We should ignore all the polls that show Kerry losing. Kerry is so far ahead in this thing it's ridiculous. The Republicans are scared out of their senses. It's over and they know it. Ignore the polls!

I'm repeating the post I made in the consumer confidence item just below, because it really belongs here:

Kerry's going to win. Bush will carry his base, but the rest of us will go into those voting booths (in record numbers ) and pull the lever for a course correction.

Forget the polls. Anyone who can't sense the sea change welling up all around us probably didn't see those hurricanes coming either.

The only poll that matters is the last one. Relax and vote and get your friends family and most importantly the first time voters to vote JFK. The polls will swing the next 47 days. Nobody knows the most important number. TURNOUT. It is very easy, if the REPUKES do a better job we lose. Those that have not decided and the first time voters will swing Kerry. There is still a large number in the battleground states that say they are undecided (6-8%). They want to get to know Kerry more (Bush has defined Kerry. Kerry is now defining Kerry) and do not want to vote Bush.
Look for Kerry to define a policy for Iraq that will be "refreshing." He can do so. Bush is locked into his dismal policy and record. Remember 47 days is a long time to the American voter. That is why it is called an October surprise and not an August surprise.

The advice to not hyper-focus on the polls at this time is good advice to take. They are gyrating due to many possible confounds.

Iraq is quickly devolving into chaos, economic reports are bleak. The isoGB's record is slowly coming out, which is most surprising since in the past the SCLM has given the moron a walk.

The deserter story is beginning to stick. We still have the traitor story -for dealing oil with Saddam during poppies Iraq war- to be examined in the public press.

It does warm my heart to know that anyone supporting Bush supports a deserter, a traitor and a coward. Bravo, republi-cons. You are a piece of work!

Discouraging Dem turnout is a Rove tactic. Then, if it looks like the Dems will turnout in numbers, direct intervention and disenfranchisement come next. Finally, actual ballot manipulation if needed.
Utilizing their control of the Media, Rove/GOP want to make non-Bush supporters (Dems and Indies) think Bush is so far ahead that they needn't vote. These Polls, which are owned by or tied to GOP Media, are part of that tactic.

How do we get the message out to the public about the false gallop poll? This poll was meant to discourage people and it does. I say give to CBS they'll look into it. Jan

I read somewhere that Gallup hasnt predicted an election correctly since 84, the same year George Gallup died. And remember, in 00, two weeks before election day, Bush was up in there poll by 13%. And dont tell the drunk driving thing had that much effect.

Has anybody seen more details on this Gallup poll? Specifically, can we find the vote by party affiliation?

With that, we could attempt to correct for the skew.

If it makes Republicans feel they don't have to make an effort to turn out that's fine by me.

I'm telling all my Rep friends (yes, I have some) "you guys seem to have it in the bag". Makes 'em think I'm not going to vote (Ha!) and, hopefully, more complacent.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is just coincidence that Gallup oversampled Republicans, right? I mean, they just called 800 people and asked them, and it turned out that 40% said they were Republicans. Not that Gallup resampled their results to make Republicans 40% of the sample. This could either be good news (evidence that this is a outlying poll) or very bad news (significant uptick in Republican party ID).

It seems to me that they're doing it so that 40% are Republican.

Which is just RIGHT OUT.

My word. If anything, you're going to see a HUGE uptick in Democrats coming out to vote, not Republicans. If you look outside the polls, you have a comitted Democratic base vs. a Republican base that is starting to show serious cracks.

Again, my word.

I'm ignorant about polling methodology, but does Gallup adjust these numbers so that they reflect previous voting patterns?

Why not just call 100% republicans and claim dear leader has the support of everyone?

So, assuming that the 35% GOP, 35% Demo, 30% independent weighting is used, what would the results be? Is it a mere proprotional calculation, so that the results would be something like Bush 50, Kerry 47?

how do you get out the word that all of the polls are bogus? it's just another distraction that takes away from getting out our message on issues.

the biggest problem, as I've been saying, is that people look at the polls, see Bush ahead, and vote for him so they can be with the winner -- idiotic voting behavior, I realize, but it happens!

dd
http://www.jadbury.com/

I agree we shouldn't put to much in the polls. But don't be complacent either. Find a local Dem/Kerry campaign office and get involved. Go out register voters (Deadline in my state, AZ, is October 4), canvass, make calls for the campaign. Do what it takes to get the message out.

I would recommend ignoring all polls. They either give false hopes or they discourage. Why die a thousand deaths when you can just do it once here in about six weeks?

This analysis is probably not very valid, but
I made the assumption that the independents
split 50:50, and then reweighted the D/R results
to match a 35:39 ratio instead of 40:33.
By my rough calculation it comes about
Kerry 50.7%, Bush 46.4%

This is probably trying to squeeze too much
information out of not enough data - but it's
probably fair to say that the race is close and
Kerry may even be ahead, if we assume that the
party id ratio is in line with recent elections.

I sent Steve's post to both CNN and USA Today via by e-mail. Do the same to other media outlets!

Hate to disagree but you HAVE to worry about the polls. Everytime a poll like this comes out we have to worry about the Chris Matthews of the world running 3 shows a week about how unstoppable the GOP is. That will take a toll on people. It'll discourage dems and it will swing votes.

If Rove and company are pulling this misinformation junk, maybe their internal polls are scaring them!

Good work, Steve. I hope you manage to follow your own advice and basically ignore Gallup (and most polls for that matter) for the remainder of the election.

In my eyes, phone-based polls in this cell-phone age aren't worth much more than internet polls.

Does anyone not believe that turnout will be significantly more than the 51.3% (VAP) that occurred in 2000? My guess is that turnout will be over 55%, and I seriously doubt a majority of those additional voters will break for Dubya. They had the anger (even if it was built on BS) and higher proportional turnout in 2000. Payback's going to be a bitch for Dubya.

Who is Gallop calling? Don't Democrats have phones?
OH wait...they don't call Democrats...
How bad was that poll when every network has backed away from it.

Great post on Gallopgate.

In response to Tim, Gallup predicted Clinton as the winner in both 92 and 96 and GHWB in 88. They pridicted W in 2000, but since they were predicting the popular vote they were wrong that year (who would have predicted that he would steal the election?). So, there was clearly a Bush bias (intentional or not) that year. Previously, though, they have been pretty accurate. I agree with other posters, though, that turnout this year will favor Democrats and that Bush is very likely to lose. Also, no incumbent since 1948 (Dewey wins!) has won re-election and ever been behind in a Gallup poll at any point. Bush has been behind this year at some points.

Thanks for doing this footwork! My Dad is panicking and I think this might just get him down off the refrigerator.

Nice reporting, Steve. Very good stuff.

Party ID is one of the most stable of all data points, according to Ruy Texiera. The Gallup screens (including asking where your polling place is) have never been accurate, and they won't be this time, either.

Polls will be important, especially with the brewing controversy over paperless electronic voting machines.

* If Kerry wins, people will be citing all the polls which showed that Bush was winning and start to cry foul over the results.

* The consiracy theorist in me believes that if the paperless voting machines are hacked in favor of Bush, the Republicans will simply shove these poll results in our face and tell us to stop whining.

Either way they've got us by the balls, people. Unless the subservient media starts to question these types of things - which is not likely.

I know it's the Wall St. Journal but Al Hunt has a breakdown of Gallup's explanation for its registered/likely breakdown, which also is quite fishy. Quote below:

"But most of the time the screen for likely voters tilts Republican. In 2000, Gallup's election eve survey showed George Bush ahead by two points among its likely voters; he trailed Al Gore by a point among registered voters, very close to the final outcome."

Great work. I'm going to send it to my local stations!

Voting in polls is fun! MSNBC has one on now with 53% of our fellow citizens voting that Bush is telling the truth on Iraq vs. 47% saying Kerry is. Do these people watch their own news clips??? Do more than half of the people with access to the internet believe things are getting better in Iraq? guess so.

The fact that Gallup's CEO would compromise a guise of impartiality by dontaing to the GOP says enough.

I think mukiku is correct -- the party ID splits just happen to be what Gallup gets when they ask the question, not that Gallup is deliberately oversampling Republicans. In other words I doubt they terminate the interview if someone self-IDs as a Dem and Gallup already has "enough" Dems in the sample. Maybe they're getting "too many" Republicans for some other reason but I don't think it's because they set quotas by party, which is basically what's being suggested here.

One question someone should ask Gallup is WHERE in the poll they ask the party ID question. AP national polls have been experimenting with position of the party ID question this year, asking the question up front for half the sample and at the end along with other demographics questions for the other half, and sometimes there are significant differences, although the reasons are unclear.

As for Zogby, he weights his data to party ID, apparently based on the party splits from past exit polls. But phone polling shows that the party ID numbers can change over time, including within a single election campaign, so Zogby may be weighting to numbers that will wind up not holding up this year. It is true however that the party ID splits in national exit polls have been pretty stable over at least the last few presidential elections -- although those numbers can vary greatly from election to election within states. So weighting to party ID strikes me as very risky in state polls. (Maybe that's why Zogby got five or six out of 20 Senate races wrong in 2002.)

Meanwhile, jenny, many other polls also get a slightly heavier Republican component when screening for likely voters. I believe it is established fact that the population of people who actually turn out to vote tends to be a little more Republican than the total pool of registered voters. It could be that Republicans tend to have better get-out-the-vote efforts, but I think it also has to do with the nature of parts of the Republican base, especially evangelical Christians, who are highly motivated to vote against candidates they feel don't share their moral values.

I also tip my hat to the person who pointed out that this doesn't get data from people who use their cell phone as their primary phone. They are also usually in the 18-27 demographic, which might be more democratic than republican.

Just got a "Thanks for the heads up" from the news director of the San Jose NBC affiliate.

Rove's team might have infiltrated the pollsters. The polls were accurate before the Rethugs convention. Now they're all hosed up. Smells like Rove.

Jenny - can you post Gallup's rationale for using a 40/33/30 sample? (WSJ only available to subscribers.) Powerful rationale is required to look at a sample population this much different from the total known population in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Due to the dramatic change in phone usage behavior during the past four years, they are not even sampling from the same population pool that they did four years ago when they erred by only having GWB a couple of points ahead of Gore. Looks as if instead of adjusting for that error, that they have compounded it. This is not just inexcusably sloppy polling, it is a travesty of statistical methods and procedures, and that is just like what was done in 1948.

It is possible that Gallup is finding that people are more likely to self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats. Unlike Zogby, Gallup does not adjust it's numbers based on presumed turnout in November. Gallup takes the voters as they find them. However, it is not unreasonable to assume a bad sample because a significantly greater number self-identify as Republicans than we can reasonably expect in November. Thus, there's reason to discount this poll, but you are showing how partisanship can blind judgment when you suggest it should be dismissed outright as some kind of intentional bias.

I wonder if you fully dismissed the Pew results because of Madelaine Albright's association.

Finally, the weekly average variance from the weekly mean of all polls for Gallup shows that it runs 1.2 points more favorable for Bush (thus, if the mean diff between Bush/Kerry for the week is 2, then Gallup would show 3.2).

I would like to echo Bill Rehm's inquiry as to the candidate preference breakdown by Party ID. I sent Gallup an inquiry about it an hour ago, but I haven't heard back. Anyone else heard anything?

Chris and Bill: Send me an email and I'll send you the attachment they sent me this AM.

Thank you for stating so eloquently what I knew in my gut to be true. This president will not be re-elected.

I am not so sure that it is a bad thing for Kerry voters to think the race is closer than it is. This way people will not become complacent and not vote.

The paranoid in me fears that the polls are being intentionally cooked to put Bush in the lead so when he wins (by hook or crook) it won't be obvious to the American public that the election was stolen. Afterall, why would it benefit Gallup and other polling organizations to be proven utterly and embarassingly wrong the day after election day? Unless they will be "proven" right by an outcome that they predicted. Tin foil hat time?

The Pentagon is releasing new military records of Bush. They release it after hours on a Friday. The oldest PR trick in the book. The spin? The WH expanded the search. Hmm What about the court order? These guys are so predictable.

Gallup: the Fox News of polling.

The only conclusion one can reach from this info is that Gallup intends to be biased toward the GOP.

In the real world, Pew says this about party ID:

Democrats Gain Edge in Party Identification

Released: July 26, 2004

The Democratic Party has achieved a small gain in party affiliation and holds a 33%-29% edge over the GOP in Pew surveys conducted in 2004. This represents a modest shift from the two year period following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when the Republican Party had drawn virtually even with the Democrats.

The same pattern is evident when independents who lean toward a party are included with partisans. In 2004 Pew surveys, Democrats hold a 47%-41% lead among partisans and party leaners; 12% decline to lean to one of the major parties. In 2002, Republicans and Democrats were at parity with leaners included (43%-43%), with 14% undecided. The current balance closely resembles 1999, when Democrats led 48%-40%, including leaners, with 12% undecided.

In my opinion the main reason that polls are flakey is that most people now have caller ID.

And, I know what I do when I see a number that I don't recognize.

I've read the Al Hunt article in WSJ and Gallup's justification is about it's likely voter screen. Not a word about the skewed percentages among registered voters.

I do not respond to polls, even had a battle with the Census Bureau over most of their questions. I ended up answering the bare minimum.

Polls do nothing but manipulate public opinion by being what Mark Twain observed years ago, "There's lies, damn lies and statistics." And you can imagine where the pollsters fall.

I think Kerry is "kicking butt!" and Dubya's lies and misinformation will catch up with him.

Well, your comments about methodology would carry more weight if the Gallup Poll for most of this year showed a constant bias toward a Bush plurality; but, if you check the figures from the USAToday story, you'll see that Gallup had K-E up by as much as 55-43 (Feb 2004). So, unless Gallup changes its LV "base composition" each time it samples, I'm not sure that you can make any sort of argument re: "Flawed methodology" based upon a single datum. There has been substantial volatility and swings, granted, but does that add up to "bias"?

I salute all the gals and guys who will be going out into the battleground states and working for voter registration and voter turnout. This election may very well be won on the ground. I know a guy who will either be going to Nevada or Colorado, and I sent him gas money. It was the least I could do. Move-on also has a fund for 'Leave no Voter Behind".
There are also droves of attorneys and others who are going to man certain polling places, so as to avoid 2000-style fraud.
I also salute those who arranged, and those who are performing at, the scheduled and sold-out Big Name concerts -(Springsteen, etc., etc. etc.) - should help with the young vote.

Check this column that ran yesterday in Newsday out:

Making call on sham of political polling

-- as if the polls weren't enough of a bogus mark as they are. Basically, Breslin argues, if pollsters don't call the 1.6 million cell phone users (some of whom have no land line) then how can any sample be representative?

Interesting point.

[Putting on conspiracy cap] Another play these biased polls would work well with is the the staging of some vote-counting fraud. If the numbers change too drastically from poll results to actual election then people might suspect something. Guess that happens no matter what, huh!

barrisJ:

Two responses:

When I asked Gallup if this was the same methodology they have been using all year long for their national and state polls, they said yes. When I asked them if the samples were consistently coming out with this breakdown, they said "This was not a constant. It can differ slightly between surveys." Now we can define what "slightly" means, but I doubt that it means they were using samples of 32% GOP in February and are now using 40% samples. It probably means they were using perhaps 35-36% GOP samples back in February, if not higher.

Second, what is the chance that Kerry's numbers were actually higher back in the spring than we thought because Gallup was oversampling the GOP even then?

Thanks. This is crucial information. Good work.

This seems pretty scandalous to me. Gallup needs to hear our concerns and displeasure. We have got to start making as much noise as the wingers. First Diebold -- now Gallop. Makes me kinda pissed.

Regardless of this bias with Gallup, the electoral map is not looking good for our team. If this is going to be another close race, I'd like to see a 2000-like scenario -- only turned on its head. That is, Kerrey wins the College, W wins the pop vote. I think that might put a fatal bullet in the Electoral College. And that, IMHO, would be a Good Thing. Icing on the cake. But, boy, I hope we get the "cake" at least.

I hate to burst the bubble of comfort you're creating here, but the markets are showing a much stronger chance that Bush will win than even the Gallup Poll. The Iowa electronic market Linked text which has been pretty accurate in past elections shows Bush over Kerry 59 to 40. Check the graph. Bush has been gaining steadily since the RNC Don't be deceived by your own illusions.

Please hear me out. None of this matters. What matters is who will vote. Who are the new voters?
Gallop is saying there will be more Republicans. For some reason, maybe for a good reason they think the voter registration will be stronger in favor of the Republicans. Or more voters who voted for Gore will vote for Bush. That is what they are saying with the bias. I for one don't know why they are thinking that. I only hope that they are wrong, but why do they think this?
Why does Zogby and Rassmussem and the rest see it differently? What trend does Gallup see that most others don't? Is it because Bush is an incumbent and his party gets weighted higher?
That is why polls don't mean anything because nobody knows what the turnout and final splits are. Either Kerry or Bush could win by a large margin if their party gets out the vote, or Kerry gets some 2000 Bush voters. Which is what I think will happen. I also think that the young vote will go to Kerry and be very strong.

CeCe:

That's rich. This crowd isn't exactly the most sympathetic to free market-based solutions.

Thanks CeCe; I wouldn't want to ingore the Iowa electronic market in favor of multiple public opinion polling experts....

The numbers are even better for Kerry. The recent Gallup poll actually shows Kerry leading among Independents by 10%! How can we lose if we get 10% more Independents than Bush does?
This shows how powerful the effect of overrepresenting Republicans is. Instead of a 4% Dem. edge, Gallup has a 7% Rep. edge -- an astonishing 11% swing! This is how we are trailing in the bogus Gallup poll even though Kerry support from Dems is almost as high as Bush support among Reps.
Keep the faith, we're going to win!

Here is what I am saying with numbers. Let's say for rough numbers 45% of the population voted in 2000.
Then the Dems got 39% and the Rebpublicans got 35%

The Dems will split 80-20 for Kerry.
The Repbus will split 90-10 for Bush
Those are real numbers.
But what if 55% of the population now vote in this election? What are they Dems or Repubs. Nobody knows. What if the Dems go from 39% to 43% or visa versa. There are too many unknows to let these polls drive us crazy. We know that Kerry lost his lead and Bush has lost some or all of his bounce. It is close that is all we know. The rest is guess work.

Dave

We can lose if there are 5 million more Republican voters. Or the reverse can be true. That is what nobody is looking at because they don't know. However it is good that Kerry is getting 10% more of the Inds vote. He was however getting 20% more.

CBS/NY Times poll confirms Gallup results:

Just Out:

Bush 50
Kerry 41
(among registered voters)

Gallup's poll today showed Bush +8 among registered voters

Sorry, but the Gallup poll is accurate, and it is not assuming that 40% of those who vote this November will be Republicans.

Dear Steve Soto,

I just read your article critcizing the Gallup polling and like it very much. I think you are right on with your analysis.

I'm a Statistics professor at Colorado State University and have specifically taught methods for sampling here at CSU as well as at other universities.

I think that the article you have written needs to be taken to a more visible level in the media and in the Statistics profession. In order to do that you are going to need additonal expert discussion which I and my colleagues (those who are bold enough) can offer. Further statistical analysis itself can be used to refute the unbiasedness of the Gallop survey assuming that the 2000 voting rates are taken as correct. It disturbs me that Gallup hasn't checked this since they certainly have statisticians that should know better. The fact that they haven't commented leaves one to suspect foul play by an organization that we have always assumed maintains high professional standards.

Maybe you can send me an email and we can discuss what can be done to substantiate the degree of bias apparent in the Gallup survey.

Sincerely

Ronald Butler
Professor of Statistics
Colorado State University

Hey everyone in the San Francisco bay area! KRON (Channel 4) is doing a story on this topic tonight for the 9 o'clock news.

I got an email back responding to the email I sent that said, "We're doing a story on the Tale Of Two Polls tonight at 9."

Be sure to check it out! The power of the blogosphere (and sending follow up emails to the press!)!

Re the CBS poll, their website indicates that Reps went 87% for Bush and Dems went 83% for Kerry; unfortunately, they did not list the breakdown for Independents, who have been going about 6-12 points for Kerry. In any event, given the similar support each candidate has from his own party, it appears that the CBS poll suffers from the same sample group problem as Gallup -- too many Republicans in the sample.
As long as Dems give close to the same % support for Kerry as Reps give for Bush, we will win. Kerry consistently outpolls Bush among Independents.

Dear Steve Soto,

Rather that simply speculating about the representativeness of the Gallop samples, I did a statistical computation to compare their compositions to that of the 2000 election. According to Zogby figures you have provided, the composition of GOP, Dem, and Indep in the 2000 election was 34%, 39%, and 27% which we take to be the current proportions for 2004.

Are the percentages of the three party catagories for the registered voter sample representative of the 2000 figures? A resounding No! The attained significance level (p-value) of the chi square test is p = .00067 or 0.067%. The meaning attached to this is the following. Suppose that the 2000 proportions are representative of the population right now (yes a big suppose). Then the chance that sample proportions of 1022 registered voters would be seen as extreme as 38%, 33%, and 30% has probability 0.067% or 6.7 in 10,000.

The same analysis for the sample of 767 likely voters, comparing them to the same 2000 proportions, leads to p =.00060 or 6 in 10,000.

Conclusion: What is plainly obvious. The survey is in no way representative of the composition of the voting population if the turn out rates are close to those of 2000.

Ronald Butler
Professor of Statistics

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/17/opinion/main644208.shtml

CBS polls also do somewhat the same thing.

Thanks Professor. That is what I am saying we don't know how many new voters there will be and what the split will be. Thanks again for your great work.

Conclusion: What is plainly obvious. The survey is in no way representative of the composition of the voting population if the turn out rates are close to those of 2000.

Ronald Butler
Professor of Statistics

From the CBS site

"The percentage that identifies themselves as Democrats in this poll is lower than it has been in CBS News Polls conducted earlier in the year."

People! Step away from the Kool-Aid! The Gallup Poll is showing what many other polls lately are showing, including the new CBS poll. See this breakdown at Slate:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2106527/
If you click on the link for PEW you'll see that Pew actually did their poll in two phases. From Sept 8 to 10 Bush beat Kerry by 52-40. The second phase, Sept 11 to 14, it came in tied at 47-46. For some reason, only that last phase has been reported, yet a wide Bush lead has also been reflected in an ICR poll, plus the Newsweek and Time polls.
Or you could go to www.electoral-vote.com
See all the red on the map? Where do you think that comes from? When even NJ moves into the Bush column, we've got problems. This is no time for head in the sand crap. This is time to go GET OUT THAT VOTE.

Marie.

"This is not just inexcusably sloppy polling, it is a travesty of statistical methods and procedures, and that is just like what was done in 1948."

It does appear that way to me also.

Someone above commented that the proportional breakdown in the GOP, Dem, and Ind during a survey can be volatile. That was a good comment.

Since we already roughly know the proportion of voters in each of the party affiliations, we should be treating each of the these 3 groups as disparate homogeneous subpopulations and proceeding to analyze the survey results for the 3 affilations separately. This is called stratified sampling and any statistician should know these results. If you aren't a statistician, it just makes for common sense to separate disparate groups and find out about them individually. However, this does not appear to be the approach used by Gallup.

Ronald Butler

I think the nonsampling of people who have only cell phones and no land lines has little impact on polls because mostly young people have cell phones exclusively, and they are the demo least likely to go vote

Is it possible that Gallup is weighting the party affiliation of their results to reflect the turnout of the 2002 election, rather than past presidential elections? I don't know what the turnout actually was (a quick google didn't find the answer) but I assume since so many repubs got elected that more Rs turned out to vote?

The youth is where Kerry has very, very strong support.

Same problems with these polls as the 36' election. If you call on a landline you get someone with the money to be at home with nothing else to do.

Not so fast Mr.Reality Check. Here are all the polls since the Bush bounce. They are a very mixed bag. Also the kids are going to vote big. It is their butt going to Iraq if Bush wins.
GALLOP
BUSH 55
KERRY 42
DCORPS
BUSH 49
KERRY 48
IBD/CSM
BUSH 47
KERRY 47
NEWSWEEK
BUSH 50
KERRY 45
ZOGBY
BUSH 47
KERRY 45
TIME
BUSH 54
KERRY 42
FOX
BUSH 47
KERRY 45
CBS 9-8
BUSH 50
KERRY 42

phidipides--I would agree with you except wasn't this the excuse given by Deaniacs for why their man was showing weakness in the primary? They were counting on the cell-phoned, energized youth to prove everyone wrong, but they never showed up to caucus.

electoral-vote.com

A great site for a fairly balanced evaluation of current state polls. If you look at the trends, Kerry is generally heading south. The Gallup poll may be off somewhat in the degree of Kerry’s slipage, but not in the trend. I think that barring some sort of major scandal Bush has it pretty much in the bag. Sorry to be depressing.

john oble--may the kids hear you and turn out to vote.
i think anonymous poster was right in that this is a depressing trend, but rather than say Bush has it in the bag, we gotta remember that:
--Bush and Gore traded places in the polls FOUR times between Labor Day and Election Day 2000
and
--We've got 6.5 weeks till the election. A lot can happen to tip polls in our favor...BUT
don't leave it to chance. This is a highly polarized electorate and rather than see the polls as frauds or as discouraging, we need to calm the panicked, encourage the depressed, and keep motivating the campaign.

eXPLAIN THE cbs pOLL.

FACE IT -- YOUR CANDIDATE STINKS -- THE ONLY THING HE SAYS IS "I'M NOT BUSH"

TO BE PRESIDENNT YOU NEED TO TAKE A STAND.

BUSH FOR 4 MORE YEARS.

I disagree. I think Kerry was South and is heading North. However, time will tell.

A great site for a fairly balanced evaluation of current state polls. If you look at the trends, Kerry is generally heading south. The Gallup poll may be off somewhat in the degree of Kerry’s slipage, but not in the trend. I think that barring some sort of major scandal Bush has it pretty much in the bag. Sorry to be depressing.

Reality: Exactly

I guess at this point the only place to go for Kerry is up. The problem is that he doesn’t have a lot of time left to do it in. The only thing left really are the debates. Does anyone really expect them to change anyone’s opinions? Kerry’s problem really seems to be that the only reason to vote for him is a vote against Bush. I am not a Bush fan, but at this point I would say that Kerry needs to re-evaluate his strategy. His message, if he has one seems to be lost in a blur of swift-boats and Guard memos.

That is enough!

FACE IT -- YOUR CANDIDATE STINKS -- THE ONLY THING HE SAYS IS "I'M NOT BUSH"

Brilliant piece of writing- well researched.

Consider it linked!

-weez

Roofie, honey, the CBS poll also oversampled Republicans. It had a mix of 36 R to 32 D.

Time for beddy-bye, honey.

Roofie, honey, the CBS poll also oversampled Republicans. It had a mix of 36 R to 32 D.

Time for beddy-bye, honey.

Bush is very vulnerable but the Dems have brilliantly selected a candidate who is
thoroughly unlikeable, who has allowed himself to be firmly established as an "opportunistic flip-flopper and whose greatest strength, his allegedly heroic Vietnam record has been thoroughly undercut by the Swift Boat Vets.
Kerry's biggest problem is that everything he says turns off half of his supporters. Comparisons to Bush/Gore miss the point. Talk of Kerry's comeback skills are over-rated. Kerry was a big fish in a very small liberal pond. Now, he's in the big leagues and for all his arrogance and money, Kerry is in way over his head. So dream on. It will be a joy to read how you Bush-haters slowly, reluctantly and grudingly are forced to FACE REALITY. Kerry is toast.

Kerry is toast.

Yeah. All those people you see at the Kerry/Edwards rallies, Edwards holding a megaphone because the crowd is so huge that people in the back can't hear.

Bush arresting Gold Star...GOLD STAR...mothers at their rallies. Yeah, you got a real weiner there, son.

Let me make a quick comment...The gallup polls are totally ignoring the african american 18-25 group who will be the deciding factor in the next election. I know SO, SO, SO MANY people who have never voted in their life, are voting this November. This election will see record numbers at the polls and be in the record books as the most important election of our times. Everybody is voting this november because of their hatred for bush. You have the hip-hop community from Russell Simmmon, P-Diddy, Outkast, 50 cent, Eminem and a lot of other celebrities who are getting african americans hip hop community to the polls in november. The have a huge following and they know they can influence record numbers to vote this november. You have black college campuses who are going over and beyond to make sure every single person is registered and vote in november. I have an uncle who is a professor at black college in louisiana and he told me that they have all kinds of incintives to get them to the polls and he said it will work. He told me a lot of them are angry and will do everything to make sure their vote is counted.

Then you have FLORIDA!!!! Remember that fiasco in 2000??Remember bush barely won and if it wasn't for him winning florida by 527 votes, gore would be president today. Gore won the popular vote by half a million and the same is going to happen with Kerry. The republicans should be worried because I really smell an upset and landslide in favor of Kerry. They are truly underestimating how many people are voting this election and if they don't be careful egg will be in their face on November 3rd which I hope will happen. With these things mentioned, I can't see bush winning. He has to many people who want him gone from office than any other president in history.

Sampling is only half the issue. The sample itself only tells us WHO they talked to. Pollsters then apply a weight to that sample based on their algorithm as to which viters are most likely to show up. This is epcifically intended to correct for sample variation. Thus, I don't think that your sampling issue is very informative.
On the other hand, I think it highly likely that weighting will be informative. If Gallup weights based on voter turnout by party in 2000, then they overweight Republicans and underweight Democrats and overweight Naderites in my opinion.
If they combine voter turnout in 2000 with subjective statements from people being polled (how likely is it that you will vote in November) then they have done as much as methodology will allow.

The idea is as old as time itself. Those on the fence see bush in the lead, and want to vote for the "winner". Those who believe bush should be gone get discouraged and don't vote. Dean could turn this around; use these fake polls to his advantage. Fake Turkey, Fake War, Fake Polls, Fake President

You can argue forever about the flawed methodology of the various polls. You can argue about some vast uncounted demographic that is going to ride to the rescue. What is the point? In the end, like it or not, the current media portrayal of Bush is of a compelling candidate on the rise, and Kerry as a soulless shell, floundering in the polls.

By the way, "I'm not bush" is good enough for me! They could pull Ronald Reagan out of the grave and run him against bush, and I would vote for Reagan before I would vote for this lying chisling, Chickenhawk Wuss. Having Bush in charge of the US is like having Dr. Smith in charge of the Jupiter 2. It results in people being Lost in Space!

What I can't figure out is whether bush used the children at that elementary school as an Alabi, or as human shields? It was one or the other. If he knew about 9/11, the children were his alabi; if he didn't, they were his human shields, protecting him from "the bad men", so after it was all over he could crawl out from his hidey hole and claim he was such a friggin leader.

I think Gallup normalising to 40% Republicans and 33% Democrats is flawed.

A recent survey of 10,000 US voter identification saw 43.5% identifying themselves as Republican and 43.3% identifying themselves as Democrat. This figures broadly reflect those of each parties representation across the state legislatures.

This evicence reflects my view that America is politically very polarised which points to a close result come November 2.

Also recent polls may underestimate the position of young voters who tend to have cell phones rather than landlines and who tend to favour the Democrats.

Bush hasn't sealed the deal yet.

Someone said above, and I agree, the problem is that a lot of "undecided" voters will want to vote for who they percieve as the eventual winner. If the mainstream media keeps forecasting a huge Kerry defeat, even though that seems unlikely, it might tip the balance. The other problem is keeping people from getting discouraged and not voting. Large voter turnout means a Kerry win. Middling or small turnout means a close call or a Bush win. Kerry might want to start advertising some of the other poll numbers out there. And, God help us, if Bush "wins" again and anything in the least looks fishy about it, I hope all take to the streets. From what the Times is reporting, between the touch screen machines in Florida, absentee ballott tampering, military vote chicanery, and other things, there is an attempt to make sure W is there for 4 more years even if he loses again.

Alfie

I think this is the point.
Thanks
Kinona
Let me make a quick comment...The gallup polls are totally ignoring the african american 18-25 group who will be the deciding factor in the next election. I know SO, SO, SO MANY people who have never voted in their life, are voting this November. This election will see record numbers at the polls and be in the record books as the most important election of our times. Everybody is voting this november because of their hatred for bush. You have the hip-hop community from Russell Simmmon, P-Diddy, Outkast, 50 cent, Eminem and a lot of other celebrities who are getting african americans hip hop community to the polls in november. The have a huge following and they know they can influence record numbers to vote this november. You have black college campuses who are going over and beyond to make sure every single person is registered and vote in november. I have an uncle who is a professor at black college in louisiana and he told me that they have all kinds of incintives to get them to the polls and he said it will work. He told me a lot of them are angry and will do everything to make sure their vote is counted.

Then you have FLORIDA!!!! Remember that fiasco in 2000??Remember bush barely won and if it wasn't for him winning florida by 527 votes, gore would be president today. Gore won the popular vote by half a million and the same is going to happen with Kerry. The republicans should be worried because I really smell an upset and landslide in favor of Kerry. They are truly underestimating how many people are voting this election and if they don't be careful egg will be in their face on November 3rd which I hope will happen. With these things mentioned, I can't see bush winning. He has to many people who want him gone from office than any other president in history.

Posted by Kinona at September 17, 2004 11:09 PM

William Schubert Love your analogys! 'Oh William the pain, the pain!"

Bush in the school in Floria, "But what about the Children? Is anyone thinking about the children?"

Why the secret service didn't bundel him up and run him out of there is beyond me. I would think that not getting the president to safety would be a firing offence. Their job isn't to protect the kids, but the president. Some one didn't tell them what was going on or told them to stand down. That person is also responsible for putting the children in danger.

This Gallup poll also shows that for registered but "unlikely" voters the result it:
Kerry : 50%
Bush : 43%

Total : 255 = 1022 - 767
Kerry : 128
Bush : 110
Undecided : 17

If Gallup is right, there must be a huge divide in the country:
Likely voters: 55% - 42% for Bush
Registered but "unlikely" voters: 50% - 43% for Kerry.

The main problem with these "polls" is not only that they are scaring people into not voting. The main problem is that they allow the media to keep talking about how Kerry is in trouble, how his message is not resonating, how he has to explain himself ... If Kerry was ahead in these "polls", the media would have no excuse to reinforce Karl Rove's spin and would be asking these questions of the president.

It is not enough to ignore these polls and focus on getting out the vote. You have to do both. People have to actively fight this. Write e-mails and letters, alert the Kerry campaign ...

Who knows how many previous elections were affected by this. Internet has broken the monopoly on information.

good read.

I never saw people criticize the polls when Kerry was ahead...

damn it, i start school and am forced to stop reading this blog and a week later steve has probably his widest-read post yet. excellent - keep it up!

STEVE AND OTHERS:
TAKE IT FROM A FORMER INSIDER: GALLUP IS WAY WAY OFF WHEN IT COMES TO JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING. I USED TO WORK FOR THEM. FANCYING THEMSELVES AS THE WORLD'S FOREMOST GATHERER AND CRUNCHER OF DATA, THEY FAILED REGULARLY (AND MANY OF US BELIEVED INTENTIONALLY) TO EVEN GET OUR PAYROLL CHECKS RIGHT. THEIR SURVEY QUESTIONS ARE WORDED AWKWARDLY AND ARE OFTEN SKEWED TOWARD A CERTAIN GROUP (USUALLY A POWER STRUCTURE). I USED TO COMPLAIN OF THIS OFTEN WHILE WORKING THERE AS A POLLSTER. THEIR CEO, JIM CLIFTON, IS A COMPLETE BOOB AND JACKASS TO BOOT-- ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT PEOPLE YOU'D EVER MEET. THEY CONSTANTLY DEMEANED, BULLIED AND THREATENED THEIR EMPLOYEES. THEY HAVE BEEN REPEATEDLY FOUND GUILTY BY THE NLRB FOR FLAGRANT LABOR LAW VIOLATIONS. I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE ANYONE WHO GETS A CALL FROM THEM TO TELL GALLUP THAT THEY ARE BEING BOYCOTTED--AND TO EXPLAIN TO THEM JUST WHY. SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THESE THUGS. THEIR REPUTATION IS SORELY IN NEED OF SULLYING.

SINCERELY,
B MALKUS
AUSTIN, TEXAS

Public Opinion Watch : Why the race is a lot closer than people think; Labor Day leads and election outcomes
Public Opinion Watch is brought to you in cooperation with the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress.

Why the race is a lot closer than people think

Gallup poll of 1,018 adults for CNN/USA Today, released September 6, 2004 (conducted September 3–5, 2004)

TNS poll of 1,202 adults for ABC News/Washington Post, released September 9, 2004 (conducted September 6–8, 2004)

CBS News poll of 1,058 adults, released September 9, 2004 (conducted September 6–8, 2004)

Opinion Dynamics poll of 1,000 likely voters for Fox News, released September 9, 2004 (conducted September 7–8, 2004)

Zogby poll of 1,018 likely voters, released September 10, 2004 (conducted September 8–9, 2004)

Princeton Survey Research poll of 1,166 adults for Newsweek, released September 11, 2004 (conducted September 9–10, 2004)

Rasmussen Research poll of 1,000 likely voters, released September 13, 2004 (conducted September 10–12, 2004)

Is Bush ahead by a little or a lot? Is it close to a tie ball game or has Bush surged to a commanding lead?

The conventional wisdom inclines to the latter not the former. The reason has a great deal to do with two persistent problems with contemporary polls that—at least at this point in time—tend to considerably inflate Bush's apparent lead. But once you dissect the available data with these problems in mind, a truer picture of the race comes into focus which suggests that the race continues to be very close.

The two problems are: (1) samples that have an unrealistic number of Republican identifiers and hence tend to favor Bush; and (2) the widespread and highly questionable practice of using likely voters (LVs) instead of registered voters (RVs) to measure voter sentiment this far before the election.

First, the issue of partisan distribution in samples. Lately, and very suddenly, many polls have been turning up more Republican identifiers than Democratic identifiers in their samples—in some cases, many more (as high as a nine- to ten-point Republican advantage).

How realistic is it to be suddenly turning up a Republican lead on party identification, much less a large one? Not very. The weight of the academic evidence is that, while the distribution of party identification among voters can and does change over time, it changes slowly, not in big lurches from week to week.

And the weight of the empirical evidence is that the distribution of party identification among voters has favored and continues to favor the Democrats. In 2000, the exit polls showed Democrats with a four-point advantage over Republicans. In 1996, it was also five points; in 1996, it was three points and in 1988 it was also three points.

The data also indicate that there were two shifts in party identification over the 2001–2004 period which largely canceled each other out. The first shift, in the period after September 11, shaved several points off the Democrats' lead and brought the Republicans close to even (but never ahead) in party identification. The second shift took place in late 2003 and 2004 and reconstituted the Democrats' lead on party identiifcation to about four points, exactly where it was in the 2000 election according to the exit polls (see this useful study "Democrats Gain Edge in Party Identification" by the Pew Research Center for more details).

But if the party identification distribution is fairly stable and tends to change rather slowly, why would polls suddenly be turning up unrealistically high numbers of Republican identifiers? The best explanation, in my view, is that when the political situation jazzes up supporters of one party, they are more likely to want to participate in a public opinion telephone poll and express their views. An increased rate of interview acceptance by that party's supporters would then skew the sample toward that party without the underlying distribution having changed very much, if at all.

In this case, the Republican convention, coming on the heels of the Swift Boat controversy, may have helped raise political enthusiasm among Republican partisans, leading to more interview acceptances and a disproportionate number of Republicans in recent samples.

But whatever the explanation for the disproportionate number of Republicans in recent samples, if those numbers are unrealistic, they are skewing reported horse race results toward Bush. What, if anything, should be done about this?

One possible solution is to weight poll results by a more reasonable distribution of party identification. The issue of whether to use this approach to the problem is well-summarized by Alan Reifman in his invaluable essay "Weighting Pre-Election Polls for Party Composition: Should Pollsters Do It or Not?" on his website.

As Reifman puts it:

One factor (among many) that may contribute to discrepancies between different outfits' polls in their Bush-Kerry margins . . . is polling firms' different philosophies as to whether it's advisable to mathematically adjust their samples—after all the interviews have been completed—to make the percentages of D's and R's in their survey sample match the partisan composition that is likely to be evident at the polls on Election Day. The latter can be estimated from exit polls from previous elections, party registration figures (in states where citizens declare a party ID when registering to vote), and surveys.

(Another issue that often comes up in evaluating pre-election surveys, with which many of you may be familiar, is whether results are reported for "registered" or "likely" voters. That is a different issue from what is being discussed [in this essay]. Whether a pollster reports results for registered voters, likely voters, or both, weighting by party ID is a separate, independent decision.)

Note well Reifman's point that the issue of whether and how to use LVs, not RVs, to report results is separate from the issue of whether and how to do party-weighting. I discuss the LV issue below after the party-weighting discussion.

Given that party identification does shift some over time, my instinct has generally been to avoid party-weighting if possible and promote a full-disclosure approach. This is how I recently put it in Public Opinion Watch:

[B]ecause the distribution of party identification does shift some over time . . . polls should be able to capture this. What I do favor is release and prominent display of sample compositions by party identification, as well as basic demographics, whenever a poll comes out. Consumers of poll data should not have to ferret out this information from obscure places—it should be given out-front by the polling organizations or sponsors themselves. Then people can use this information to make judgements about whether and to what extent they find the results of the poll plausible.

But this approach increasingly seems unrealistic to me. The polling organizations and sponsors do not routinely release the data I call for and certainly do not prominently display them. And even if they did, the typical consumer of polling data lacks the time and skills to use these data to re-weight or adjust reported results. The fact of the matter is that people pay attention to reported results period; therefore they are at the mercy of whichever results are reported and emphasized (an issue that also looms large in the LVs vs. RVs issue, discussed below).

This suggests that weighting poll results by a reasonable distribution of party identification may be necessary to avoid giving the public distorted impressions of the state of the race.

What is a reasonable distribution of party identification to use in such weighting? One obvious candidate is the exit poll distribution from 2000: 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, 26 percent independents. Moreover, the Democratic advantage in this distribution—four points—closely matches the average Democratic advantage in 2004, as measured by the Pew Research Center (see above) and other polling organizations, making it an even more attractive option.

But political analyst Charlie Cook probably has the best idea, even though it can really only be implemented by the polling organizations themselves: "dynamic party identification weighting." Cook's idea is that polls should weight their samples by a rolling average of their unweighted party identification numbers taken over the previous several months. This would allow the distribution of party identification to change some over time, but eliminate the effects of sudden spikes in partisan identifiers in samples (such as we are experiencing now).

Lacking such a dynamic weighting, however, the best we can probably do at this point is to use the exit poll distribution mentioned above. How much difference would this make if we applied it to recent polls?

Quite a bit. Here are Bush's leads in a number of recent polls, ordered by size of his lead, once the horse race question is weighted by the 2000 exit poll distribution (note: not all recent polls can be included because you need the horse race figures among Democrats, Republicans, and independents separately to do this procedure and not all polls release these figures; in addition Zogby and Rasmussen results are party-weighted to begin with and therefore do not have to be re-weighted; RV results used unless only LV results available):

CBS News, September 6–8 RVs: +5 Zogby, September 8–9 LVs: +2 Rasmussen: September 10–12 LVs: +1 Fox News: September 7–8 LVs: +1 Washington Post, September 6–8 RVs: +1 Newsweek, September 9–10 RVs, –2 Gallup, September 3–5 RVs: –4

These data present a clear picture of a tight race, with Bush likely running a small lead, but not the solid—and even large—advantage that has been conveyed to the public.

The other problem that is afflicting the polls and considerably inflating perceptions of Bush's lead is the widespread, and highly questionable, use of LVs, instead of RVs, to report horse race results far in advance of the actual election. The reason why using LVs instead of RVs is a bad idea is simple: the LV approach is being asked to do a job—gauge voter sentiment and how it changes from week-to-week (and even day-to-day)—that it was never designed to do. What the LV approach was designed to do was measure voter sentiment on the eve of an election and predict the outcome. That was, and remains, an appropriate application of the LV approach.

But applied as many polling organizations currently do, it is highly inappropriate and frequently very misleading. As political scientists Robert Erikson, Costas Panagopoulos, and Christopher Wlezien put it in their important forthcoming paper, "Likely (and Unlikely) Voters and the Assessment of Campaign Dynamics" in Public Opinion Quarterly:

[E]stimates of who may be likely voters in the weeks and months prior to Election Day in large part reflect transient political interest on the day of the poll, which might have little bearing on voter interests on the day of the election. Likely voters early in the campaign do not necessarily represent likely voters on Election Day. Early likely voter samples might well represent the pool of potential voters sufficiently excited to vote if a snap election were to be called on the day of the poll. But these are not necessarily the same people motivated to vote on Election Day.

And of course, since the group of people "sufficiently excited to vote if a snap election were to be called on the day of the poll" changes from poll to poll, it raises the uncomfortable possibility that observed changes in the sentiments of "likely voters" represent not actual changes in voter sentiment, but rather changes in the composition of likely voter samples as political enthusiasm waxes and wanes among the different parties' supporters. Or, as Erikson et al. put it:

At one time, Democratic voters may be excited and therefore appear more likely to vote than usual. The next period the Republicans may appear more excited and eager to vote. As Gallup's likely voter screen absorbs these signals of partisan energy, the party with the surging interest gains in the likely voter vote. As compensation, the party with sagging interest must decline in the likely voter totals.

And this is exactly what their analysis of Gallup data from the 2000 election finds—"shifts in voter classification as likely or unlikely account for more observed change in the preferences of likely voters than do actual changes in voters' candidate preferences."

This is an important result and helps nail down what has always been disturbing about the use of likely voter methods far in advance of the actual election. Instead of giving you a better picture of voter sentiment and how it is changing than conventional RV data, it gives you a worse one since true changes in voter sentiment are swamped by changes in who is classified as a likely voter.

Does this matter? You bet it does. When Gallup told the world on September 6 that Bush was leading Kerry by seven points among LVs, the world listened and absorbed that figure as a trustworthy indicator of where the race was. Completely lost, except to those who bother to look at such things, was the Gallup finding that Bush only led by single point among RVs—in other words, that the race was about tied. Gallup and its sponsoring organizations implicitly and explicitly encouraged people to treat the LV finding as the real story and the RV finding as an unreliable afterthought (after all, those voters aren't "likely"!). The incredible irony, of course, is that the real situation was exactly the reverse: as the Erikson et al. findings suggest, it was the RV data that provided the best gauge of voter sentiment and the LV data that should have been an unreliable afterthought.

Or take the Gallup data gathered in Ohio in the last two months, perhaps the key state in this election and the subject of endless media stories about "the battle for Ohio." On September 8, Gallup released data showing Bush ahead of Kerry by eight points among LVs in Ohio, a fourteen-point swing from late July when Kerry led by six points. Again, completely lost in the Gallup, newspaper, and television reports on the poll was the poll's finding that Bush had just a one-point lead among RVs in the state, representing a much more modest swing of six points since late July.

Guess which figures are still with us as coverage of the battle for Ohio continues? That's right: Bush's eight-point lead among LVs and fourteen-point swing. In fact, just this Sunday, the New York Times practically built their Ohio campaign story around these figures which allegedly showed just how well Bush is doing! and just how much the situation has changed!

In short, these LV figures, especially from Gallup, are contributing mightily to the impression that Bush has built a substantial lead and is even surging ahead in some of the key swing states. But, as we have seen, these LV data are fundamentally inappropriate for measuring the state of the race, and how it is changing, this far ahead of election day. For that, you need the RV data and they suggest something far different: the race is damn close and Bush's substantial lead is a myth.

Labor Day Leads and Possible Election Outcomes This Year

Frank Newport, "Can Election Probabilities Be Established at This Point?" Gallup News Service, September 8, 2004

Speaking of the harm done by use of early LV data, here's another example. Gallup posted an analysis on their site September 8 about estimating election probabilities based on Labor Day poll data that is almost completely worthless. The reason is that they focus on Kerry's seven-point deficit among LVs on Labor Day (Can he overcome it?), while basing their analysis almost entirely on data about RVs on Labor Day.

How do I know their Labor Day poll data is almost entirely (prior to 1996) based on RVs? Because they published these data, clearly marked as being from RVs 1952–92 and from national adults 1936–48, in an analysis on their own site just five days before they posted the analysis mentioned above.

Don't they read their own stuff? Clearly it makes no sense to analyze a lead among LVs this Labor Day, and its possible relation to the final outcome this year, on the basis of historical data mostly about RV leads on Labor Day and how much they changed by Election Day.

Thus, the question Gallup should have been asking is: can Kerry overcome his one-point deficit among RVs by Election Day, based on historical patterns? Turns out the answer to this question—really, the only question that their data can properly answer—looks pretty favorable for Kerry. In thirteen of thirteen cases, going back to 1952, the Labor Day margin between the candidates changed enough for Kerry to tie or surpass Bush in the popular vote and, in eleven of those thirteen cases, the change was in Kerry's direction (that is, in the direction of the candidate who was behind among RVs on Labor Day).

Moreover, if you compare Bush's position to the position of incumbent presidents who won their campaigns for reelection in this period, it doesn't look auspicious. In the five cases that qualify (Eisenhower, 1956; Johnson, 1964; Nixon, 1952; Reagan, 1984; and Clinton, 1996), winning incumbent presidents on Labor Day had an average lead of twenty points and a median lead of nineteen points among RVs. Wow.

I sent some of the comments above to Gallup's editors' blog and Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup poll, was sporting enough to print an edited version of my comments on their blog, along with his reply. In Newport's reply, his key rationale for conducting their analysis the way he did was he wished to "[use] Gallup's best available estimates at Labor Day for each year for which we have data." (But by all means read his argument in full through the link.)

To further this discussion, here are some additional remarks on the issue replying to Newport's argument. I should add that I don't believe that Gallup has any particular axe to grind in how they did this analysis—I just think in this case they got it wrong.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. But I still don't buy it. You surely must see that it makes a difference when people read these analyses with "seven-point deficit to overcome" in mind rather than "one-point deficit to overcome"? And in fact that's how your analysis was written, focusing reader attention on the seven-point LV deficit.

And the fact remains that apples-to-apples comparisons are far preferable to apples-to-oranges comparisons. Therefore the proper comparison is between this year's RV Labor Day results and previous years'. Otherwise, you are not analyzing the same change (RV labor day gap vs. final gap) across years.

Using a consistent time series would make a difference to your analysis.

Instead of:

"In summary, the history of presidential elections since 1936 suggests that in about half of the cases, the type of gap change that would be necessary for Kerry to tie or move ahead of Bush has occurred. About half the time it has not. If a gap change does occur, the odds are higher than 50–50 that it would be in Kerry's direction (i.e., a shrinkage rather than an expansion of Bush's current lead)."

You would have:

"In summary, the history of presidential elections since 1952 suggests that in all cases, the type of gap change that would be necessary for Kerry to tie or move ahead of Bush has occurred. If a gap change does occur, the odds are very strong (eleven out of thirteen) that it would be in Kerry's direction (i.e., a shrinkage rather than an expansion of Bush's current lead)."

This clearly sounds quite a bit different. And thinking Kerry is behind by one point, rather than seven points, clearly makes a big difference when considering elections like 1960 and 1980, which loom large in your analysis. Kennedy was behind by a point in 1960 among RVs—the same as Kerry—and Reagan was behind by four points in 1980—more than Kerry. If you're thinking seven points behind, those races look a lot different.

In short, lacking a consistent time series of any length on LVs, you just shouldn't use 'em in an analysis like this.

(9/18/2004)
- Gadflyer

The assumptions in the Gallop Poll are valid if Gallop is aware of something that you are not aware of. Can we think of various things that would make a difference? Is Zogby used by the WSJ because Gallop is just plain crazy, or does Gallop have the inside track on what is happening?

Start with the possibility that Gallop knows that the turn out will end up being the amount indicated. How do they know? By polling or some other way?

Then turn to the prospect that in many states, the systems can be "tweaked" to ensure certain voting.

Then turn to the prospect that as electronic voting increases, fraud becomes the norm, not the possibility. The president of the manufacturer of the largest number of electronic voting machines (for all I know all of those machines) has stated that he will ensure that there is a Bush victory. How about that? Of course, he may have said that about Ohio, but he is also active nationally as I understand the situation.

Are these fantasies?

How to manufacture a 14 point bounce:

1. bush states(last count): 203
Average lead in bush states: 20 %

2. Kerry states: 137
Average lead in kerry states 5%

3. independant states 198
Average bush lead in independant states : 1 %

now cook on a sample of "proportional representation for all states"

203 40.6 15.32%
137 -6.85 -1.74%
198 1.98 0.73%
538 14.30%

Here 40.6 is 203* 20%
and 15.32 is 40.6*(203/538)

so we have a 14.3 % lead for bush....we would have had a similar lead for bush if KERRY had a 1% lead in the 198 independant state seats...except Kerry would have won the election 335 : 203 in the electoral college...

go figure...

Here's my quick and dirty (and bogus) back of the envelope meta-reanalysis.

Zogby says for the last 3 elections Dem % was: 34, 39, 39
Average: 37.3%
Reeps: 34, 34, 35, ave = 34.3%

Gallup is using 33 (D), 40 (R) weighting to get 42 (Kerry), 55 (Bush).

So they underweight (D) by 37.3/33.0 = 1.13
and overweight (R) by 34.3/40 = 0.86

42 * 1.13 = 47.5% (Kerry)
55 * 0.86 = 47.3% (Bush)

Bottom line:
Vote Democrat. In 2 years, no matter who wins, it will be obvious to everyone you did the right thing.

Ah, but why did the Over sampling occur? surely the explenation that "I want my cronies to win" is not a good enough reason. Gallup has to justify their reasoning by claiming "yeah we had 40 % republicans in our sample, but the country is going 40 % republican so it's not our fault..." etc .

The rationale they manufacture IMO would be based on popular leads in states where margins are meaningless. (yeah sure 40% country is republican, but they mostly stay in texas, so sampling all 40 % in texas would be a meaningless excersice ...unless some idiots are taken in to vote republican by gallup's excercise in cookery).

At PollingReports.com, you can see the polls for the 2000 Gore Bush race, and Gallup was consistently showing Bush with a 3-7% lead, even though we know the results as almost dead even...

Yes, ignore the polls. They are being messed with by both sides. I know that my groups decided to either not answer polls of any kind, or mess with them, which ever we felt moved to do, at the time. Why?

The business in 2000 with the polls and the exit polls and the Supremes was just too much. Why tell anyone anything. Who I plan to vote for is no ones damn business, espicially the corporations, who know too much already.

We are also afraid that if the Bushies get too scared, someone American City will pay big time.

The mass media is already playing the game of calling the horse race. The polls (all of them in my opinion) have shown themselves to be just about useless. What is important is everyone and I mean everyone who is registered to vote turn out to vote. If Bush manages to win this election I think it would say more about this country than it does the candidates. America at this moment could turn in any direction. We aren't quite the country we think. We've gone down a road that makes us a force that could be for good or could be the evil force most people rally against. WE won't reap the results but our children and grandchildren will.

BTW, whoever mentioned that Gallup's polling was correct in 1992 is dead wrong. 1992's Gallup poll was off by 6%.

that's just because the democrats are so busy staying smoking dope they forget to vote.

Where do you people get your information? Dan Rather?

Where do you people get your information? Dan Rather?

Bush is done Stick a fork in him....
We all know the troll polls and we
are not dumbed down as the GOP would
like to think...Wake up Jr, THE U HAUL
IS OUT FRONT WAITING.....

I am in agreement, I suspected the pollsters and yes, everyone likes a winner. How many knows that there are world wide bets on our American Presidential Races. Look at the Irish Sweepstakes search and you can find that, it is legal there to take bets, in the race Yes, like a horse race, and many people use the jokey to bet on, not the horse. In our case this is true. The Gopers are are betting on their Jockey.

We here in U.S.A. have a laws against bookies and illegal gambling - on that lottery (horse race or futures, what ever) for they are attepting to pass that bill now. Who knows, there could be a lottery (bets)on this election right here in America. Perhaps this is why the GOPs want to postpone the November elections. Ha. Ha. Did you know about this? Well, I didn't, The U.S. is looking at this bill right now and they will be able to put it on the Stock market and call it futures this is already permissible by our laws if it is called the futures stock market. (betting on the race or Lottery which ever you like.) This is a farce.

Quechick007

I'm no troll, but i think people are missing a possible explanation that is not good for us. For the past several elections there have been tens of thousands of people out there who CALLED themselves "independent" but were in fact rabid liberal-haters. If those people, post 911, post Perot, and with the now virtual extinction of the last dixicrat vestiges, have now started calling themselves republicans, that would explain both the shift AND why the self-declared "independents" are polling so well for Kerry. So the argument that the sample is skewed doesn't convince me. MORE convincing is the cellphone vs landline issue. If they are only polling people with landlines who are at home when they call, they are getting an increasingly unrepresentative sample. For this reason I am still confident, because I think there are a lot of people under the radar who have been motivated by Bush to vote for the very first time, against him. The polls never reflected the magnitude of Reagan over Carter for exactly the same reason. To paraphrase Dylan: "something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Gallup?"

I would be delighted to know what you think about the recent Knight-Ridder poll by Mason-Dixon. Enclosed is recent email with national correspondent Steven Thomma:
------------------------
All the details about our poll are on our website, www.krwashington.com. General Electric has no role. And i often cite Pew in my political reporting.

Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 7:52 PM
To: sthomma@krwashington.com
Subject: St Paul Pioneer Press 9/19: Coming Tuesday: The blue states Bushpulls ahead in 6 key swing states

Dear Sir:

It has recently come to my attention that Gallup appears to be making unrealistic and unwarranted assumptions about "likely voter" turnout, assuming in several swing states that Republican turnout will exceed Democratic turnout -- even in states where the opposite is normally the case:

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/002806.html

I am concerned that such assumptions would account for recent poll variations showing a widening lead for the president, and hope that Knight-Ridder/MSNBC has not made similar unjustified and biased adjustments to its sample. As a student of mathematical statistics, I would be delighted to know the composition of your sample. As a student of politics, I am wary of the influence of defense contractor General Electric on the MSNBC partner in your polling. As a student of the press, I continue to be amazed at the lack of attention attracted by Rasmussen and Pew polls, showing much less sensational results.

Is it just me, or is this analysis of Gallup all wrong?

You seem to be assuming that Gallup simply calls 1000 random people, and divides the number of "Bush" and "Kerry" votes by 10, and that's the percentage.

From what I know, this isn't at all the way they do it, because it wouldn't be very accurate. (They do this for a living; you're assuming that nobody at Gallup has thought about polling, which is pretty arrogant.)

I understood that they called a bunch of people, and asked *several* questions (age, sex, where you live, what party you claim to belong to, how often you have voted, etc.) to come up with some sort of model of what sort of influence you're expected to have.

As a really simple example, suppose you called 1000 random people and found that 95% of the people who claimed to be Republicans and voted for Bush in 2000 say they'll vote for him again. That gives you a lot of information. Or maybe: 70% of independents who voted Dem in 2000 will vote Rep this time. If you put together enough pieces of information like this, you can paint a pretty accurate picture of how the whole country is going to vote, based on a relatively tiny sample.

So it doesn't matter at all that they got 40% reps and 33% dems. (It might if they got 95% reps and 2% dems, but they didn't.)

Polling isn't just "Hi, Bush or Kerry? OK, thanks, bye".

Wow... That so many can be convinced of a conspiracy theory with the smallest shred of evidence is amazing.

If I say that Gallup is in bed with Bush/Cheney/Rove and that's why the numbers are bad, everyone nods in approval.

If I then, using similar logic, say that the media must be in bed with the Kerry/Edwards group, everyone calls me a Republican moron.

How did we get into a "logic free" zone?

This is yet another example in a litany that serve to raise the level of cynicism in our so-called "democratic process".

Nader voter

I hope the Bush people do not trash the Whitehouse,when they leave Jan. 2o, 2005.

I hope the Bush people do not trash the Whitehouse,when they leave Jan. 2o, 2005.

I hope the Bush people do not trash the Whitehouse,when they leave Jan. 20, 2005.

Two thumbs up for Steve. Here are some links to email blitzes targeting news managers, editors and prominant personalities at all major news outlets alerting them to Steve's piece and calling them out on the matter. Be sure to tailor your feedback in the form provided for personal comments:

CNN
http://www.citizenspeak.org/campaign/1383.php

MSNBC
http://www.citizenspeak.org/campaign/1455.php

Fox News
http://www.citizenspeak.org/campaign/5828.php

Network News
http://www.citizenspeak.org/campaign/4747.php

Newspapers & Magazines
http://www.citizenspeak.org/campaign/1865.php

Radio
http://www.citizenspeak.org/campaign/1383.php

Sorry I cannot find the source, but I read somewhere (recently) that when voter turnout is high, the Democrats generally benefit. In other words, The more people that get out to vote, the higher the percentage of those votes will go to the Democratic candidate.

For example, (note: these numbers are exaggerated to show the point I'm trying to make here, so bear with me! - and I'm assuming we're talking about a two-party race) Low voter turnout might vote something like this: 60% Rep, 40% Dem. Whereas, high voter turnout might look more like this: 40% Rep, 60% Dem.

If this is the case, it will get down to the Democrats getting as many people as possible to vote. Polls such as the Gallup can work for or against such a campaign. They can either discourage voters from showing up who might otherwise have voted for John Kerry; or they can make the Republicans complacent about victory and fuel the zeal of Democrats to bring even more people out to the voting booths.

If what I had read is true, then let's hope for the latter. Then again, kids, you shouldn't believe everything you read.

Like watching a bunch of blind panic stricken mice run around.

smirk.

Coincidentally, here is an excerpt from Bush's speech at the UN a couple of days ago,

"Well, I don't give a flying phooey what the polls say. I believe it is time we send a man to Mars. In fact, if we send anyone, it will be my good friend, Bob, who deserves more than Cheney, even. You can find his harrowing yet inspiring journal at http://www.sendbobtomars.com and it's a darn good read, y'all."

Thanks, Dubya. Right back at ya.

No one answered Chris.

Why are the polls biased and wrong now when Bush is ahead when they were accurate when Kerry was ahead?

Gallup had results showing leads for Kerry that none of you questioned--even though you've now uncovered their flawed, republican-leaning scenario.

Was it republican leaning when Kerry was ahead? According to this 'analysis', it was.

Think about that.

Here's another tidbit regarding voter turnout. Republicans are energising their base with the slogan, 'if it isn't close, they can't cheat'. They're telling people that the Democrats are already preparing to tie the election up in the courts again. That the Democrats are going to try to do what they tried in Florida.

And believe me, 2000, from the right, is a very different animal.

jack,actually, gallup never gave kerry a big lead as much as they did bush. like mason-dixon, gallup is another right-winger and you know it.

Has anyone considered the possibility that many Kerry supporters are actually reluctant to indicate their preference to pollsters?

In my state, the Republican Party has a web site that asks supporters to indicate the party preference of their neighbors. How will that data be used? It smacks of 1984 to me.

It's also becoming almost impossible to distinguish real polls from Republican or special interest push polls, and I'd venture to guess that the majority of such polls are driven by Bush supporters.

Consequently, many Kerry supporters may be simply refusing to respond to poll phone calls. There are probably more Kerry supporters among the groups, such as minorities and non-Christians, that are paranoid about how their poll responses will be used.

Sorry to all you anti-bush people. Remember, there is nothing bad about being christian, we do get taxed to much, kerry HAS changed his stance on just about everything at least twice, and the dem's just picked a bad canidate this time around. Also I did vote for clinton in his last term, so don't try to write me off as a extreme muslim hating christian right winger.
To all the self proclaimed "progressive" people. If you want someone to change our system of goverment to be socialistic. You must find a canidate that truly stands with your crowd. Good Luck-- you're gonna need it. To the creator of this site; Gallup does poles, you write opinionated articles. Your both doing a good job.

My parents haven't voted in 30 years. They are this year. Gallup doesn't call them or consider them likely voters.

Bush has flopped so many times on big issues it makes Kerry's redirections look minor.

Bush: no 911 commission, yes 911 commission is the biggest flop of all. An attack we have not seen since Pearl Harbor and this prez doesn't want to know how or why? Fool and anyone that votes for him are fools.

Support a liberal cause here

the issue of this analysis is if the party distribution is a RESULT or an ASSUMPTION of the poll...

This can be known by looking at the sampling and calculation methodology. If you do not undestand this, is better not to make comments about a poll.

If you do not want to trust a poll, don't do it, anyone can create data for any purpose, even more if you have a big name that can back you up.

Being in a country were a recent election is being questioned, mostly by its difference to polls, I know the harm that a poor understanding or analysis of statistical methodology can do, for any side.

IMHO, vote for whomever you want, use your conciousnes, don't let yourself to be carried away by the herd, and try to trust the people who count your votes... If you can...

I think you guys will be happy with the latest polls. Here's the link: http://www.tripias.com/state/

The only problem with your argument is that all of the polls consistently say that Bush is leading. So even if Gallup is wrong, what about all of the other polls that say the same thing?

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

Actually, Jack, the other polls predict a dead heat. Look at:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh2004.htm#Registered
and note that the only poll where Bush has a significant lead is the Gallup. Note also that the latest Newsweek poll for registered voters has Kerry with a 3 point lead, a/o 10/2.

well gallup says its a dead heat
not bush
http://nogeorgebush.blogspot.com

no bush

Get real...we all loose if Kerry is elected. What a weenie!!! What would he do with his wife? Keep a rag tied around her mouth. What a sorry excuse to have to be called the first lady.

rauchen fügt ihnen und den menschen in ihrer umgebung erheblichen schaden zu

Hi Jack,

Bush won hands down, this shows how bias Gallup
is.
The problem is, that the most liberal states we
have in these countries aside from Mass are NY
and California, where the media, as well as
Hollywood control the airwaves.
They must think, that the rest of us are not
well informed.
Bush has shown, that he is a strong President and
will continue taking this country through the
right path.
As someone else wrote, if Kerry is elected, we
all loose

Apparently it has escaped your notice that Bush has consistently fared better in the polls of LIKELY voters than he has in the polls of REGISTERED voters, or, for that matter, polls of adults in general. Maybe it's not such a far out assumption that more Republicans will actually go to the voting booth this year. It has been obvious all along that while Democrats hate Bush, they're not too thrilled with Kerry. ALL the polls asking about this confirm it; those planning on voting for Bush see it as a vote FOR him, those favoring Kerry just consider it a vote AGAINST Bush. Apparently (again, according to ALL the polls) even the Democrats don't feel strongly enough about Kerry to actually get out and vote for him.

Rauchen in der schwangerschaft schadet ihrem kind edustartpage

Wow. I knew something smelled fishy when I saw the headlines. I only hope this has the clearly unitended consequence of lulling the republicans into a false sense of confidence, and in contrast, energizing democratic organizers to redouble their efforts to turn out the democratic vote

Wow. I knew that something was fishy when i read the usatoday story. i can only hope that this will have the clearly unitended consequence of giving the republicans a false sense of security and in contrast, energizing the democratic organizers of redoubling their efforts to turn out the vote.

hey evryone, i think we all see what is coming , a new era in america one that doesnt have to thin our military to bare bones to cover our own asses at home .one that will definately crush the bush ticket once and for all . as an ex marine typically the armed forces are republicans but it has taken a whole new look these days . all in all we need another JFK in the white house !pressure all your freinds and relatives to vote bush out on 11-2-04 the end of an error!

hey evryone, i think we all see what is coming , a new era in america one that doesnt have to thin our military to bare bones to cover our own asses at home .one that will definately crush the bush ticket once and for all . as an ex marine typically the armed forces are republicans but it has taken a whole new look these days . all in all we need another JFK in the white house !pressure all your freinds and relatives to vote bush out on 11-2-04 the end of an error!

hey evryone, i think we all see what is coming , a new era in america one that doesnt have to thin our military to bare bones to cover our own asses at home .one that will definately crush the bush ticket once and for all . as an ex marine typically the armed forces are republicans but it has taken a whole new look these days . all in all we need another JFK in the white house !pressure all your freinds and relatives to vote bush out on 11-2-04 the end of an error!

hey evryone, i think we all see what is coming , a new era in america one that doesnt have to thin our military to bare bones to cover our own asses at home .one that will definately crush the bush ticket once and for all . as an ex marine typically the armed forces are republicans but it has taken a whole new look these days . all in all we need another JFK in the white house !pressure all your freinds and relatives to vote bush out on 11-2-04 the end of an error!

hey evryone, i think we all see what is coming , a new era in america one that doesnt have to thin our military to bare bones to cover our own asses at home .one that will definately crush the bush ticket once and for all . as an ex marine typically the armed forces are republicans but it has taken a whole new look these days . all in all we need another JFK in the white house !pressure all your freinds and relatives to vote bush out on 11-2-04 the end of an error!

I feel that Americans are intelligent people, and these polls are not likely to change in three days as they are said to have. Kerry did a great job on the debate.

I feel that Americans are intelligent people, and these polls are not likely to change in three days as they are said to have. Kerry did a great job on the debate.

I feel that Americans are intelligent people, and these polls are not likely to change in three days as they are said to have. Kerry did a great job on the debate.

I think what the dems don't like is all the lying that Kerry is doing hasn't been doing any good, and that America is seeing who the tru leader is. I all 3 debates he dodged questions right and left never really gave an answer to anything. He has more money spent in all his "plans" to double our debt. I'm from Ohio and he spends alot of time here lying about jobs and the economy. If you live in my are we have new houses going up all over the place new companies coming into town and we have a 3rd mall ariving in a few years. That mall makes 3 malls less that 15 apart but the economy is down. I was laid off last year but it wasn't from bush it was from Office depot who wanted to find was to save money, and they did. I have seen companies in our area sending jobs to mexico but that started when clinton was in. I believe the polls and can't wait to be partying on november 2nd from a Bush victory.

JZ, let me guess...

You have three balls...you think Bush is smart and Cheney is sexy...you're convinced that Saddam still has WMD stashed somewhere...and you KNOW for a fact that Saddam was hand-in-glove with Osama all the way.

I guess after Bush gets drubbed by 4% in terms of the popular vote and loses the President, you'll walk around still believing he is President.

Sarabeth

P.S. You should probably resume your medication right away.

Please Visit LenBourret.com! http://www.lenbourret.com/

On the 'Home Page'... http://www.lenbourret.com/

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By PHONE'. Just CLICK ON This LINK...
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I generally agree that polls aren't great indicators of what's going to happen. In this election, in particular, the early exit polls had a definite pro-Kerry bias. The news media, early on, had me thinking Kerry was a lock.

I'm afraid part of this is wishful thinking behavior--seizing the evidence that supports your hopes/desired outcome and ignoring the evidence (like the Gallup poll referenced above) that would tend to go against what you hope/expect.

Later, as a projected Bush victory became clear (by any methodology except for the ultra-cautious one used this year) there were REPORTERS (not politicians) almost wringing their hands in an appeal to viewers to believe it wasn't over. Senator Kerry could still win! Only the self-delusional could see things this way--but Ohio was not called by most networks until just before Senator Kerry conceded.

Our votes still count--but the news media didn't seem to want to acknowledge that 140,000 ahead in Ohio is not the same as 1,000 ahead in Florida. Whichever side lost in Florida (in 2000) was going to feel robbed and possibly a bit vindictive. Unfortunately it appears the news media identified with one side in the 2000 race--the losers. Thus their early projections of a Kerry win in a race that was never even truly contested by him. Thus their unwillingness to call the one state they knew Senator Kerry had to have--even though the margin of victory was potentially much higher there than in some states they had previously called FOR Senator Kerry.

Despite this bias, the hearts and minds of Americans are a bit more pro-President Bush than pro-Senator Kerry (in spite of the comments by someone above that a heavy turnout would favor Senator Kerry). With Bush's record there for all to see (and it's not one I'm very impressed with, by the way) and a strong negative campaign by Kerry--constantly pointing out President Bush's all-too-obvious flaws (not that Bush wasn't negative at times)--the people chose the President and his record over Kerry and his ant-Bush campaign.

I believe a pro-Kerry campaign would have won more votes. But Kerry's reluctance to take a stand is what did him in. I remember one specific debate question (remember, almost everyone believes Kerry won these) about what Kerry would do about nuclear weapons in Iran. Kerry's response was 100% anti-Bush and 0% "here's what I'll do". Those sort of answers lost Kerry the election, IMO.
Brian Larry
www.brianlarry.com

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