Is this election now Bush's to lose?

Great Debates
1

Has this election reached the point that Bush must make a major mistake in order to lose? The polls have indicated more and more states going Bush.

Although I support Kerry, I think he has run a terrible campaign. It is Bush’s race to lose and with Karl Rove in Bush’s corner, that isn’t too likely to happen. If Bush can get his way and avoid a town hall debate, I think Bush has it sealed unless he makes a major gaffe. The longer this race focuses on what happened 30 years ago helps Bush pile on the states.

A major event could change the outcome, however. This isn’t a McGovern/Mondale/Dukakis debacle. Still, this is starting to remind me of 1996. Dole was the war hero and Clinton was plagued with questions about his past. Clinton won because voters had already decided that Clinton’s past wasn’t enough to disqualify him from the presidency. I’m not sure there is any smoking gun from the 1970s that will change this election.

Any chance that Kerry, without a major Bush screw-up, can pull this one out?

2

Oh, sure. This was always going to be a tight race. And with a big ad buy coming up ($50 Million) Kerry can go on the offensive.

It’s always wrong to look at one or two week swings (prior to the last week) during a race as being decisive before election day.

3

Well, IMHO it would take quite a lot for votes to start swaying back to Kerry. More and more people are supporting Bush, and this has been happenning during a period of quite grim news. The death toll passed 1,000 in Iraq. The economy is recovering still, but very slowly and without much positive press from a hostile (to Bush) media.

It’s still quite a ways to the election, and anything can happen. But, I just don’t see any surprise that is likely to occur that could hurt Bush.

Here are some possibilities:

Another terrorist attack. This, IMO, would help Bush’s approval ratings. People trust him far more than Kerry for security and another attack would sway voters back to him.

Some scandal from Bush’s past. Bush has been in the spotlight for long enough that every stone has been uncovered. I don’t think any new scandal could be found that has been missed all the way until this point, unless the media has been sitting on it until the end. A good example is Bush’s drunk driving arrest in 2000.

Economy problems. Some kind of gas shortage, stock crash, or bad economic news could hurt Bush. However, I don’t think this is likely. The economy is still steadily improving. The ME plays along and won’t raise gas prices during an election season.

The debates. There is more danger here for Bush than anything else I can think of. Swing voters are impacted by debate performances, IMO. If Kerry kills Bush in the debates, then he could have trouble. However, I don’t think this will happen. Bush isn’t a great speaker, but he is good at sticking to a simple and clear message. He knows what he believes and sticks to his guns. He’ll shine when standing next to flip flopping Kerry. Plus, at this point, people know what to expect. They don’t expect Bush to be a skilled speaker. They do expect Kerry to be slicker than snot. The bar is lower for Bush, as he continues to be underestimated.

4

Kerry sure needs to define himself more with voters and show who he is…

Overall I still think the election was always Bush’s to lose.

5

If the US electorate can look at his actions in the last 3 years and still consider him suitable presidential material, it is difficult to see what could convince them that he wasn’t - I am beginning to suspect some kind of mass hypnosis has somehow occurred.

What must he do? Lose a truth-telling competition with Saddam Hussein or something?

Oh, wait…

6

Yeah, that’s pretty much my view.

Step 1: Fire this idiot
Step 2: Hire someone else

Step 1 is not contingent on finding someone outstanding to fill the position for implementation of Step 2. Step 1 is necessary even if the person hired in Step 2 is not an improvement. (And if he isn’t, god forbid, we fire that one and keep firing them until we get someone worthy of the office).

Is it “Bush’s election to lose”? I dunno, if you were thinking of it was “Kerry’s election to lose” up until late August, I guess that would be consistent. I’m worried but not as badly as if this were October and these were the numbers. Rasmussen has been showing Kerry closing the raw-percent preference gap but electoral-vote.com is still showing Bush claiming states that Kerry can’t afford to let him claim in November.

I don’t know how likely it is that things will swing Kerry’s way again between now and Nov 4, just as I don’t know what made things swing for Bush since end of August (Swift Boat Vets Against Truth? The Republican Convention itself?).

The new ads aren’t bad. Kerry needs to make some specific promises, few in quantity, repeated often; they can still equate to “I promise not to be George W Bush” but they need more meat behind them. If the new ads can lay some of that down (Kerry will balance the budget and the economy will get better; Kerry will fix the Medicare mess Bush signed off on; Kerry will have the US working with other nations as a partner again) that will help.

7

According to analysis by James K. Galbraith in Salon, Bush’s approval numbers show a steady decline of 1.4 percentage points every month. This steady decline is modified by upticks caused by spectacular events, the last being the Republican convention. According to Galbraith, Bush needs one more spectacular event before the election in order to prevent his approval numbers from hitting bottom.

8

Rather than Clinton-Dole in 1996, I’d compare this to Carter-Reagan in 1980. Nobody* was particularly happy with Carter, who had presided over a tanking of the economy and foreign policy disasters in Iran and Afghanistan. But nobody really knew what to think of Reagan, whose reputation was that of an extremist and who just wasn’t that terribly well-known to most voters. After they saw Reagan and Carter side-by-side in the debates, people decided they could trust Reagan and abandoned Carter in droves.

Now I certainly don’t think this is ever going to be a Kerry blowout, but he’s got a massive opportunity in those debates to make it clear that he’s a better alternative to another four years of Bush. If Bush comes out better in the debates, then I think it’s safe to say it’s his election to lose. Otherwise, this sucker’s wide open.
*“Nobody,” as used herein, excludes the core party loyalists who would vote for one party’s presidential candidate over the other party’s no matter who was running.

9

I think Minty makes a compelling argument, and I agree with him. It really is rather reminiscent of Reagan-Carter at the corresponding point in time. And I agree that just as things happened then, the debate could turn it all around. However… Reagan, it turned out, was a great and effective speaker. Kerry is not. On the contrary, he tends to over-intellectualize and meander with that fingernails-on-a-blackboard northeastern twang. Unless he pulls out something we haven’t seen, the debates could make things even worse.

10

The Bush convention bounce is already fading. But Kerry needs to get back on message. He now needs a home run or a stand up triple in the debates to get back on track. Some encouraging news is that the undecideds generally break heavily for the challenger and the Iraq war loses support continually. I’m continually amazed that even one person would consider voting for Bush, but I continue to have faith that Kerry can and will turn this around.

11

The debates are Kerry’s last stand. He has to knock it out of the park, or he’s done.

But I don’t think he will. He’s got a real problem in that he has taken so many contradictory positions in this campaign that Bush is going to be able to hammer him on that no matter what he says.

To get an example of the box Kerry has put himself in, consider his answer to Imus this morning when asked about Iraq:

Can anyone make any sense of that? This is what Don Imus (a Kerry supporter) said later:

There’s Kerry’s problem. It’s not just his campaign - it’s Kerry himself. The man is incapable of speaking clearly. There are numerous examples of this - Kerry giving some long-winded answer to a simple question, leaving the questioner more confused than ever.

Part of the problem is that Kerry is serving two masters. He needs his ‘base’, but his base is stridently anti-war. But he also has to appear strong for the independents. Thus the straddling act on Iraq - a strategy that has been successfully torpedoed by the Bush campaign.

But that’s not to say that Kerry’s campaign is running well - this may be the most inept campaign I’ve seen, at least for the last twenty years. Well, maybe George Bush I’s was worse, but it’s close. Here’s an example: Bush just got the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police - the largest police union in the country. It’s the first unanimous endorsement they’ve given in their history. Part of the reason? Because they sent a questionaire to the Kerry campaign, asking for his positions on matters important to the FOP. The Kerry campaign didn’t bother to return it. How lame is that? You risk losing the endorsement of the police because you forget to fill out their questionaire?

Anyway, the fundamental advantage Bush has going into the debates is that he believes in what he says, he knows what he wants to say, and he’ll be on message. Kerry’s big problem is that his positions are fundamentally artificial - driven by the needs of the ‘base’ and focus group strategies. His perch is much more precarious, and it’ll be much easier for Bush to catch him in inconsistencies than it will be for Kerry to catch Bush.

12

The situation isn’t as bad as it seems.

I downloaded the spreadsheet of data for Sep 14 from electoral-vote.com, and I modified the formulas, so that I can tell it to ignore states where the difference between the two candidates is less than x%, where x is a value I can vary.

Below are the results, for various values of x.



x             Kerry        Bush         Tie
-------------------------------------------
4            214           213          111
3            229           226          83
2            229           243          66
1            238           291          9

We can see that if we include states with 1% difference, Bush does indeed have many more EV than Kerry (291 vs 238). But, if we include only states with 2% or more difference, the EV count changes to 243 vs 229.

If we ignore states with 2% or less difference in state polls, the EV count for Bush and Kerry is essentially the same (229 vs 226).

So, as long as Kerry doesn’t screw up the majority of the “tied” states, he has a pretty good shot.

Also, using the state poll data in the downloaded spreadsheet, and using population data and voter turnout data for election 2000, I estimated the expected number of people to vote for Kerry and Bush in each state, and added it all up across states. This gave me an estimate of the popular vote for each candidate.

Result:



Popular vote            Kerry       Bush         Nader
 (percent)	                48.4         50.9         0.7

So, Kerry is only 2.5% behind Bush in popular vote across the country, and in the EV count (which is what matters), Kerry seems tied to Bush if we ignore states that are statistically tied.

13

As long as Bush doesn’t promise that Giuliani will be secretary of some department in the second term, Kerry has a decent chance.

14

God, that was good!!!

Well, there are lots of possible scandals this administration is currently covering up:

(1) The outing of Valerie Plame,

(2) The U.S. being used by Iranian intelligence through Chalabi to do their dirty work,

(3) Someone giving Chalabi super-duper top secret info on the U.S. having broken Iranian codes which he then told to the Iranians.

The question is whether the fuller story will emerge on any of these before the election and how the public will react.

15

Kerry has made a major error with the Vietnam thing: Bush can only lose with difficulty and Kerry cannot win.

The Democrats consistently deride Bush as stupid, when he is manifestly not stupid. This actually works in Bush’s favour as it sets the bar lower for him.

Kerry needs to give clear, concise answers - soundbites. He also needs to become happy with givin answers with which some will disagree. Sorry mate, but you can’t win them all over.

The Democrats need to be a damn sight less paranoid. You don’t try and stop someone standing for President. You don’t suggest to Borders staff that they be creatively incompetent with selling books that are pro-Bush - and if you do you certainly don’t put it in writing. You don’t try and brow-beat those who are not yet of your political persuasion: a positive attitude works wonders. You admit when you are probably wrong (also see this).

Kerry needs to act less like John Major and more like Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher. He’s nowhere near a bad as Michael Foot, mind.

16

Well, both parties have been playing games with Nader’s candidacy. Did you hear about the Republicans in Michigan who were going around and helping collect the petition signatures to get Nader on the ballot? I would say that you don’t do something like that unless you are paranoid too and believe that you can only win by splitting the vote against your candidate:

What that web-blog actually takes you to is a page where Borders’ employees have a message board. So what you had is one person going on that measure board and suggesting such a “creative solution” and then a lot of other Border’s employees blasting him for it:

There were people on this site who have proposed nuking Mecca. So, do you think that we should note that Dopers support the nuking of Mecca? Or, better yet (since these were likely people who were pro-Bush at least in a context between Bush and any Democrat), that the Bush Administration does? So, please, qts, next time, don’t just naively believe what you read on some web-blog, okay? The SDMB is about fighting ignorance, not spreading it!

17

I don’t know if I’d say Kerry would be helped by a “scandal”, exactly. But these issues all point up where his campaign should be focused: on the PRESENT DAY. The Viet Nam stuff at the convention was necessary to show that he understands and can be trusted with the military. But every day from here on out that the media sheep chooses to focus on his vs Dubya’s military service 30 years ago is a wasted day that should have been spent discussing the shit sandwich that is Iraq. And every newscast that leads off with experts debating arcane matters of proportional spacing is a blown opportunity to point out that the economy is still sputtering and the deficit is ballooning.

And frankly, regarding the polls, there’s a lot of crap in there. Go to Donkey Rising for a good parsing of the nationwide and state-by-state polls released seemingly every day. Please note their comments regarding the folly of trusting Likely Voter polls this far out from Election Day, vs. Registered Voter polls. Also please note that many of the nationwide polls showing a huge Dubya lead seem to be drastically overstating those who identify as Republican. Do only Democrats have caller ID?

When all is said and done, and you average all the national polls, Dubya has maybe a three point lead at this point in time. This is crappy for an incumbent still in his post-convention bounce phase. And here’s a question: what can Dubya do to increase his polling numbers? The answer, at this stage in his presidential term, is probably nothing. He can’t go much higher. He can continue to attack Kerry, his VP can continue to try to scare the hell out of people, but does this administration really have anything they can point to that would convince undecided voters to vote for them, and not Kerry? (Of course, Kerry has to do the same thing, and that’s not exactly a given.)

Bottom line is the hardcore partisans on both sides have absolutely nothing to feel too good about.

18

Well, the election is still way too close to call. Last time I looked, Fla had a one point difference. The OP site has it “Weak Bush” but in my mind, it’s too close to call. And, since they have a category “Barely Bush” they seem to be skewing the results Bush-ward. Just Fla alone would have them only 4 votes apart- on THAT chart. There are about 105 EC votes that are “too close to call” so the election is anything but “Bush’s to lose”. He has a tiny edge, and for an incumbent, that edge is WAY too small.

19

I keep hearing this sort of comment, and here’s the thing: Kerry’s positions on the issues are complicated, particularly compared to those of Bush.

If one has a position on the war that is anything other than “Saddam bad! Kill! Kill!” or “War bad! No blood for oil!”, then it might just take a few sentences to articulate that position. However, then people can go on about how you’re not making any sense, or how you’re not taking a stand, or how you’re “over-intellectualizing” the issue. (That doesn’t make sense on any level, not to mention that we could do with a little over-intellectualizing after these last four years.)

In my mathematics days we used to say that every problem has a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong. Such solutions are Bush’s stock in trade–simplistic solutions to complicated problems. Kerry’s positions are more like those of someone who might look at an issue and try to understand all sides of it, and then come to a reasoned conclusion–a process that does not tend to yield “sound bites”.

I’m not saying that Kerry couldn’t outline his positions more clearly in some cases. But there’s much more to it than that.

20

Nice straw man. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Good for them - I couldn’t get on to it - but the fact remains that the suggestion was made in the first place, and that’s not on.