Empahasis added.
With no disrespect intended, do you recognize anyone in this editorial (registration migh be required)?
Yeah, he’s a right winger. Yeah, he’s partisan. But he has a very good point that denying the other side has any legitancy is a sure recipe for disaster.
Yeah, it’s sure killing Kerry in the polls, isn’t it? What observable facts are there that lead to the conclusion that the Democrats are “blowing up”, or will?
Krauthammer is just barely on the reasonable side of Peggy Noonan. That editorial was a repetition of his favorite approach, deriding the mental health of anyone who might not share his politics. It’sa bit disappointing for a former psychiatrist to be making diagnoses without examining the patients, of course, but he *did *turn his license in. All he can do is rail from his wheelchair against the world for its stubborn refusal to conform to his own preconceptions, or even notice them.
Yeah, that’s silly. The simple fact is that elected GWB for a second term will NOT cause the sun to go Nova or bring a dinosaur killer down on us.
Here’s something for you, John:
From here: http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising/Survey%20Website/survey_website_press_release.htm
And I know I’ve read that stat elsewhere. I’ll keep looking.
I predict that the election again won’t end until decided by a court. I think that Kerry will just barely win, and that it will be closer than 9 EV. And Colorado has got the referendum on the ballot to split our 9 EV based on popular vote. I think it will barely pass, and then the constitutionality of it will be challenged. (I think the constitutionality of it will certainly be challenged if it passes, whether it impacts the national election or not.) Big court battle, recounting, blah blah blah. I think Kerry will win eventually, but not before W pulls every thing he can think of short of an armed coup. Actually, I think an armed Bush coup attempt is not that likely-- but if it did happen, I certainly wouldn’t be suprised. Why do I think this? Worst case scenario, I suppose. I hope I’m not right, but I’m pretty sure there is no way this election is ending without another huge court battle, at least.
Are they? I can find all sorts of data on Bush’s negatives (about 44%), but not much on Kerry. This, from CNN, is unclear:
Do you have data that Bush’s negatives are worse than Kerry’s? Does anyone have data on Kerry similar to the Polling Report data on Bush (first cite in this post)?
Even though I’m planning for voting for Kerry, there’s a little part of me that’s hoping that Bush will win, just so all of the chickens will come home to roost on his watch.
My prediction: A second Bush victory will wreck the GOP. The federal budget’s a mess and will only get worse by 2008. Iraq is a festering sore that’s not going to go away. And there are several scandals brewing that have the potential to destroy the facade of competence that the administration has erected. Since the Republicans control most of the government, when the shit hits the fan in 2006 it’s going to all fly to the right. And when that happens, Reagan’s grand coalition of business interests, fundamentalists, and libertarians is going to crack wide open.
Yes, the vast evil empire will fall, and you along with Han, Chewie and the droids will get to watch from the surface of Endor. Yay!
Meanwhile: A Bush win definitely does create a more interesting landscape. The Pubs have no clear successor (His people are all old farts, McCain’s too old for 2008, Arnie’s a furriner) and the division between the social conservatives and the Libertarians could be huge. Same goes for the Dems and a split between the Quasi-Naderites and the Leiberman/WJ Clinton moderates. They do have Hillary to rally 'round, though. Fun stuff.
My prediction: Bush loses popular vote by about a point, but – again – takes EC by about 10 points. And all America learns the name “Glenda Hood.”
Is she the good witch, or the bad witch?
This Kerry voter believes, sadly, that Bush will win.
Rove and his dark cabal have demonstrated that they will do virtually anything to win short of assassination. He’s been doing this a long time, and he has a deep, deep toolbox.
The Swifties were a carpet-bomb run of conventional munitions. We haven’t seen the hydrogen warheads yet.
You dare doubt me?This is a few weeks old, sure, but:
The rest is well worth a read, too.
I disagree. If the pro-Bush crowds at least acknowledge that the race is close, their interests are better served by suggesting that Kerry is leading. That perception is more likely to bring the faithful to the polls on November 2. If they showed Bush with a significant lead, that may hurt the pro-Bush turnout.
As to the OP, I don’t really have much to add. Without any major events to provide a big swing, I think things will tighten up after the RNC, and then Kerry will pull back a slim lead after the debates. After that, Kerry wins both the popular (and irrelevent) vote, and narrowly takes the EC.
Of course, there will be (a) major event(s), so this is all subject to change.
Both sites cite the polls they use, although they use different ones. None of them have been widely noted to use identifiably-skewed results. Feel free to go right to the sources, or compile your own “neutral” site if you wish. More likely, the truth is somewhere between electoral-vote and electionprojection, so if they’re saying the same thing, that does mean something.
Oh, yeah, the “major event”. To change the dynamic for Bush, it’s going to have to be a strongly anti-Kerry one, on the order of a child-molestation conviction. The strongest conceivable pro-Bush one might be Osama’s capture, but that has its own exploitable weaknesses.
On the other hand, we have the Plame outing investigation, very possibly resulting in the armed escorting out of the White House of Scooter Libby or even Dick Cheney himself. We have the very real possibility of another great eruption of the nationalist insurgency in Iraq and another spate of coffins and wheelchairs. We have the real possibility of an Al Qaeda attack, but this time it would undercut Bush’s case to be effectively fighting The Wah on Terrah. We have no likelihood of the economy magically healing in the next 2 months, but a near-certainty of the negative jobs and income news continuing, with a sudden sharper downturn even more likely than an upturn. We have the Florida voting situation ready to blow up in Jeb’s face - even today, a judge there ruled that all votes must be hand-recountable, just like the law says, despite what Jeb wants.
I haven’t come across any disagreement that the debates will clinch it. All Kerry has to worry about is his own mistakes, but he’s been a very cautious man ever since his first Senate run and can’t be expected to make the same mistakes of contemptuousness that Gore made.
Bush wins with >53% of the vote.
I’m baffled by those who say that the Swiftboat thing hasn’t had an effect. Before the story broke, Bush and Kerry both had 46% of the veteran vote. Now it’s Bush 59 Kerry 37. That’s a HUGE swing. Before the story broke, Bush was trailing Kerry in most polls by 2-3%. Now he’s leading him in most polls (latest CNN/Gallup: Bush 50, Kerry 47).
Most troubling for Kerry is that Bush is starting to take the battleground states. Kerry had substantial leads in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Now Bush is leading in all of them by 2-5%
Remember, this is the election in which the total lack of a Kerry bounce after the convention was attributed to an electorate which had already made up its mind and wasn’t going to be budged. But now they are all trending Bush, and some of the moves have been quite substantial.
And this Swiftvet thing isn’t done. They’ve just begun to talk about his post-Vietnam activities. But even if they fade from view now, they’ve damaged the Kerry game plan tremendously, because they’ve taken Vietnam away from him as an issue. That opens the door for Bush to hammer Kerry on his Senate record without Kerry being able to retreat to Vietnam and heroism and such like he did at the Dem convention. Now he’s actually going to have to talk about it - and it’s not pretty.
Historically, at this point in the race the challenger would be up 10-15 points in the polls. Kerry is trailing. His campaign has been totally inept - his handling of the Swiftboat thing was about as bad as you can imagine. What he SHOULD have done was take the high road and play it strong. He should have gone on TV and said, “I understand why my old colleagues feel the way they do. What I said when I came back from Vietnam was polarizing, but I felt I had to speak up. Looking back, some of my words were couched in the heated rhetoric of youth and battle fatigue, and I regret the intemperate tone of some of what I said. For that, my colleagues have my apologies. But it was a long time ago, and the country was very different.”
Instead, he chose to do this, “Bring it on!” thing, then two days later he ran to Bush and said, “Make it stop!” In the meantime, he avoided the media, refused interviews, and generally gave the impression of someone who has something to hide, whether he does or not. But more importantly, he didn’t look very presidential.
For that matter, his campaign knew this attack was coming back in May. They examined it, and decided to ignore it. Huge mistake. They should have gone after it head-on then - because it would have been old news by now no matter how it shook out. But they let it simmer until the election heated up when everyone was paying attention. Stupid move.
Then there are the debates. Bush has never lost one. He beat Ann Richards, he beat Gore. Kerry, on the other hand, is a terrible debater. He lost several debates in the Democratic primaries against the likes of Howard Dean and Al Sharpton. I predict Bush wins every debate.
As for a convention bounce, I would have said two weeks ago that there wouldn’t be one. Now I’m not so sure. The effect of this Swiftboat attack has been to insert doubt about Kerry and drive up his negatives. That provides fertile ground for Bush. The attacks may not have moved many voters to Bush so far, but I’ll bet they’ve moved a LOT of voters from, “definite Kerry” to, “probably Kerry”. Bush can capitalize on that at the convention.
And there are still some potentially explosive issues out there for Kerry. For instance, if you think 254 Swift Boat vets can garner sympathy, wait until you see what a hundred or so POW/MIA widows can generate. I don’t know if they are going to appear in this election cycle, but I do know that many of them hate Kerry with a white-hot passion, both for sliming their husbands in his testimony after the war, and for what they perceive as a whitewash of the POW/MIA issue while in the Senate because he was pushing for normalized relations with Vietnam.
(Insert usual dislaimer here about being a long time to the election, things change, terror attacks, economic news, yada yada)
We already have a thread about the Swiftees, Sam. Your case isn’t restored to life by shifting it to this one. You can return there and wrap up matters any time.
Who told you Bush “won” every debate and Kerry “lost” every one of his, btw? Fox?
I don’t know about Kerry’s debate record, but Kerry himself said on the Daily Show that Bush has won every debate. (See the Cafe Society thread for speculation on why he said that.)
I think Kerry will win.
It was a close race back in 2000. In that election, Bush didn’t even receive the popular vote, and keep in mind that this was before the WoT, the missing WMDs, the prison abuse scandal, the retarded economy, the questionable military record, the stem cell angst, the rising deficit, the unpopular anti-SSM amendment, the high gas prices, the negligent environmental protection policy, * Farenheit 911*, and four years of media footage showing him in less than flattering ways. The country was a relatively happy go lucky place back in 2000, and Bush still only managed to scrape by with a victory.
In 2004, after the all shit that’s accumulated in the last four years, I can’t imagine that more people will vote for him than they did before. Sure, the die-hard partisans will. So will the people who think its bad news to switch presidents mid-war, no matter how bad the incumbent is. But I’m thinking that most of the folks who were undecided in 2000 and voted for Bush at the last minute, will put a little more thought into it this time. If they do, they will probably vote for Kerry, because the reasons against Bush are a lot stronger than they are against Kerry.
I predict Kerry wins by 1 point in popular vote (49.5 to 48.5) and a small but comfortable electoral win (collecting between 280 and 300 e-votes, say 285).
Kerry is the better candidate, but Bush has an amazing campaign team.
The swiftboat debacle is a good example. Kerry was mostly in the right, but his whiny, aggressive attack on Bush was a real bad move. Bush made a perfect counter-attack and came out on top. It doesn’t help matters that Kerry has based a major part of his candidacy on his Vietnam record.
Another recent flub was Kerry’s speaking out against Bush’s announcement of world-wide U.S. troop relocations. Don’t try to compete against him as a wartime President, asswipe.
And throughout this, Kerry has only lost a little in the polls, which shows the inelasticity of the electorate. Bush has two boosts coming to him, the RNC and the 9-11 anniversary, and has at least one downturn, the 1000th US soldier killed in Iraq.
But when the campaign starts focusing on issues, Kerry should start climbing again. The economy, Iraq, foreign relations, the deficit … all spell bad news for Bush. But he does have tax cuts at least. And he would have had a bonus with the gay marriage issue, but he took TOO strong a stance on the issue, and Bushcamp had to soften the administration’s policy with Cheney’s recent public announcements (of all people!).
I can’t see Bush coming ahead in the debates. Kerry, while a little boring, is very eloquent, and either he is quick-witted or very knowledgable about the subjects he needs to speak about. I’ve heard Bush speak. It’s not pretty. Unless it’s a planned speech, it sounds as if he is completely clueless. To tough questions, he either uses a stock answer that oftentimes has nothing to do with the actual question, or stammers for a bit, then says something completely idiotic. About a month ago, in a question and answer session, the audience actually laughed AT him after an amazinging stupid response to a question.
So, all in all, barring any extraordinary events, this is gonna be one helluva tight race.
Sam, let’s face facts. You’re already committed to Bush; you’re not one of the voters either side is seeking to persuade. And there are voters who are equally committed to Kerry. But neither side has a large enough percentage of committed voters to win the election. So both sides are seeking to persuade undecided voters to either vote for them or at least not vote for their opponent.
And most people are saying that the Kerry campaign is currently doing a better job of convincing these voters. Yes, many people are convinced by the statements being made by the Swift Boat Veterans; but most of these people were already in the Bush camp. Among undecided voters, more voters are being lost by what they perceive as an unfair attack than are being won by the basis of the attack. This is why Bush supporters are increasingly trying to silence the SBV.
I have no idea. It’s too close. That is all.