Thursday, October 28, 2004

Cautious prediction based on the polls

Virtually every national poll has this election in a virtual dead heat. I don't know why so much importance is paid to these numbers, since it's the individual state polls that matter.

I've heard some experts say that the most important number to look at is the president's job approval rate, which I think has peaked around 48% recently. According to the conventional wisdom, the percentage of votes cast for Bush will not be higher than this number. Makes sense to me.

If Bush's best case scenario is 48%, then he needs Nader to pull in 4% nationally to tie or win the popular vote. That's never going to happen this time. Indeed, if you examine all of the polls over the past few weeks, Bush never tops 48% beyond the margin of error and Nader is at 1 or 2%.

Another thing in Kerry's favor is that conventional wisdom says that late undecideds break for the challenger. So will it be enough to unseat Bush? Unfortunately, if it comes down to Florida again, the answer is probably not.

(Late update: Scarborough Country on MSNBC has Bush winning about 300 electoral votes when you break it down by state, despite losing the popular vote. That's hard to fathom.)

posted by bkopec @ 10:57 PM   4 comments