I’m bracing for a rough Nov. 3rd. By now if there was going to be a clear winner, we would have seen it reflected in the polls. I don’t know about the popular vote percentages (why bother with them, since they don’t matter?), but going by the Electoral College, this remains a statistical dead-heat. Key states like Florida are still completely up in the air. Since we’re looking at an election at least as close as 2000, and nothing substantive has changed in the realm of election reforms, my prediction is another long legal battle, with a possible SCOTUS Bush re-appointment, based on another 5-4 majority along party lines.
If there were a God, I would pray to he/she/it that I’m totally wrong.
The best omen would have been for Houston to have won the NL Pennant and then for the Sox to have crushed them in four games with permanent injuries to their best players.
I think there are a lot of folks like Mr. Worden here who feel betrayed by Mr. Bush and would just as soon tolerate four years of Kerry if it means purging the neocons from the Republican Party. This is what the polls aren’t showing. I dare say that there are many many more Bush 2000 voters voting for Kerry than Gore 2000 voters voting for Bush.
I was just thinking this weekend that I know five or six people who’ve told me ‘I voted for Bush last time but won’t this time.’ and I know NO one who said the opposite.
I’ve heard that too, and read a great op-ed piece in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune by Steve Chapman that made the point very well, and yet you see the polls. I’m not getting this whole thing. Things aren’t adding up.
I think there are people who voted for Gore who are now voting for Bush who just aren’t vocal about it. They’re voting out of fear, I guess, and their instinct that Bush is better against terrorism. I don’t get that, personally, based on Bush’ track record, but the country as a whole sees Bush as better on terror.
If Bush had been good on fighting terrorism, then I would have expected that those terrorists wouldn’t have destroyed the WTC and flew into the Pentagon on 9/11. Bush would have implemented policies before that happened to stop them. Bush’s record on stopping terrorists has been less than stellar.
Let’s remember the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.
Myself, I’m wondering if the Al Qa Qaa story is going to have some serious legs. It has survived the first attempts to debunk it (it has its own thread) and speaks to a weakness of GWB’s: that he lacks good judgement and has made serious blunders in his two wars.
Plus, I can’t help but notice the story popped on a Monday, eight days before the election. This is probably the absolute worst time for Dubya for a story like this to come out; there’s no burying this on a Friday afternoon, giving the spinmeisters all weekend to ruminate on how to work this. One must wonder if certain . . . factions opposed to Dubya (like intelligence officers?) massaged this to wreak maximum havoc with BC04. (It must be said that I can’t see exactly how this could have happened; I don’t see their fingerprints on the sources of info used in the original New York Times story.)
And speaking of stories that popped yesterday, I’m totally befuddled by this story that appeared yesterday in the pro-Bush Wall Street Journal (registration may be required). It’s about the missed opportunities to take out Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi in the months leading up to the Iraq war. It doesn’t contain any new information that I can see, and the only thing that could have prompted it is the increasing violence wrought by Zarqawi’s followers in the Iraqi insurgency.
If either of these stories start to gain some traction this week, I have to think that Bush is in serious trouble.
I stand by my original prediction, made (I think) earlier in this thread: Kerry by 8 in the popular vote, and he’ll take 300 electoral votes.
Well, you gotta give the WSJ a certain amount of credit…They may be right-wing nutjobs on their editorial page, but (unlike, say, the Washington Times) they seem to have a very good wall between that and their news journalism side, which has actually broken quite a few stories unfavorable to Bush, I believe.
Am I a total weenie for only daring to make marginally substantive predictions this late in the game?
I think Kerry is going to win by an electoral vote margin larger than any single contestable state. More specifically, I think he is going to receive the most votes in Ohio and in Florida.
His odds are not as good on getting Florida, but his odds of still winning the election without Florida are quite good anyhow. (See electoral-vote.com map for 10/28/04 — without needing Florida, Kerry wins the election if he wins in Hawaii and Iowa (or New Mexico and Iowa) while retaining his lead in the states marked in blue on this date; or Michigan alone will do. Bush, on the other hand, has a more difficult time of it without Ohio in his basket. He could clean up by claiming Michigan but I’ll bravely go out on a limb and say it simply ain’t gonna happen. More believably he could capture Colorado but it sure isn’t the Republican easy pickins we all thought it would be, not according to several recent polls; then add Iowa to that, and not lose any of the red states on this date’s map, including Hawaii. I’ll bravely go out on another limb and say Bush just plain old isn’t going to carry Hawaii. That leaves Bush with 266 electoral votes after obtaining Iowa and Colorado. I’d say he’s more likely to snag Wisconsin or Minnesota than to retain Hawaii or to win in Michigan.
Bush could of course win in Ohio but I don’t think he will win there and also in Florida. At his point I expect him to lose both states and that, as they say, is all she wrote.
