If you like your political spin Bush-friendly, John Zogby?s latest tracking poll and comments will be most welcome:
President Bush holds a slim three-point lead over Democratic rival John Kerry one week before the Nov. 2 presidential election, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Tuesday.
Bush led Kerry 49-46 percent in the latest three-day national tracking poll, maintaining a stable lead on the Massachusetts senator as the White House rivals head down the stretch. Bush led Kerry 48-45 percent the day before.
With the campaign winding down, the poll added voters leaning toward either Bush or Kerry into their totals for the first time. That left only about 3 percent of likely voters undecided.
“If Kerry, as suggested, is looking to undecideds, look again — there may not be enough left,” pollster John Zogby said.
John Podhoretz expounds on the theme of undecided voters and how and whether they will vote in a New York Post bit, including this kicker:
In the other 10 presidential elections featuring incumbents in the past 68 years, the voters from the second-to-last Gallup either broke for the incumbent or broke evenly.
And let’s be clear what “break” means. It’s not that 100 percent of undecideds go one way ? it means that 60 to 65 percent do. Using yesterday’s Gallup poll as a benchmark, Kerry would need an even greater break than that to catch up to Bush ? 70 to 75 percent of the undecided voters at least.
That huge margin for Kerry just doesn’t seem likely right now.
Ah, but what about all the excitement over the newly registered?
Look at the numbers here. Some people are talking about a staggering increase of 10 million voters this year. Both parties have spent vast sums looking for these new voters and registering them, and there’s reason to believe their efforts will basically cancel each other out.
But let’s assign 55 percent of them to Kerry. That’s 5.5 million voters. With those 5.5 million voters, surely then Kerry will win.
Um, no, he won’t. Because Bush will get 4.5 million new votes. This would make Kerry’s margin among new voters only 1 million votes ? in an electorate of 115 million. That’s not even a single percentage point increase. Kerry can’t win that way.
But then again, the Washington Post?s E.J. Dionne says that there is an ?intensity gap? favoring Democrats:
In the torrent of polling information released over the weekend, the most significant finding was this one: John Kerry’s supporters are more likely than George W. Bush’s to believe that this year’s election is the most important of their lifetimes.
According to Newsweek’s poll, 37 percent of Kerry’s voters felt this way, compared with only 27 percent of Bush’s. Of the rest, 40 percent of Kerry supporters thought 2004 was more important than most other elections, while 35 percent of Bush’s backers did.
As a political matter, this intensity gap suggests that even if Bush has been successful in mobilizing the Republican Party’s political base, he has been even more successful in mobilizing Democrats.
