Race for Whitehouse once again a dead heat…

That's good news. I'm glad the convention bounce wasn't too long lived.

 

There's only one thing keeping John Kerry from becoming the next President of the United States:

a backbone.

And it appears that he's finally found his.

 

Of course Gallup, Time, Newsweek and others have Bush well ahead. So its hard to really know whats going on. My guess it Bush is probably ahead by 3 - 5 pts but within any margin of error...

 

Those polls are all older than the most recent polls mentioned here.

 

new gallup has bush up by double digits, which seems wildly optimistic to me.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-09-17-gallup-poll_x.htm

--
USA TODAY


Bush clear leader in poll
By Susan Page
WASHINGTON —

President Bush has surged to a 13-point lead over Sen. John Kerry among likely voters, a new Gallup Poll shows. The 55%-42% match-up is the first statistically significant edge either candidate has held this year.

Among registered voters, Bush is ahead 52%-44%.

The boost Bush received from the Republican convention has increased rather than dissipated, reshaping a race that for months has been nearly tied. Kerry is facing warnings from Democrats that his campaign is seriously off-track.

With 46 days until the election, analysts say the proposed presidential debates offer Kerry his best chance to change the race.

"It doesn't look like the new consultants and strategies of attacks are the right ones" for Kerry, says Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush campaign. Kerry in recent weeks added veterans of the Clinton White House to his team and began criticizing Bush more sharply on Iraq and other issues.

Dowd says Kerry at this point would "have to defy history" to defeat a sitting president.

"We have seen some bouncing around in the numbers," says Mike McCurry, a top Kerry adviser, "but it is our sense that the race is moving back to a much closer race."

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday shows a tighter contest. The survey, taken Saturday through Tuesday, gives Bush a statistically insignificant lead of 47%-46% among likely voters.

The Gallup Poll was taken Monday through Wednesday.

Presidential candidates have won after trailing by similar margins. One was George W. Bush himself. In 2000, he was behind Al Gore by 10 points among registered voters in early October and then prevailed in the Electoral College, though he lost the popular vote.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was down 8 points in the Gallup Poll in late October but won in a landslide after doing well in the only debate held with President Carter.

"Sen. Kerry is like Seabiscuit: He runs better from behind," says Donna Brazile, who was Gore's campaign manager. But she acknowledges that "backbenchers" in the Democratic Party "have begun pushing the panic button."

 

That does seem to be a little high...Does anyone really think that one candidate or another will win by such a large margin? Its gotta be near as close as 2000. However, if I never hear swing-state, battle-ground state or swing voter again it will be too soon!

 

I have a funny feeling that this election will be closer than 2000, and the post-election shenanigans from both sides will reach an all-time fever high pitch.

I wish I could go on vacation to a desert island for the entire month of November.

 

So many polls, so many varying results. Tim Russert pretty much says its a middleground.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5961048/

MSNBC: Polls, polls, polls. Tim, who do we believe? Respected pollsters say the presidential race is anywhere from neck and neck to a 13-point lead for Republican incumbent President George W. Bush over Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.


Tim Russert: There have been ten national polls in the past three weeks. They all show one thing – George W. Bush is ahead. Now, you talk to the campaigns privately, they’ll tell you they believe President Bush is ahead five to six points nationally and he’s pulling ahead in the battleground states. The momentum is with the president. There’s no doubt about it. John Kerry has a lot of work to do.

 

When polls come out, notice the language used in headlines.

In one poll, one candidate may be ahead by 4 points, but he "clings" to the lead.

In another, one candidate may be ahead by 4 points, but he is the "clear" leader.

Interesting nuance, that.

 

http://www.electoral-vote.com/

News from the Votemaster


The American Research Group is polling all 50 states. All were telephone polls with a MoE of 4%. The first 20 polls were just released. The rest will follow soon. The first batch were mostly the solid blue and solid red states, including the first polls for Nebraska and Wyoming. Bush has commanding leads of 31% and 36%, respectively in those two states. That's why nobody was willing to spend the money to poll them before. The only two states that changed are Maine (was tied, now Kerry by 4%) and Colorado (was Kerry by 1%, now Bush by 1%).


The poll also concluded that without Nader, Kerry is leading Bush nationally by 48% by 45% and with Nader by 46% to 45% with Nader at 3%. Among likely voters, it is Kerry 47%, Bush 47%, Nader 3%. The Harris national poll (Sept. 9-13) puts Kerry ahead 48% to 47% and the Pew poll (Sept. 11-14) puts Bush ahead 47% to 46%. In contrast, Gallup (Sept. 13-15) has Bush ahead 55% to 42%. It is not clear why Gallup is contradicting three other polls that say the race is tied nationally.


Jimmy Breslin of Newsday had an column yesterday that, if true, makes this website irrelevant. Breslin claims that pollsters do not call the 168 million cell phones in the country. Since many younger voters do not have a land line and just a cell phone, they will be hugely underrepresented in all the telephone polls. Since younger voters lean more towards the Democrats than the average voter, the polls may be greatly underestimating Kerry's strength. Between missing all the people who have only a cell phone and no land line and the 5 million overseas voters, the polls maybe missing a very large section of the electorate. If anyone working for a pollster or telecom company knows ***for sure*** whether pollsters call cell phones, please let me know. But please don't send e-mail on this subject if you are just speculating.


And, as has become normal in recent years, the election is being fought over in the Florida courts. No fewer than three courts, including the Florida supreme court, are now involved in the issue of whether the Reform Party actually exists in Florida and thus whether its nominee, Ralph Nader, can appear on the ballot. Nader did not gather signatures in Florida, claiming to be the nominee of the Reform Party, which if not clinically dead, has been in deep hibernation for years. Just in case you have been living on the back side of the moon for the past four years, Bush won Florida in 2000 by 537 votes with 97,421 votes going to Nader. Jeb Bush is doing his utmost to see that Nader appears on the ballot. Perhaps he has come to believe that the extraordinary intensity of the storms Florida has been experiencing for the past few weeks might be related to global warming and he now thinks that Nader will protect the environment better than his brother.

 

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres163973220sep16,0,5025667.column

Jimmy Breslin

Making call on sham of political polling

September 16, 2004


Anybody who believes these national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool.

Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible. On behalf of the public they profess to serve, they are indolent salesmen of falsehoods.

This is because these political polls are done by telephone. Land-line telephones, as your house phone is called.

The telephone polls do not include cellular phones. There are almost 169 million cell phones being used in America today - 168,900,019 as of Sept. 15, according to the cell phone institute in Washington.

There is no way to poll cell phone users, so it isn't done.

Not one cell phone user has received a call on their cell phone asking them how they plan to vote as of today.

Out of 168 million, anything can happen. Midway through election night, these stern-faced network announcers suddenly will be frozen white and they have to give a result:

"It appears that the winner of the election tonight is ... Milford J. Schmitt of New Albany, Ind. He presently has 56 percent of the vote, placing him well ahead of John Kerry, George Bush and another newcomer, Gibson D. Mills of Corvallis, Ore. It appears the nation's voting habits have been changed unbeknownst to us. Mr. Schmitt was asked what party he is in. He answered, 'The winning party.'"

Those who have both cell phones and land lines still might have been polled the old way - on their land lines by people making phone calls with scientifically weighted questions and to targeted areas for some big pollster. These results are announced by the pollsters: "CBS-New York Times poll shows George Bush and John Kerry in a statistical dead heat in the presidential race."

Beautiful. There are 169 million phones that they didn't even try. This makes the poll nothing more than a fake and a fraud, a shill and a sham. The big pollster doesn't know what he has. The television and newspaper brilliants put it out like it is a baseball score. Except not one person involved can say that they truly know what they are talking about.

"I don't use telephones anymore because there is no easy way to use them," John Zogby was saying yesterday. It was the 20th anniversary of the start of his polling company. He began with what he calls "blue highway polls," sheriffs' races in Onandaga and Jefferson counties in upstate New York.

"The people who are using telephone surveys are in denial," Zogby was saying. "It is similar to the '30s, when they first started polling by telephones and there were people who laughed at that and said you couldn't trust them because not everybody had a home phone. Now they try not to mention cell phones. They don't look or listen. They go ahead with a method that is old and wrong."

Zogby points out that you don't know in which area code the cell phone user lives. Nor do you know what they do. Beyond that, you miss younger people who live on cell phones. If you do a political poll on land-line phones, you miss those from 18 to 25, and there are figures all over the place that show there are 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, one in five eligible voters.

And the great page-one presidential polls don't come close to reflecting how these younger voters say they might vote. The majority of them use cell phones and nobody ever asks them anything.

Common sense would say that the majority of the 18 to 25 who do vote would vote for the Democrat. The people who say they want to vote for Bush are generally in the older age brackets, and they don't have as much trouble with the lies told by Bush and his people. The older people also use cell phones much less because they can't hear on the things and when trying to dial a number on these midget instruments they stand there for an hour and get nothing done. The young people on cell phones appear not to be listening and they hear every syllable. They punch out a number without looking.

They are quicker, and probably smarter at this time, and almost doubtlessly more in favor of Kerry than Bush.

Older people complain about Kerry's performance as a candidate. Younger people don't want to get shot at in a war that most believe, and firmly, never should have started because it was started with a president lying.

Zogby has no opinion because he is a professional figure man and he has no figures he trusts.

"I am making a segue into Internet polling, which is going to be the future," he was saying yesterday. "You use screened e-mails of hundreds of thousands. Every household has some chance of being polled. How can you not do it that way? I have three children. The one in Washington uses only a cell phone. The ones at home use cell phones."

If you want a poll on the Kerry-Bush race, sit down and make up your own. It is just as good as the monstrous frauds presented on television and the newspaper first pages.

 

I've been hearing about how many young voters are leaning Bush this time. Totally blows your article out of the water, if true, Batman.

 

You've been hearing that? Well, that's good enough for me. Well, darn. I guess there's always 2008. How have you heard that one's shaping up?

 

Just remember Truman holding up the paper that says "Dewey Wins!", surely you have that image to post KingCheetah?

GREAT poll results then, hows abooot now?

 

Depending on the method -- which is completely arbitrary and easily manipulated -- polls will tell you anything you want them to. A hundred million Americans voted in 2000, but a sample size of 0.00002% voters (who are, by the way, people too stupid to screen their calls) is supposed to predict how we'll vote in 2004.

In essense, polls don't really mean crap. Nor should they. Who cares what other people think? Think for yourself.

 

The only poll that matters is the one on November 2nd.