I was looking at the polls from battleground states on the RealClearPolitics site. I was surprised to see that Democratic stronghold Hawaii was among the swing states, and stunned to see that Bush was leading.
Last election, Gore beat Bush by 18.3%, and that was with Nader stealing 6%, mostly from Gore. Now Bush is up by about 1% - that’s a 19% swing. Next closest I see is Missouri, which has had a 9% swing toward Bush since 2000.
Is there some major demographic shift I’m unaware of? Why has Hawaii swung so much more dramatically than other states?
9/11. There is a large Filipino community there, and they break heavily for security. Bush is leading among Filipinos by 20 points. The economy is also strong in Hawaii, which favors the incumbent.
But I think that one poll might be an outlier. I suspect Kerry is really in the lead there, although his lead is probably down to 3-4 points.
It means that when polled, they say security is a bigger issue for them than for most. And on issues of national security, Bush still has a huge lead over Kerry. By about 20 points.
But like I said, I don’t think Bush is leading in Hawaii. Nor do I think he’ll win it.
It just doesn’t make sense. Nothing has happened to make it so. The only thing I can think of is that the two newspapers (which until a few years ago shared the same building and printing press yet don’t appear to like each other that much) decided together to work the results in such a way so as to show a close tie to try and intice one of the candidates to visit or at least get some moneyed attention. But we will never have a candidate visit us. We’re too far to travel for too few votes and too far west. Maybe a sitting president might visit for business purposes and work in a campaign visit but it will never happen this late in the election.
Not that I think Hawaii is impossible for Bush to win. If any candidate visits Hawaii this late he will be well rewarded. Heck we gave Kucinich, the only Democratic candidate who visited us, a 2nd place showing with 26% of the votes.
Or maybe local issues, meaning the very long Democratic control of the state, has pissed off enough voters to punish Kerry. It just doesn’t add up though.
I wasn’t clear about it - that website averages multiple polls for each state. In this case, from two different local newspapers, the Advertiser (.7%) and the Star-Bulletin (1%).
I was just reading the links to their poll articles, which to some degree confirmed what has been said above. It also mentioned that many Filipinos don’t have a strong party affiliation. And there were 9-12% undecided, a rather large number comparatively.
Well, what you are really quibbling about is not facts but language / interpretation. The OP’s point was that the 6% that Nader won in 2000 would likely have gone mainly to Gore if Nader had not gotten these votes.
If you wanted to argue a point of fact, you could argue that some not-too-insignificant fraction of these might have gone for Bush…e.g., even if Bush would have only gotten 1/6 of them, that would have meant they would have only added 4% to Gore’s margin rather than 6%. One could also argue that some of these folks might not have voted at all if Nader were not in the race.
race2004.net has 4 polls for Hawaii in the last 3 months. It seems to point to something recent but there’s nothing that leaps to my mind at all.
I doubt it’s because of Lingle. She’s governor because she’s very moderate and provided an opportunity for protest against the Democrats. Kinda like Schwarzenegger in California.
The Filipinos are both Catholic and highly unionized wage workers. If they have switched boy, things are really going to change around here. The Republicans have been very anemic here since the 60s.
No. No votes were stolen. That is a fact. To claim otherwise is false.
To argue who would’ve gotten votes had Nader not been running is meaningless. Nader WAS running. Hence nothing was stolen. I really, really resent it when someone tries to perpetuate that incorrect meme.
FWIW, www.Electoral-Vote.com has President Bush leading in Hawaii by 1%. This appears to be majorly skewed with two statistically tied polls and one poll with President Bush ahead by 10%. Still, it’s much closer than most people would probably think Hawaii is.
I’ve got $20 that says Kerry will take Hawaii. Anyone got $20 to put up against it?
Nader’s off the ballot in Hawaii, so the winner will need ~49.5% of the vote. (I figure the other minor-party candidates will snag ~1%.) That means that if these polls are accurate, Bush still has to score himself a bunch of Hawaiian undecideds between now and Tuesday. Undecideds rarely break towards the incumbent in the last few days; if he hasn’t been able to make his case in 3 years and 9 months, he’s pretty much run out of ways to convince anyone to vote for him at the end.
Plus, Dem ad buys are a-comin’. They’ve still got money to spend, and the two parties have pretty much bought all the ad time there is to buy in FL and OH for the last few days.