How Close is this Election REALLY?
Lately I've been wondering whether I'm on an emotional roller-coaster when it comes to this election. Now I'm thinking that I've been rooted in the same place all along, and it's everybody else who is whipsawing back and forth.
I am an accountant by profession. My job, distilled to its essence, is to crunch numbers and by so doing communicate information. And, as you can see, I have been doing so with regard to national and state-by-state polling numbers throughout the campaign, refining my weighted polling composite along the way to provide myself and my readers with as objective a picture of the state of the race as I can. And one of the primary reasons why is precisely to avoid the aforementioned emotional whipsawing as one poll comes out showing a tie or Kerry slightly ahead, while the next shows Bush up mid-to-high single-digits.
Eleven days I ago I gave my hardheaded analysis of the race as it stood on the eve of Debate III:
Contrary to Jonathan Rothenberg's laboring optimism, the polling trend is moving away from the President, not toward him. And it isn't just Zogby that says so. The fact is that from the four-point lead Bush held in my composite on the day of Debate I, he steadily declined to the 1.5-point lead posted yesterday. Today was the first day that showed movement back toward GDub, and one day does not a trend make.
If the election were tomorrow (bearing in mind the rampant Democrat fraud and violence across the country) and I had to call it, I would designate John Kerry as the next President of the United States.
Fortunately (perhaps), the election isn't tomorrow. But Debate III is, and because of his perceived pratfall in Debate I, the President has to do at least as well as he did last Friday in St. Louis. If he matches or exceeds that performance, I think he'll eke out a two or three point popular vote win and scrape by similarly in the Electoral College.
If we get the Coral Gables Bush, you can stick a fork in him.
That was what the numbers said, and I opined thusly. Eleven days ago.
I also took to task some on my side of this war who I thought were tangenting off into wishful-thinking by urging the disregarding of polls, and denigrating the ones showing Bush doing the worst (like Zogby) for no other seeming reason than that they were showing Bush doing poorly. I thought they were the proverbial shooters of messengers bearing bad news, and I opined thusly. Eleven days ago.
It's now eleven days later. And I find myself in the opposite position.
The President slam-dunked John Kerry in their rubber match. From the 1.9% lead Mr. Bush held in my polling composite going into Debate III, a week later (as of this past Thursday) he rebounded to the four-point lead he held when the debate phase of the campaign began, and is still there today.
Part of it was Kerry's despicable outing of Mary Cheney, and part was Bush's upward performance curve while Kerry's stayed flat, tarnishing the apparent quality of his Debate I showing. The Massachusetts mercenary's ostrich-like comments on terrorism in his infamous N.Y. Times Magazine interview didn't help, either. This past week brought Teraaaaaaayza's imperious mugging of Laura Bush. And of course there is the unprecedented wave of vote fraud and political terrorism being inflicted on Republicans across the country by the openly fascist Democrat Left, showing that they want power entirely too much and raising harrowing questions of what they would do if they seized it.
Yet now, instead of my fellow GOPers whizzing on the polliteriat, I'm seeing the conservative punditocracy ingesting the "It's 2000 all over again" conventional wisdom like it was chocolate chip cookie dough. (No, I'm not providing links - if I did, there'd be no room in this post for my counter-analysis, and that's what you logged on here to see - right...?)
There is a saying about old generals: "They're always fighting the last war." The same thing quite evidently applies to political commentators. Seems like every last one of them has been spouting this "50-50 nation" paradigm ever since then-Prince Albert withdrew his concession on Election Night four years ago. But how valid is it in terms of actually handicapping this election?
Consider a few caveats.
For starters, if the two major parties are at parity nationally in terms of registration and self-identification, hasn't that been the result of Republicans rising, and Democrats declining, to that equilibrium? Doesn't this mean that in previous elections, there were more Democrats than Republicans? Yet, with the exception of Bill Clinton's deviant detour, it is the GOP that has dominated the presidency for nearly two generations. How could that be in what was (1) "45-55 nation" and (2) a political landscape scarcely much less "polarized" than it is now?
None of the above is to suggest that we aren't evenly, and bitterly, divided. But does that demand that election results will be necessarily as rigidly monolithic? Or does it simply reduce the breadth of the range in which possible election results can oscillate?
Let's look back at 2000, and remember a few details that the "conventional wisdom" seems to have forgotten.
At this point in that campaign, George W. Bush held a mid-single-digit lead over Al Gore (a lead that would probably have been double-digits ten or fifteen years ago). He appeared to be cruising to victory. Yet he came within an ultimate 537 votes of losing. Was it "50-50 nation"?
No, it wasn't. It was "DUI."
The middle of that final week was when, ironically, Fox News broke the story about Bush's DUI conviction back in 1976. Yes, it was a last-minute dirty trick, and no, it wasn't relevant to the man Bush was a quarter-century later. But it accomplished what all dirty tricks are designed to do - raise public doubts. Since Bush was the de facto challenger, he was especially vulnerable to such a tactic. As a result, undecideds broke 3-1 for Gore, and a five-point lead evaporated into the dead head we've been hearing about ever since.
Without that DUI gotcha, there's no dead heat, no Florida insurrection, and no conventional wisdom that every subsequent election from now until doomsday is going to be a nail-biter.
Four years later, Mr. Bush is again up by mid-single digits, and though his team has a much less blase attitude about the last ten days of the campaign than it did last time, the fact is that they are cruising to victory. Not a landslide victory, but no nail-biter either.
Could the Democrats have one more "gotcha" up their sleeve? Certainly. Could it be one that would stampede undecideds away from Bush? Personally, I doubt it, or they wouldn't have resorted to shouting "draft!" and scaring grandma two weeks early.
Here's the $64 question, though: could massively increased vote fraud be the "gotcha"? Now you're getting warm.
Looking back on 2000, I can't help wondering if systematic vote fraud didn't account for at least part of that unexpected Bush collapse. The other day I plugged all the 2000 election-eve (and DUI story-influenced) poll numbers into my current composite formula. The projected result was Bush 49.0%, Gore 47.0%. Yet the actual outcome was Gore 48.4%, Bush 47.8%, roughly a two-and-a-half-point additional swing. That translates out to about 2.73 million votes nationally, or a straight per-state average of about 54,000 votes. Recent vote fraud stories in swing states like Ohio mention comparable numbers of phony ballots - and that, of course, is just the ones that have been uncovered.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that that 2.6% Goreward swing in 2000 was entirely vote-fraud driven. Plug that into the current numbers, and you get the following:
Popular vote projection: Bush 51.3%, Kerry 47.0%
PVP with vote fraud: Bush 50.1%, Kerry 48.4%
A four-point win, IOW, becomes a two-point win. And historically, a popular vote margin of greater than a percentage point always means victory in the Electoral College.
Could the Democrats' vote fraud efforts be vastly larger this time? Perhaps in certain key states. But how much would that matter?
Bush barely carried Florida last time, but he won Ohio by a full 4%, or approximately 180,000 votes. If he's five points ahead of where he finished in 2000 nationally, it's difficult to see how the most enormous conceivable vote fraud scheme could do much more than help Kerry match Gore's total. As to Florida, and battleground states in general for that matter, the 2002 mid-terms revealed a vastly improved Republican GOTV (get out the vote) apparatus that produced senate race results that exceeded last-minute poll forecasts by from four percentage points (in Iowa) to almost ten (in Colorado). Since vote fraud pretty much is Democrat "voter registration" and GOTV, and registration numbers in this election cycle are pretty much a wash, I would suggest that the only way Kerry could defraud his way to victory (the platform of his planned post-election litigation offensive) is if his brownshirts in battleground states succeed in intimidating Republicans from voting.
The unlikelihood of that prospect can, I think, be taken for granted. Whereas its flaming irony defies human comprehension.
So, the whole shebang returns, once again, to numbers. And mine, up-to-the-moment, show President Bush leading nationally by four points in the popular vote, and in 34 states totaling 311 Electoral Votes. Of those states, Kerry is within a percentage point in four (Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Ohio) yielding 61 Electoral Votes - or....nineteen more EVs than Kerry would need to steal the White House.
Cause for concern? As a nuts & bolts practical matter, yes. But Team Bush is going to be all over Florida and Ohio in the next week, the Governator is going to be campaign for Bush in the Buckeye state, and lastly, remember the lofty ambitions the Democrats had for the Sunshine state in 2002. Terry McAuliffe guaranteed, among other things, that Governor Jeb Bush was going down.
Jeb was re-elected by a thirteen-point margin.
Yes, my friends - and foes - I am the same man who sounded so "pessimistic" to my compatriots two weeks ago, and who doubtlessly sounds so "cocky" to my adversaries today.
But I'm just tracking the numbers.
And unless John Kerry can somehow regain the ground he lost since the debates - a possibility, but not a probability - then this election will not be a replay of 2000, but rather what 2000 should have been: a clear victory for George W. Bush.
I am an accountant by profession. My job, distilled to its essence, is to crunch numbers and by so doing communicate information. And, as you can see, I have been doing so with regard to national and state-by-state polling numbers throughout the campaign, refining my weighted polling composite along the way to provide myself and my readers with as objective a picture of the state of the race as I can. And one of the primary reasons why is precisely to avoid the aforementioned emotional whipsawing as one poll comes out showing a tie or Kerry slightly ahead, while the next shows Bush up mid-to-high single-digits.
Eleven days I ago I gave my hardheaded analysis of the race as it stood on the eve of Debate III:
Contrary to Jonathan Rothenberg's laboring optimism, the polling trend is moving away from the President, not toward him. And it isn't just Zogby that says so. The fact is that from the four-point lead Bush held in my composite on the day of Debate I, he steadily declined to the 1.5-point lead posted yesterday. Today was the first day that showed movement back toward GDub, and one day does not a trend make.
If the election were tomorrow (bearing in mind the rampant Democrat fraud and violence across the country) and I had to call it, I would designate John Kerry as the next President of the United States.
Fortunately (perhaps), the election isn't tomorrow. But Debate III is, and because of his perceived pratfall in Debate I, the President has to do at least as well as he did last Friday in St. Louis. If he matches or exceeds that performance, I think he'll eke out a two or three point popular vote win and scrape by similarly in the Electoral College.
If we get the Coral Gables Bush, you can stick a fork in him.
That was what the numbers said, and I opined thusly. Eleven days ago.
I also took to task some on my side of this war who I thought were tangenting off into wishful-thinking by urging the disregarding of polls, and denigrating the ones showing Bush doing the worst (like Zogby) for no other seeming reason than that they were showing Bush doing poorly. I thought they were the proverbial shooters of messengers bearing bad news, and I opined thusly. Eleven days ago.
It's now eleven days later. And I find myself in the opposite position.
The President slam-dunked John Kerry in their rubber match. From the 1.9% lead Mr. Bush held in my polling composite going into Debate III, a week later (as of this past Thursday) he rebounded to the four-point lead he held when the debate phase of the campaign began, and is still there today.
Part of it was Kerry's despicable outing of Mary Cheney, and part was Bush's upward performance curve while Kerry's stayed flat, tarnishing the apparent quality of his Debate I showing. The Massachusetts mercenary's ostrich-like comments on terrorism in his infamous N.Y. Times Magazine interview didn't help, either. This past week brought Teraaaaaaayza's imperious mugging of Laura Bush. And of course there is the unprecedented wave of vote fraud and political terrorism being inflicted on Republicans across the country by the openly fascist Democrat Left, showing that they want power entirely too much and raising harrowing questions of what they would do if they seized it.
Yet now, instead of my fellow GOPers whizzing on the polliteriat, I'm seeing the conservative punditocracy ingesting the "It's 2000 all over again" conventional wisdom like it was chocolate chip cookie dough. (No, I'm not providing links - if I did, there'd be no room in this post for my counter-analysis, and that's what you logged on here to see - right...?)
There is a saying about old generals: "They're always fighting the last war." The same thing quite evidently applies to political commentators. Seems like every last one of them has been spouting this "50-50 nation" paradigm ever since then-Prince Albert withdrew his concession on Election Night four years ago. But how valid is it in terms of actually handicapping this election?
Consider a few caveats.
For starters, if the two major parties are at parity nationally in terms of registration and self-identification, hasn't that been the result of Republicans rising, and Democrats declining, to that equilibrium? Doesn't this mean that in previous elections, there were more Democrats than Republicans? Yet, with the exception of Bill Clinton's deviant detour, it is the GOP that has dominated the presidency for nearly two generations. How could that be in what was (1) "45-55 nation" and (2) a political landscape scarcely much less "polarized" than it is now?
None of the above is to suggest that we aren't evenly, and bitterly, divided. But does that demand that election results will be necessarily as rigidly monolithic? Or does it simply reduce the breadth of the range in which possible election results can oscillate?
Let's look back at 2000, and remember a few details that the "conventional wisdom" seems to have forgotten.
At this point in that campaign, George W. Bush held a mid-single-digit lead over Al Gore (a lead that would probably have been double-digits ten or fifteen years ago). He appeared to be cruising to victory. Yet he came within an ultimate 537 votes of losing. Was it "50-50 nation"?
No, it wasn't. It was "DUI."
The middle of that final week was when, ironically, Fox News broke the story about Bush's DUI conviction back in 1976. Yes, it was a last-minute dirty trick, and no, it wasn't relevant to the man Bush was a quarter-century later. But it accomplished what all dirty tricks are designed to do - raise public doubts. Since Bush was the de facto challenger, he was especially vulnerable to such a tactic. As a result, undecideds broke 3-1 for Gore, and a five-point lead evaporated into the dead head we've been hearing about ever since.
Without that DUI gotcha, there's no dead heat, no Florida insurrection, and no conventional wisdom that every subsequent election from now until doomsday is going to be a nail-biter.
Four years later, Mr. Bush is again up by mid-single digits, and though his team has a much less blase attitude about the last ten days of the campaign than it did last time, the fact is that they are cruising to victory. Not a landslide victory, but no nail-biter either.
Could the Democrats have one more "gotcha" up their sleeve? Certainly. Could it be one that would stampede undecideds away from Bush? Personally, I doubt it, or they wouldn't have resorted to shouting "draft!" and scaring grandma two weeks early.
Here's the $64 question, though: could massively increased vote fraud be the "gotcha"? Now you're getting warm.
Looking back on 2000, I can't help wondering if systematic vote fraud didn't account for at least part of that unexpected Bush collapse. The other day I plugged all the 2000 election-eve (and DUI story-influenced) poll numbers into my current composite formula. The projected result was Bush 49.0%, Gore 47.0%. Yet the actual outcome was Gore 48.4%, Bush 47.8%, roughly a two-and-a-half-point additional swing. That translates out to about 2.73 million votes nationally, or a straight per-state average of about 54,000 votes. Recent vote fraud stories in swing states like Ohio mention comparable numbers of phony ballots - and that, of course, is just the ones that have been uncovered.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that that 2.6% Goreward swing in 2000 was entirely vote-fraud driven. Plug that into the current numbers, and you get the following:
Popular vote projection: Bush 51.3%, Kerry 47.0%
PVP with vote fraud: Bush 50.1%, Kerry 48.4%
A four-point win, IOW, becomes a two-point win. And historically, a popular vote margin of greater than a percentage point always means victory in the Electoral College.
Could the Democrats' vote fraud efforts be vastly larger this time? Perhaps in certain key states. But how much would that matter?
Bush barely carried Florida last time, but he won Ohio by a full 4%, or approximately 180,000 votes. If he's five points ahead of where he finished in 2000 nationally, it's difficult to see how the most enormous conceivable vote fraud scheme could do much more than help Kerry match Gore's total. As to Florida, and battleground states in general for that matter, the 2002 mid-terms revealed a vastly improved Republican GOTV (get out the vote) apparatus that produced senate race results that exceeded last-minute poll forecasts by from four percentage points (in Iowa) to almost ten (in Colorado). Since vote fraud pretty much is Democrat "voter registration" and GOTV, and registration numbers in this election cycle are pretty much a wash, I would suggest that the only way Kerry could defraud his way to victory (the platform of his planned post-election litigation offensive) is if his brownshirts in battleground states succeed in intimidating Republicans from voting.
The unlikelihood of that prospect can, I think, be taken for granted. Whereas its flaming irony defies human comprehension.
So, the whole shebang returns, once again, to numbers. And mine, up-to-the-moment, show President Bush leading nationally by four points in the popular vote, and in 34 states totaling 311 Electoral Votes. Of those states, Kerry is within a percentage point in four (Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Ohio) yielding 61 Electoral Votes - or....nineteen more EVs than Kerry would need to steal the White House.
Cause for concern? As a nuts & bolts practical matter, yes. But Team Bush is going to be all over Florida and Ohio in the next week, the Governator is going to be campaign for Bush in the Buckeye state, and lastly, remember the lofty ambitions the Democrats had for the Sunshine state in 2002. Terry McAuliffe guaranteed, among other things, that Governor Jeb Bush was going down.
Jeb was re-elected by a thirteen-point margin.
Yes, my friends - and foes - I am the same man who sounded so "pessimistic" to my compatriots two weeks ago, and who doubtlessly sounds so "cocky" to my adversaries today.
But I'm just tracking the numbers.
And unless John Kerry can somehow regain the ground he lost since the debates - a possibility, but not a probability - then this election will not be a replay of 2000, but rather what 2000 should have been: a clear victory for George W. Bush.
posted by JASmius at 8:48 AM
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