Many state have had record turnouts for voter registration.
Lots of new voters = lots of voters period
Big turnouts have almost always been bad for incumbents. The winds o’ change are blowin’…
Fortunately for my bank account, I do not gamble. However, I believe that Kerry will top 300 electoral votes.
Indeed. The article linked by the votemaster today is interesting.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8694
*. . .in incumbent elections, the incumbent’s percentage of the vote is a far better indicator of the state of the race than the spread. In fact, the percentage of the vote an incumbent president receives in surveys is an extraordinarily accurate predictor of the percentage he will receive on election day – even though the survey results also include a pool of undecided voters. Hence the 50-percent rule: An incumbent who fails to poll above 50 percent is in grave jeopardy of losing his job. . .
Think of it this way: The percentage that Bush receives in polls represents his ceiling of support; he may get a little less, but won’t get more. In contrast, Kerry’s percentage represents his floor, and he will almost certainly do better on election day. Assuming that Ralph Nader and other minor candidates will receive about 2 percent – which is what current surveys suggest – 49 percent becomes the critical line of demarcation in this election. If Bush can get to 50 percent or above in the polls, he should be able to win. At 49 percent – where he is today – we’re probably looking at another photo finish, lots of recounts, and narrow state-by-state victories dictating the Electoral College outcome. And below 49 percent, Bush is almost certain to lose. *
(Of course, the Newseek poll today has him at 46%, but who’s counting. -Moody)
Bob, I want your guy to win, but I really, really think your perspective is colored by your party affiliation. Which states do you have Kerry carrying? (Or Harry Caraying, however you choose)
No problemo. The states that I expect Kerry to win are:
ME, VT, MA, CT, RI, NY, NJ, MD, DE, PA, DC, OH, FL, MI, WI, MN, IL, IA, NM, CA, OR, WA, HA. I count 307 electoral votes.
Some of those are safely in Kerry’s camp already. However, at present, http://www.electoral-vote.com/ lists Ohio and Iowa as “Barely Bush,” Florida and Wisconsin as “Weak Bush.” While http://www.race2004.net/ lists Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota and Washington as “Undecided,” Florida and Iowa as “Weak Bush,” Wisconsin as “Strong Bush.” All based on pre-debate polling, of course.
But of course. I’m counting on the following perfect storm:
1- The debates will only get worse for Bush. It won’t be so much as he will do poorly, it’s just that Kerry will look presidential and the great fear of the unknown for the electorate will pass as they get comfortable with Kerry. I think a lot of people watching the first debate were quite surprised at Kerry’s depth of knowledge and his personabilitiy. If this happened in the foreign policy debate, wait until Kerry starts talking jobs and outsourcing.
2- The news from Iraq only gets worse. The drip drip drip of casualties is getting to be like Chinese water torture. Every body bag costs Bush hundreds of votes.
3- The polls are undercounting those groups that historically have not turned out in great numbers. All of these dormant groups are coming to life now.
4- Undecideds break to the challenger as has historically been true.
Furthermore, on domestic issues, Kerry can distinguish himself from Bush very clearly, and the “flip-flopper” charge won’t stick. I mean, so far as I know, Kerry has never said anything about economics or tax policy (or even gay marriage or gun control :rolleyes: – jeez, how can those even be issues in a presidential race?) that differed from his present line.
I don’t think it’s a “perfect storm”, I think all of those factors will likely come true (although I wish #2 didn’t). And I think #1 and #3 would be the strongest factors in a Kerry victory.
However, there must be some factors that we’re not thinking of that will favor the incumbent. I can’t find a cite, but I did read that Karl Rove thinks there are 4 million conservative evangelicals who didn’t bother to vote in 2000, hence his “Pander to the base” strategy–he thinks he doesn’t need independents.
Also, the Electoral College maps at Electoral Vote and Race 2004.net are still showing a Bush victory, although I don’t think any of the polls used on those pages are post-debate.
I yield to our conservative brethren to come up with other factors . . .
It’s just a hunch, but I think Bush will do far worse in the coming debates not because of the issues, but because Kerry got his goat and he’ll be on the defensive. When someone has bettered you once, your response to them is even more strident in future meetings - his blood pressure has got to rise at the very thought of Kerry. Plus Bush doesn’t strike me as being smart enough to master self-control while he’s trying to think on his feet.
That’s an important point, actually.
I continue to believe that Gore’s reaction to his debate criticism in the later debates cost him vital support on election day. The press told him he was too mean for the first (sigh) so he went soft then they goaded him into changing AGAIN.
At that point the electorate had to wonder who the hell he actually was. He’d have been far better just staying tough and seeing what happened.
I expect Bush to put on a strong performance in the second debate.
He is if nothing else a fiery competitor, and will not take his round 1 loss to Kerry lightly. I expect he will redouble his debate preparations. It would be a mistake to underestimate him. The town hall style will be more suited to Bush than to Kerry, in my opinion.
Hope I’m wrong, though.
Why? I would expect just the opposite. Bush is the one who debates well in tightly controlled settings; Kerry is the one who has a reputation for being able to think on his feet.
Rove abandoned that strategy some time ago when he realized that vast majority of these voters were in states that were already in the bag.
The questions are coming from undecided voters, yes? Anyone who is still undecided at this point…well…let’s just say I’m not expecting probing questions that require detailed exposition of policy. I forsee open-ended, softball questions, which Bush will deflect with talking points and a folksy manner.
Secondly, Bush is a people person. I expect he’ll feel more comfortable in a crowd of voters than in a sterile, formal debate setting. On the other hand, I’m still not convinced Kerry has the charm or common touch to pull off a town hall debate.
I hope Kerry’s team is not overconfident after the first debate. Reagan got pummeled in his first debate with Mondale, and came back strong. I expect the same from Bush.
Bush is presumed by some on the left to be a dim bulb. He is not. Take him lightly at your peril.
No. That was the original proposal, but the final agreement was that they’d be either “soft Kerry” or “soft Bush”.
The reality is, as I said in a similar thread, that phone polls are reaching obsolescence as a means of tracking opinion very closely. It simply isn’t possible to get a truly random sample from phone calls that’s generalizable to the voting population: so pollsters have to either resort to all sorts of strage attempts to model the population from the sample, or simply ignore the lack of a true random sample. The reality is, we don’t really know how this race is stands. I should note, however, that while polls may not be able to track data points very well, they probably can still track trends fairly well. By that measure, Kerry has made some pretty huge jumps in the last couple of days: polls in which he was down by 11 points jumped up to dead even. If you believe, as many do, that these polls are clearly oversampling registered Republicans (which is not a good measure given that R/D voters are generally about even on election day, if not Democratic) as is apparent looking at their own internals, then this should seriously scare Bush’s team, along with all the new Democratic registers.
For example, check this post about Gallup polls:
As the writer correctly points out, ignore what these polls say about Kerry vs. Bush. Look only at the party affilation of the sample. If these polls were truly reflecting the population at large, these polls would be showing a 16% swing in party identification. That’s utterly ridiculous. The move from Kerry being down to him being dead even could be purely because of the change in sample size.
I’m sorry, not the sample size, just the (obviously non-random) sample.
I heard that pollsters aren’t allowed to call cell phones (some arcane regulation or another). So people who don’t have a land phone are automatically out of the sample.