A call for innovative thinking
Take Rasmussen Report's Red Blue Chart, which predicts how the electoral votes of every state will be cast. As of today, that's 203 for Bush and 204 for Kerry, and 127 in the "toss up" states, in which the polls put GW and K less than 5% apart. (There are nine of 'em.)
Assume, for the moment, that the decided states will stay that way. Let's examine the effects of some hypotheses on how the toss ups will settle out.
The Rasmussen site itself presents three scenarios: if Bush or Kerry somehow garner and maintain a 5% popular lead nationwide, the winner of the popular election wins a convincing majority of the electoral votes, as God and the Founding Fathers intended.
If polling errors are thrown out the window and states go to the candidate who leads by as little as one pollee, Kerry gets the nod 286 to 247.
But the people in the toss up states are largely keeping their own counsel. What happens if, as the stakes get higher and the campaign gets uglier, they revert to type and the states are distributed as they were in the last election?
My numbers say it would go to Bush, 278 to 260.
posted by Undersecretary to the Deputy Commissariat at 5:30 PM
1 Comments:
It may be many things, it may be very close, but the 2000 Election doesn't tell us much about this election except about the position of the country in 2000 - which is your electoral count seems to reflect. The political situation has changed tremendously since then; vast changes in voter motivation, in national polarization, in the political culture itself. In terms of the choices and the cultural changes involved, this is nothing like a sleepy 2000, '96, '88, '84, or '56. It feels like 1932 Hoover/Roosevelt as much as anything, in terms of gross political divide, although not in terms of personalities.
When the difference in majorities for large states is under 50,000 votes or so, historical vote trends tell you almost nothing of value for the grit of a real election- a tight election will come down to organization, money (close enough between the national campaigns now to be functionally equivalent), campaign quality, and the biggest one (easy to forget for pols, because unlike media it's not really their area) motivated voter turnout. Merits of the film aside, you are seeing significant indications of what might happen at the polls in the massive audience for Moore's new film. Will it translate to the polls? - if the energy is organized well (Centrist Ds had better engage and embrace their Left; and damn the consequences).
The massive leftward shift of Illinois is really interesting - the GOP is showing signs of crumbling among certain formerly reliable constiuencies, especially Reagan Democrats. It's so tight in places like Ohio and Oregon that it will absolutely come down to organization and motivated turnout - and part of my optimism stems from a perception that the Ds are much better motivated at the base, even if the GOP party organizations are fairly tight. And the weakness of this president is casting big doubts in his base voter's minds, which is likely to surpress R turnout.
This would only be partly reflected in polls, which targets likely voters, which usually skews old and GOP. The pissed off D base - the "Dean base" to coin a phrase, is actually fairly young - will they turn out and vote for Kerry? This is why some commentators and pollsters are calling it Kerry's race to lose.
I disagree about New Mexico and Arizona (with a popular current or former democratic governor and no love lost for the national GOP) are both slowly shifting not so much left but to a center that only Democrats and traditional Republicans occupy, the latter increasingly isolated.
My central point is that this election is COMPLETELY IN PLAY - at this point I would be somewhat but not entirely shocked if Kerry took Alaska or Bush took Washington. The very fact that the stakes are very high means that not only is there no place for determinism, and in analysis it's simply inaccurate. It's too close, there are far too many new variables; even if you had a statisically significant sample of Ohio voting hundreds of times, Ohio is not the Ohio it was at the first vote.
If I remember correctly, Clinton was doing far worse throughout the early campaign in 1992. And again, we are dealing with a (relatively to recent decades) highly energized electorate, not a resigned and indifferent one. And every last pundit was predicting a Bush landslide until February, as well as a losing Dean juggernaught, I might add. Bottom line: we'll know nothing important in terms of predicting the outcome (other than it's highly competitive), until the Democratic convention. Now if only we can get Bush to say "We need to build a bridge to the past. "
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