Doom and Gloom for Bush?
Spoons notes that the electoral college looks like a solid win for John Kerry right now and asks us to answer a question for him.
Currently, Election Projection predicts 296 electoral votes for Kerry versus 242 for Bush. As I look over that map, I don’t see any Kerry states that Bush could reasonably expect to pick up. At the same time, I see a LOT of Bush states that I think he might lose, like Ohio, or Missouri, or Nevada.
So for those of you who still think Bush is going to win, explain it to me. How’s he going to do it? What states is he going to pick up from last time? Is he going to keep Florida? West Virginia? New Hampshire?
How’s it going to happen?
I have a few answers.
First, Florida, which isn’t a solid Kerry state, is worth enough to put the race into an Electoral College tie. Election Projection has that state as a Really Close Kerry, but in reality it’s definitely in play. One state, again, could swing the election. But I don’t see that happening because of my second and third reasons.
Second, look how many states are really in play here (the Really Close states for both candidates). I count 14 states with a total of 146 electors. Now consider that John Kerry has had three big things going for him thus far (and a couple minor ones)
- The Democratic Primaries which lasted for several months were far less a group of people running against each other and much more all of them running against Bush. If you go back and read the transcripts of any of the debates, you’ll see that every candidate took more shots at President Bush than each other. Kerry, once out of Iowa, faced an extremely genial trio of competitors in Edwards, Sharpton, and Kucinich. Not a single one of them took a telling shot at Kerry. Edwards actally seemed to spend most of his time auditioning for the position of Running Mate.
- Kerry got huge press coverage and some very glowing magazine covers when he announced Edwards as his running mate. Who could forget the July 19th edition of Newsweek?
- The Democratic Convention. Four whole days of hitting Bush from every conceivable direction using every bit of showmanship the party could muster.
On top of that we could throw “Fahrenheit 911″, the six-week front-page orgy of Abu Ghraib coverage, and the 9/11 Commission spectacle. We can top the Kerry Sundae with the 527 organizations spending millions of dollars in advertising buys, media interviews, and web presence. But what does Kerry have to show for any of this? Very little. The national polls show him in a deadlock with the President, and he has 3 more states in the Close or Really Close columns according to Election Projection. All the big guns he’s brought to bear thus far have given him very little advantage.
And Bush has yet to fight back. The Republican Convention is still three weeks away and it promises to put some very prominent and popular people in front of the American people. We’ve yet to see an aggressive advertising campaign from him either. In fact, as Dean has noted, Bush traditionally holds back until late in the game, then comes out swinging hard and uses his opponent’s words against him (or her, in the case of the Texas Governor’s race). Kerry’s left an awful lot of words out there for Bush to use. You can bet your bottom dollar that he will.
Third, we’ve been a bit mistaken about how many undecided voters there really are out there. The conventional wisdom is that each candidate will carry about 46-48 percent of the vote with about 4-6 percent up for grabs. This is based on all the polls taken by Gallup, Zogby, and so on. But what we often don’t see is that these polls deal with “likely voters” – people who, at the time of the poll, say they are going to vote in the election. Very few polls, if any, count people who are actually undecided about voting at the time of the poll. In the 2000 election, roughly 33 percent of registered voters didn’t vote at all. That, to my thinking, pushes the total numbers of undecided voters way, way above the proverbial 4-6 percent. The task for the Bush campaign is to give those people who didn’t vote in the last election a reason to vote in this one. They have several they can use and I’m betting you’ll see all of them aimed squarely at this third of the voters. If they can pull as little as 5 percent in the next several months, the Bush campaign can turn a close election into a landslide.
It’s a long race and we’re not even close to the home stretch.
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Category: President George Bush
