ABC poll, which is the first non-holiday, post convention polling data.
Bush beats Kerry on the economy (4 points), Iraq (16), education (4), taxes (10), the war on terrorism (22!), the Supreme Court (10), and relations with other countries (10). He’s down only 3 on health care, down 5 on helping the middle class, and down 2 on creating jobs. He’s even beating Kerry (by one point) on “understands the problems of people like you.”
Good analysis of the problems facing Kerry w/r/t the electoral college – at least if one puts faith in the polling numbers. Of course, the polling numbers for likely voters become more and more relevant the closer we get to the election…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14607-2004Sep11.html
(registration required to follow link)
The key is that Kerry needs to pull of a big state Bush won in 2000 such as FL or OH to have any chance – either that or pick up all the remaining battleground states. Plus, states Gore won in 2000 such as PA, WI and OR are looking competitive, which means he will have to work hard just to keep them – and he needs to keep them to have any shot.
Key paragraphs:
[Begin excerpt] President Bush's post-convention bounce in state and national polls has left Democratic challenger John F. Kerry with a smaller battlefield upon which to contest the presidential election and a potentially more difficult route to an electoral college victory than his advisers envisioned a few months ago.
The Kerry campaign and Democratic Party officials face difficult choices in the coming days involving the allocation of millions of dollars of television ads and the concentration of campaign workers as they decide whether to concede some states to Bush that they earlier hoped to turn into battlegrounds. Bush may have to do the same but on a more limited scale.
The presidential race looks closer in many battleground states than some national polls suggest, a morale boost for Democrats after Kerry's worst month of the general election. But as the number of truly competitive states has shrunk, Kerry is faced with the reality that he must pick off one of two big battlegrounds Bush won four years ago -- Florida or Ohio -- or capture virtually every other state still available. To do that, he must hold onto several states Al Gore won in 2000 that are now highly competitive.
The Massachusetts senator spent much of the summer trying to expand the number of battleground states with television advertising and campaign trips to places such as Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana and Virginia. But in the past week, Kerry dramatically scaled back the number of states in which he is running ads. Democratic strategists privately acknowledge that only a significant change in the overall race will put some of the states Kerry sought to make competitive back into play. Democratic hopes for victory in Missouri have diminished sharply, as well.
Tad Devine, a senior Kerry-Edwards strategist, said the shift in advertising dollars marked a decision to ensure that Kerry can campaign fully in all of the truly competitive states in the final weeks. "We did not want to be in the situation that the Democratic nominee was in four years ago of having to choose between Ohio and Florida," he said. "That choice will not have to be made this time. We have the resources to compete in those states and many, many more."
Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign, called the shift by Kerry an acknowledgement that the Democratic ticket's earlier goal of expanding the electoral map had failed. "They've basically decided they're competing in 14 states and sort of ceded, for all intents and purposes, states they were in at the beginning of the year and spent a lot of money in," he said. [End excerpt]
Not to say Bush has anything wrapped up of course – but it definitely looks stronger now than it did a few months ago… And, of course, the futures markets still have Bush winning the electoral vote:
BB:
Thanks for the post, very interesting.
The poll means little.
Popularity for a candidate always surges around their convention because the general public, particularly your undecided voters, are easily swayed and impressed by the rhetoric and the glitz.
Things will level out before the election.
Agree ~ they will level out. They will level John Kerry right out on his ass!
Maybe, but that’s because he is a dweeb with the personality of the bowl of oatmeal I forced down this morning.
However, he’s not a redneck retard.
Can’t America find someone better?
[quote]deanosumo wrote:
Maybe, but that’s because he is a dweeb with the personality of the bowl of oatmeal I forced down this morning.
However, he’s not a redneck retard.
Can’t America find someone better?[/quote]
Hey! I’m a redneck! I resemble that remark!
Latest poll out of Minnesota (a traditional democratic state) shows Bush and Kerry in a virtual tie!
This means more time and money must be spent in order to try to win a state that they thought was in the bag.
That has to shake up the DNC some!
same thing with NJ too. Bush and Kerry neck and neck.
For what it’s worth, this shows even NY is getting close. Lumpy, better get out and try to talk some sense into your fellow New Yorkers…
Note, I know NY isn’t all that close, and the poll is of Registered Voters. Still, it’s funny…
Maybe some NYC people who had never met any actual Republicans actually found out that Republicans don’t eat babies and George Bush doesn’t have two heads when the Republicans held their convention there.
You just have to wonder what the Kerry camp is thinking when funds have to be diverted to hold Minnesota and New Jersey.
What states are now being shorted that would have otherwise not had their budget cut?
Interesting article re: polling, and the art behind it (definitely more art than science):
Divergent Opinion Polls Reflect
New Challenges to Tracking Vote
By JOHN HARWOOD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 20, 2004; Page A1
WASHINGTON – Widely divergent poll results in recent days underscore a paradox of the 2004 presidential race: Despite all the surveys, it may be the toughest election in memory for anyone to track.
Opinion polls themselves had been getting harder to conduct long before the matchup between President George W. Bush and his Democratic rival, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. The reasons range from growing reluctance to participate in surveys to increasing reliance on cellphones rather than the land lines pollsters have long used to ensure demographic and geographic balance in surveys.
But this year’s bitter presidential contest has heaped on new challenges. They include an exceptionally close race and a polarized electorate that magnifies the consequence of different polling methods. In addition, unprecedented voter-mobilization drives by both parties make it especially tough for pollsters to say which voters probably will show up on Election Day.
“It makes it harder” to forecast the likely electorate, says Fred Steeper, a longtime pollster for Mr. Bush. In the six weeks to Election Day on Nov. 2, he adds, disparate polls may reflect sampling error and methodological differences more often than shifting opinion. “My advice to the consumer is … the day-to-day reports of polling will exaggerate the changes in this race.”
Media coverage of the campaign last week appeared to prove that point. On the same day last week, USA Today cited a new poll by the Gallup Organization in reporting that Mr. Bush “has surged to a 13-point lead” over Mr. Kerry, while other news organizations reported surveys by Pew Research Center and Harris Interactive showing the contest tightening to a dead heat.
Adding to the confusion is the way poll reports themselves become weapons in the campaign. The Bush campaign swiftly touts favorable surveys and seeks to discredit those showing Mr. Kerry drawing closer. The approach plays on the so-called bandwagon effects that energize supporters of a surging candidate and dispirit those of a lagging one.
Kerry advisers embrace dead-heat polls as a way to halt high-profile critiques of their campaign’s inner workings and shift public dialogue to more fruitful ground such as violence in Iraq or domestic issues. Thus, even as Bush aide Matthew Dowd argued that Mr. Bush’s lead was widening at week’s end, Kerry spokesman Joe Lockhart told reporters, “The trends are going in our direction.”
Underlying those conflicting arguments aren’t just different political calculations but also differences in polling philosophy and techniques. Consider last week’s Pew Research Center survey, which showed strikingly different research during two consecutive polling periods.
In the portion of the survey conducted Sept. 8-10, Mr. Bush led Mr. Kerry 52%-40% among registered voters. In a separate portion conducted Sept. 11-14, Messrs. Kerry and Bush were tied at 46%. But there was one other key difference, too: Among voters sampled in the first portion, self-described Republicans outnumbered Democrats by two percentage points; in the second, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by four percentage points.
Pew pollster Andrew Kohut described that difference as normal week-to-week drift – because party allegiance is a fluctuating attitude – that doesn’t call his results into question. In fact, he says his surveys show the race is more volatile than other analysts have suggested. But the Bush campaign insists the partisan variation exaggerated the appearance of a trend toward Mr. Kerry.
Party allegiance “does not change in seven days” by that much, says Mr. Steeper, the Bush pollster. He says Mr. Kohut should have “weighted” his poll with a common assessment of partisanship for both samples; averaging the two would have shown the president with a steady lead of about six percentage points.
Bush advisers were more pleased by a CBS-New York Times survey late last week showing the president leading Mr. Kerry by nine percentage points, 50% to 41%, up from seven points the previous week.
Yet those CBS surveys were conducted the same way the Pew polls were – without making any adjustment for the different number of Republicans and Democrats surveyed. And in the CBS polls, the number of Republicans surveyed rose sharply from the first week to the second.
Last week’s CBS sample, in a mirror image of Pew’s, contained four percentage points more Republicans than Democrats. Because this polarized contest has left roughly nine in 10 adherents of each party supporting its nominee, such variation in the number of Republicans and Democrats surveyed has an unusually large impact on polling outcomes.
In a close race, in fact, that can make the difference between an apparent dead heat and a solid lead for one candidate. If the CBS and Pew surveys are adjusted to reflect comparable numbers of Republicans and Democrats, their results would have been virtually identical.
Indeed that’s precisely what liberal polling analyst Ruy Teixeira did on his Web log, called Emerging Democratic Majority. As the New York Times report of the poll carried the headline “Bush Opens Lead,” Mr. Teixeira’s blog declared, “CBS News/New York Times poll has it close to even.”
(The Wall Street Journal and NBC News plan to release the latest of their surveys later this week. The Journal/NBC poll does adjust for variations in self-described party identification.)
Mr. Teixeira argues that the Democratic edge Mr. Kohut found is realistic, since exit polls from the 1996 and 2000 campaigns indicated that in both cases four percentage points more Democrats than Republicans showed up to vote. Slightly more self-described Democrats than Republicans voted in the 1984, 1988 and 1992 elections as well.
There’s no assurance that will be the case this year, since both realignment of voter attitudes and party turnout drives can sharply affect that balance. Mr. Dowd says a roughly equal number of Democrats and Republicans will show up on Nov. 2.
Just who will turn out represents one of the biggest quandaries facing pollsters. About 105 million ballots were cast in 2000, and all sides agree more Americans will vote this time. Bush strategist Karl Rove predicts a total of around 110 million; Democrats estimate an even larger turnout, with some projections as high as 120 million.
Close to election time, pollsters like to report results among those considered most likely to vote on the theory that those results will align most closely with the final outcome. But weeks away from Election Day that’s especially difficult to do, since many of the campaign’s mobilization activities occur immediately before the election.
“I don’t know how you factor that into your polling,” Mr. Steeper says. Adds Democratic pollster Peter Hart, a veteran of presidential politics who helps conduct the Journal/NBC survey: “This is art. This isn’t science. Nobody knows.”
The Journal/NBC survey uses a single question to identify likely voters. It asks respondents to assess their interest in the election on a 10-point scale with 10 as the highest; those responding 9 or 10 are called likely voters.
The Gallup Poll, which provides surveys for CNN and USA Today, among others, assesses likelihood of voting in a different way that has raised the ire of the Kerry campaign. Gallup asks a series of questions first devised decades ago that assigns voting probability to each respondent; it then uses their answers and an overall estimate of voter turnout to identify the likely electorate.
Since mid-July, that method has yielded a likely electorate that is substantially more Republican-leaning than those of recent presidential contests. For instance, the likely-voter sample in last week’s survey showing Mr. Bush ahead by 13 points contained seven percentage points more Republicans than Democrats. Given the current polarization by party, the survey would have showed a near-even race had the sample’s partisan balance matched the 2000 exit polls or the registered-voter sample in the Pew poll.
As a result, Kerry pollster Mark Mellman has loudly accused the high-profile Gallup survey of using a likely-voter identification method that is “not very accurate,” in part because the screening questions are outdated and because they can’t properly measure voting intention so long before Election Day. The substantial variation between the likely-voter results and Gallup’s registered-voter findings – which showed an eight-percentage-point Bush lead – is larger than what other likely-voter assessments usually record, Mr. Mellman says.
“We’re open to any scientific evidence that would point to our modifying our likely-voter model,” responds Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. Mr. Newport says so far he hasn’t seen any.
In 2000, Gallup’s election-eve sample of likely voters showed Mr. Bush leading by two percentage points over Al Gore. Its registered-voter sample, showing Messrs. Bush and Gore neck and neck, was closer to the actual Election Day results. But Mr. Newport notes that in 1996 the likely-voter model more accurately forecast the size of Bill Clinton’s victory over former Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole.
Mr. Bush narrowly lost the popular vote while winning enough electoral-vote battlegrounds to capture the presidency. And the same polling variations that can affect assessments of the race nationally are multiplied this time around by the intense focus on polls in battleground states. Democrats insist Mr. Kerry is more competitive with Mr. Bush in the race toward a 270-electoral vote majority than national polls would suggest. They argue Mr. Bush is piling up exceptionally large polling margins in states he’s already expected to win, masking closer contests in battlegrounds such as Ohio and Florida.
Mr. Dowd argues, to the contrary, that Mr. Kerry’s advantages in Democratic-friendly states such as California and New York offset Mr. Bush’s edge in the South and Mountain West. As a result, he says, the president’s advantage in battleground states matches his national lead.
The argument is especially hard to sift since different surveys of battleground states as a group show different results. There are multiple public polls of many individual battlegrounds, and the campaigns rarely publicize their private battleground-state surveys.
Write to John Harwood at john.harwood@wsj.com
New York and New Jersey really in play? That’s what Rassumussen says, but decide for yourself:
I do know that Bush is now spending money in New York and has scheduled campaign stops as well. Hey, with only 5pts separating them he might as well at least make Kerry spend money and time here, taking him away from other states that he really needs.
Interesting take from Colorado-based journalist Stephen Green, aka the Vodkapundit:
Thanks to demographic changes, if John Kerry were to win the same states Al Gore did in 2000, Kerry would lose 278 to 260, instead of Gore’s 271-266 nailbiter. To win, Kerry needs to find ten EC votes somewhere. But where?
Let’s write off big parts of the map where Kerry - or probably even Jesus, if He ran as a Democrat - simply can’t win. There’s the South, short of Florida and perhaps Virginia. Everything between Kansas and Utah, and between the Rio Grande and the Canadian Border (minus New Mexico) is Bush Country, too. So what states can and should Kerry contest? It’s a short list:
New Hampshire
Ohio
Florida
Nevada
Virginia*
Missouri
Taking New Hampshire and Nevada (9 votes total) wouldn’t cut it. Ohio, Florida, Virginia, or Missouri by themselves, would. So how is Kerry doing in those states? Let’s see the latest numbers from Mason-Dixon, Rasmussen, Zogby, and others:
New Hampshire - Kerry up 6, to Bush up 9
Ohio - Bush up 3 to 8 points
Florida - a tie, up to Bush by 6
Nevada - Bush up 4
Virginia - Bush up 4
Missouri - Bush by anywhere from 2 to 14
OK, then - Florida is Kerry’s last, best, and maybe only hope. But that’s assuming an awful lot, given what’s going on in a few of Kerry’s base states.
Right now, Pennsylvania (21) and Iowa (7) are both up for grabs, Wisconsin (10) looks strong for Bush, and New Mexico (5), Minnesota (10), and Oregon (7) are all weak for Kerry. That’s 60 EC votes Kerry can no longer count on to win. Instead of fighting in Florida, he’s got to watch his back in six states he ought to have in the bag. Meanwhile, Bush’s only big worry is Florida.
Now that Kerry has exhausted the Vietnam issue both for himself (thanks to the Swift Boat Vets) and Bush (thanks to Dan Rather), he needs some fresh ammo. If what we’ve read the last couple days is any indication, Kerry thinks that Iraq is exactly the right caliber.
Brace yourselves, kids - Kerry is going to do some damage in the next week, hammering Bush on Iraq. Bush’s numbers will slip. But if Bush is vulnerable on Iraq, Kerry is even more so. He can hurt Bush, but thanks to Kerry’s history of taking every possible position on Iraq, he won’t be able to gain any traction from it.
In the meantime, Rathergate will continue to fester, and there’s not a damn thing Kerry can do to stop it - and there’s nothing Bush need do to encourage it. A hundred years from now, journalism schools will still be teaching about Dan’s Folly.
The more important question is, what about the Democrats’ Folly? In a field with Joe Lieberman (the “Let’s win the war without being total Republican bastards” candidate) and Howard Dean (the anti-war guy), the Democrats nominated a guy who is neither fish nor fowl.
Kerry voted against the Gulf War in 1991 ? a position I can respectfully disagree with. I mean, restoring Kuwait’s kleptocratic sheiks to their thrones probably wasn’t our Number One priority. Then Kerry voted for war against Iraq. Except now he claims his vote was only to threaten Saddam, not to oust him, which Kerry would never have done, except for those times when he said he would have.
Yet the flip-flopping isn’t what bothers me. What bothers me here is: Just how stupid does John Kerry think we are? When Congress votes to authorize the use of force ? which is the modern, nicey-nice version of a Declaration of War ? does he expect us to believe he thought the President wouldn’t use it? That’s like giving a kid a gross of bottle rockets and a new Bic lighter, then leaving the boy unsupervised ? and being shocked, shocked to hear small explosions in the distance.
What, exactly, did Kerry think Bush was going to do with his authorization of force, have it framed and mount it on an Oval Office wall? Bullshit. Kerry knew his vote meant war. You knew it meant war. Amazon tribes so primitive they don’t even know they’re living in Brazil knew it meant war. Single-cell organisms knew it meant war. Yet Kerry expects us to believe he was only voting to give Bush some extra diplomatic muscle?
Forget the polls. Forget the Electoral College. Forget the economy, the war, and 9/11. Forget if you’re a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green. Just remember that John Kerry thinks you’re stupid.
*Yes, I do mean Virginia, not West Virginia. Northern VA is more or less a suburb of DC now, making the state less Southern and more like a government town. And we know how those usually vote. Twelve years from now, we may wonder how any Republican ever won there.
West Virginia hasn’t voted for a northeastern liberal since Dukakis, and isn’t likely to do so again. Not so long as there’s a war on, anyway.