Since this is mostly based on my nebulous political “feelings” at this point vs hard facts I’m putting it here instead of GD. Mods move if you must.
I’ve voted for both Democrat and Republican Presidents in my time and I’ve almost always (with one exception) voted for the winner over the past 27 years. I’m beginning to get a “feeling” that I think think the mood of the electorate is slooowly shifting away from Bush, and that Dean (or whoever the challenger is) might actually have a shot if the looming 2004 deficit numbers and the continuing Iraq morass tag team Bush in 2004.
Whatever his other virtues Bush is not a particularly charismatic man, and for a variety of reasons cannot count on the female vote in 2004 if a more attractive Democratic candidate makes a compelling argument. I think the pundits are entirely wrong about his relative invulnerability in the coming election and Bush needs to be a lot more concerned about 2004.
What do you think? Is my political “feeling” completly off base or not?
How I wish I could agree with you astro, but I am a realist. There is a serious lack of charisma among Democratic challengers in '04. Dean is the one exception and he has problems that will likely prove insurmountable. I think we get a warped sense of the political winds from reading this board.
Polls still show that the war is popular and they approve of Bush’s job performance. I don’t expect the economy to implode before the '04 elections. The defecit is a cancer that takes a long time to manifest itself. I fully expect to have Dubya until '08.
According to my newspaper today ( The Times), the odds are strongly in favour of Bush being re-elected.
“In the past 100 years only 4 elected Presidents have missed a second term”
Although of course his father was one of them!
I think Bush is getting more vulnerable, but there needs to be a Democratic candidate that can take advantage of that vulnerability. I don’t know if that will happen though. I detest Bush, and am a Democrat, so I don’t understand how any Democrat can’t win just by not being Bush. Of course I realize that this is ridiculous and people that think clearly don’t think that way. The thing that worries me is that there are so many Dem candidates running right now. The press seems to have picked up on Dean right now, but they keep saying things like “Is he peaking too soon?” So much for the liberal media. It’s almost like when Hollywood takes some plain looking person and starts telling everyone they’re gorgeous so people start to think it. I think the same thing is happening with the Democratic Party. The press is saying how there aren’t any solid candidates and the party doesn’t have any direction. The public starts to believe it and then there’s no chance. Combine that with the fear mongering the GOP is doing and it will be hard to defeat a president that doesn’t have much going for him.
So, anyone want to take bets on what level of Terror Alert the country will be on in relation to where Bush stands in the polls at election time in a little more than a year?
Not to beat a dead dog, but I don’t see Bush as being the question. He’s going back in unless the Dems can come up with an attractive alternative. At this point, it doesn’t appear that they will do so.
I agree, there are ten feet in the door for the Democratic nomination. None of them is looking great right now, so the media swell isn’t behind one of them exclusively. I think this will cripple the chances of whichever candidate finally gets the nomination.
Bush isn’t looking great now, but at least he’s getting media time. Any press is good press. Look at what Schwarzenegger is getting in Cali., I bet that he get’s a considerable percentage of votes, even though he hasn’t been involved in the state government before.
Also, I’ll bet anyone here $50 that Howard Dean doesn’t get the nomination. I like him so far, but I don’t think the DNC will allow him to be their man.
Objectively speaking, of course Bush is increasingly vulnerable. He’s a sitting President and, rightly or wrongly, everything to do with the state of the nation is on his plate. And the broader world as well, though the political spin machines will focus selectively on that, depending on what suits the ultimate goal: re-election.
Equally objectively speaking, the state of the nation ain’t good. We hold the Chief Executive responsible for handling tough problems, and we’re notoriously myopic when it comes to causes and effects.
How it’ll play come election time? Who knows. Shrub’s strong suit is his ruthless, effective campaigning. He has very effective advisors; handlers, rather. The gyrations and gymnastics of the last election won’t play a second time. OTOH he is the serving President. That carries both grandeur and piss. He’s responsible for what he’s done in the past 4 yrs. and he can’t dodge the inevitable election debates the way he’s stifled press conferences. He’s ill-informed, and a very poor speaker. He does very well with the tell-'em-what-they-want-to-hear crowd though.
It depends on who the Dems run. I think if they run someone who will call Bush up and get the progressives riled up and behind them, they can win. I honestly, truly think Dean can win. And I honestly, truly don’t think the Dems have the balls to run him.
That’s sortof lying with statistics. The fact is that the odds are around 50/50 of a president being re-elected.
In the past 100 years (Since 1901), 11 presidents that have been elected (i.e. were not in office because the prior resident died or resigned) have run for a second term. 6 of them were re-elected and 5 (more about the claim of four below) were not. So, it’s very close to 50/50. The word “only” further falsely implies that failing re-election was pretty unlikely.
The four comes from (I assume) the fact that Roosevely didn’t seek re-election immediately after his term ended in 1909, though he did re-run (and was defeated) in 1912.
Not to mention that if you look at it historically no president that has lost the popular vote has been reelected. And if you compare Bush with his father at this time Bush’s father was doing better in almost every way.
As far as the democratic nominee goes if Wesley Clark doesn’t join Dean wont have too much trouble winning. He is 21 points ahead of Kerry in New Hamshire and 5 points ahead of Gephardt in Iowa. And those two right now are his main competition.
I mean, this guy didn’t have any kind of mandate from the people, even in the LAST election. He either squeaked in, or stole the election, depending on who you ask.
If he’d been running right after 9/11, he’d have won handily. I agree that if we manage to catch Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden right before the election, he’ll win pretty neatly.
True, the Democrats are having their usual organizational problems, and their usual knack for not being able to agree on a decent candidate. But once the national convention is resolved, there will BE a Dem candidate, one Dem candidate. And that’s when the election will really get rolling.
Wonder what will explode right before the election? And where?
I think there’s a decent chance to defeat Bush, but the Dems are going to have to light a fire under people who ordinarily don’t vote. If I were a bigwig in the Democratic party, I’d organize a massive get-out-the-vote drive, focusing on voters under the age of 30. Get your candidate to talk about affordable health care, education, environmental issues–issues that younger voters are more likely to care about. There’s a vast, untapped pool of potential voters out there. Although I’ve voted faithfully since turning 18, many of my peers have never voted. And, frankly, when so much of the rhetoric is about Social Security and Medicare, it’s not hard to understand why.
Do you think they could get away with having already caught Laden/Hussain and waiting for the electorially avantageous moment to produce them, or would it be impossible to cover up?
</cynical as hell mode>
I consider it extremely likely that whatever happens, you US guys will be on a high terror alert status when elections roll around. I hope things work out okay for you, I worry about you these days.
Bush’s team will of course be manipulation the terror alerts, etc., for electoral purposes. They’ll also be using other less legal techniques. Look for more election scandals in key states like Florida. The Pubbies have learned they can “fix” elections, they’ll continue to try to do so. As a Dem, I hope they try something so illegal and blatant that it destroys Bush’s chances, but Rove is a slick character and will prolly keep them away from the edge that Nixon tumbled over.
This is why I like Dean as a candidate. I see fliers up for him at my college already and I’ve never, ever seen it before. I think he’s got a good foot in with young voters, kinda like Nader had. The Dems need to quit angling for the old (who, I think, are probably set in their voting patterns) and make a run at the young. It doesn’t take much to swing an election and if they got a bunch of young first-time voters, they could probably take it easily.
But, the political Common Sense is “Young people don’t vote.”
Like most folks who have so far weighed in, I’d sure like it to be true that Bush is increasingly vulnerable, but the pragmatist in me knows it’s way too early to make such a call. The experience of '94, when the Pubbies utterly destroyed the burgeoning Dem revolution but Clinton came back and handily won '96, compared to '88-90 when Bush the Elder looked invulnerable but got squashed in '92, means you can’t tell anything this far out.
One thing about Dean interests me, though. (Actually, many more things interest me, but this is the one I’m gonna talk about.) The Pubbies, predictably, will try to tar him as a liberal, as usual, even though his record in Vermont is decidedly centrist. Karl Rove, a few weeks ago, was asked how he’d feel if Dean were the challenger, and Rove responded, “Bring him on,” which the right-wingers have crowed about as evidence of Dean’s hopelessness as a candidate.
But what is Rove going to say, really? “No, we’d rather not face him”? Wouldn’t that be the surest boost to any candidate’s popularity? Rove is enough of a manipulator that he might try something like, “Hey, Dean’s a patsy, send him if you want. But it’s that Kucinich who really scares us. We don’t think we have a chance against him. And don’t be throwin’ us in no briar patch, neither.” Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I can’t believe Rove would ever say what he really thinks about such an issue; he’s always going to say what will have the most political benefit in the short or long run.