John Kerry beat George Bush 44-41 percent of RV viewers of the 2nd presidential debate, with 13 percent undecided in an ABC News Poll. But Kerry beat Bush among self-identified independents 44-34 percent. (The respondents were self-identified 35 percent Democrats, 32 percent Republicans and 29 percent Independents.)
Kerry beat Bush 47-45 percent of RV debate-viewers in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. But Kerry beat Bush among self-identified independents 53-37 percent. (The respondents were self identified 38 percent Republicans, 32 percent Democrats and 30 percent Independents.)
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 26: Kennedy Now Taking As Many Votes From Trump As From Biden
Polls are showing a subtle but potentially important shift that I discussed at New York:
For a while there, the independent ticket of ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan seemed to be taking crucial votes away from Democrat Joe Biden, at least as indicated by comparing three-way and five-way (with Cornel West and Jill Stein) polls to head-to-head matchups of the incumbent and Donald Trump. Now, even as Biden has all but erased his polling deficit against Trump, he’s getting some more good news in surveys that include other candidates.
Two recent major national polls show Biden running better in a five-way than a two-way race. According to NBC News, Biden moves from two points down to two points up when the non-major-party candidates are included. In the latest Marist poll, Biden leads Trump by three points head-to-head and by five points in a five-way race. Since left-bent candidates West and Stein are pulling 5 percent in the former poll and 4 percent in the latter (presumably taking very few votes from Trump), you have to figure Kennedy is beginning to cut into the MAGA vote to an extent that should get Team Trump’s attention. And it has, NBC News reports:
“Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’s confident that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will pull more votes away from President Joe Biden than from him — a net win for the Republican’s candidacy.
“’He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine,’Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. ‘I love that he is running!’
“Behind closed doors, however, Trump is less sure. A Republican who was in the room with Trump this year as he reviewed polling said Trump was unsure how Kennedy would affect the race, asking the other people on hand whether or not Kennedy was actually good for his candidacy.”
Politico notes that Kennedy is drawing higher favorability numbers from Republican voters than from Democratic ones, which could indicate a higher ceiling for RFJ Jr. among Trump defectors. And it’s generally assumed from his past performances that there is a lower ceiling on Trump’s support than on Biden’s; he needs to be able to win with significantly less than a majority of the popular vote, as one Republican told Politico:
“’If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,’ Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. ‘They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they can’t afford to lose any voters — and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trump’s] policy ideas.’”
One likely reason that Kennedy could be appealing to Republicans is the residual effect from the positive attention he received from conservative media when he was running against Biden in the Democratic primaries; his identification with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories also resonates more positively on the right side of the political spectrum than the left. So it’s in the interest of Team Trump to begin telling the former president’s sympathizers that RFK Jr. is actually a lefty, and that started happening recently, as the New York Times reported: “Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, pointed in particular to Mr. Kennedy’s views on climate change and the environment, writing on his social media site that Mr. Kennedy was more ‘radical Left’ than Mr. Biden.”
The idea, of course, is not only to discourage potential Trump voters from drifting toward the independent candidate, but to encourage potential Biden voters to consider a Kennedy vote.
If Kennedy continues to draw votes from both Biden and Trump, each of their campaigns will need to make a strategic decision about how to deal with him: Do you ignore him and count on the usual fade in support afflicting non-major-party presidential candidates as Election Day nears, or do you attack him as too far left (if you’re Trump) or too far right (if you’re Biden) and try to make him a handicap to your major-party opponent? The more aggressive approach has become common among Democrats seeking to intervene in Republican primaries (or in the recent case of the California Senate race, a nonpartisan top-two primary) by loudly attacking candidates they’d prefer to face in the general election, encouraging Republicans to flock to the supposed menace to progressivism. This kind of tactic — if deployed with some serious dollars — could have an effect on Kennedy’s base of support.
Certainly Trump seems to be considering it. With his usual practice of saying the quiet part out loud, Trump opined: “If I were a Democrat, I’d vote for RFK Jr. every single time over Biden, because he’s frankly more in line with Democrats.”
Trying to minimize losses to Kennedy and maximize opposite-party votes for Kennedy could become a routine practice down the stretch. Where and by whom this strategy is pursued will depend in part on where RFK Jr. is ultimately on the ballot. Right now he has nailed down ballot access in just two states, Utah and Michigan. CBS News reports the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is close to securing a spot on the November ballot in a number of other states:
“Kennedy’s campaign says it has completed signature gathering in seven other states in addition to Utah and Michigan — Nevada, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nebraska and Iowa.
“The super PAC supporting Kennedy, American Values 2024, says it has collected enough signatures in Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina.”
Coping with Kennedy could become a game of three-dimensional chess between the Biden and Trump campaigns. But if it begins to look like RFK Jr. has become an existential threat to Democrats or to Republicans, you can bet they’ll go medieval on him without even a moment’s hesitation.
> Bush and Cheney are increasingly desperate. So their
> rhetoric will be increasingly shrill and over-the-top.
> They have painted themselves in a corner with their
> scare campaign.
I think the Kerry camp needs to be careful in the final debate. They’re saying the subject (domestic issues) should favor the Dems, but a *lot* of observers are saying “Shrub” actually fared better in debate#2 than when he had to defend his failed Iraq strategy.
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My fear is “Shrub” and the GOP will try to exploit the usual cultural wedge issues in the final debate, and Kerry will give some vague Dukakis-esque responses. Maybe they will accuse the Democrats of banning the bible and requiring men to marry other men… It’s what they do when their Iraq policy is in shambles, there are fewer jobs than four years ago and the federal government is drowning in red ink thanks to the tax cuts.
MARCU$
Mimikatz, you wrote:
I think that Bush really damaged himself with undecided women in the second debate. His demeanor in the first half was the sort of swaggering, cocksure braggart that most women detest. He was rude to many of the questioners, particularly the older man who asked about drug reimportation and the last woman, who asked about his mistakes. Women tend to be more attuned to social niceties. Third, the abortion question. Of course rabid pro-life women would go for Bush. But his refusal to understand any nuances to that issue, and his favoring the fetus at the expense of the mother’s health or even her life, had to make many women cringe. Expect to see Kerry rise a few points in the next polls because of this.
Posted by Mimikatz at October 9, 2004 05:22 PM
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I absolutely agree.
All the talking heads need to pull their HEADS out of their collective ass and look around. The ONLY voters who matter are those in the middle who are undecided or persuadeable. If oozing faux machismo would have won them, they wouldn’t be persuadeable now.
Many woman respond very negatively to men to exhibit the behaviors of Bush, mainly because most have been bullied by some similiar sounding male all too often. They know it instantly as the boyfriend or husband who was always going to have things his way, and wanted to shout down opposition. Or the boss, or the co-worker, or the husband of a friend.
Bush had to have lost all women who were anywhere near the fence.
I am predicting that Kerry will gain the lead from the second debate and not lose it again.
We should begin to see evidence of it tomorrow or Tuesday.
I think that Bush really damaged himself with undecided women in the second debate. His demeanor in the first half was the sort of swaggering, cocksure braggart that most women detest. He was rude to many of the questioners, particularly the older man who asked about drug reimportation and the last woman, who asked about his mistakes. Women tend to be more attuned to social niceties. Third, the abortion question. Of course rabid pro-life women would go for Bush. But his refusal to understand any nuances to that issue, and his favoring the fetus at the expense of the mother’s health or even her life, had to make many women cringe. Expect to see Kerry rise a few points in the next polls because of this.
RE: Angry Man
Between the blatant lies and the anger Bush’s public persona is morphing from “Someone you would like to have a beer with”* to Richard Nixon.
*I am only quoting the spin, I always thought that line was a load of nonsense
Two points.
1. Bush and Cheney are increasingly desperate. So their rhetoric will be increasingly shrill and over-the-top. They have painted themselves in a corner with their scare campaign.
2. In each debate there was an initial effort in the media to prop up Bush and Cheney’s performances. They quickly abandoned the effort in the first debate in the face of Bush’s obvious stumbling. With Cheney/Edwards and last night the effort is more resilient, but has weakened after time as the consensus pointed out reality. They are the incumbents defending a sorry record. They are defensive and angry. They insist they are right and their defense consists of outright lies or distortions or browbeating. All Kerry has to do is sound reasonable and truthful.
Expect them to now go back to the August formula – attack Kerry with lies and slander. But now people have seen and heard Kerry. That swiftboatliar won’t hunt.
It is disappointing that with such a strong performance by Kerry (better than the first debate, although the improvement in Bush was enormous), the polls wouldn’t show Kerry with a stronger win. The press will insist that it was a draw.
Kerry FINALLY introduced the point that the whole ‘wishy-washy’ (but he was talking about flipflops) issue was a mere spin. He needs to explain that more clearly.
The questions were also really favorable to Kerry. I really admired Kerry’s frankness with his “it’s not a matter of if but when” response to the question about another 9-11, but he should also have been more specific about the history (unsure when the 1993 attack and the following attack in E Africa he alluded to was? — chalk that up to tiredness). In my own mind, Kerry’s substantive forthrightness in answering that question contrasts with Bush’s “And he put a trial lawyer on the ticket” line. The irony of the latter is that trial lawyers are often resented as people who profit by demagogically appealing to juries in an emotional manipulative way — just like Bush was doing in his approach.
KERRY HAS GOT TO STOP USING THE WORD “PLAN” SO OFTEN. He needs to sharpen his attacks on Bush’s policies on health care as for the corporate interests.. He could have left Bush looking like an ogre in response to the environment question. He should take the opportunity as he lays into Bush in the last debate on either tax policy for the wealthy and/or pro-corporate health care policy to give a good NICE AND ACCURATELY HARSH picture of Bush the worst kind of stereotypical big business Republican and go into at least three or four specific environmental policies. Kyoto ISN’T winning him any points with the mainstream, although I support it. How he has made backroom deals with corporations that even the Republicans wouldn’t pass thru Congress and then name SEVERAL NEW ones: mercury policy should be specifically described, as well as one or two other horror stories like that.
On jobs, Bush keeps citing the 1.9 million figure. That is his BEST(and only) year of job growth, after massive declines, and it’s worse than the AVERAGE year of 8 years of Clinton. That punches Bush down at his main point on that issue.
It doesn’t even keep up with the growth of the potential job market.
He was a little confusing at the key point on how he had been consistent on the Patriot Act — the issue of being a flipflopper and explaining how he isn’t is probably more important than the issues of the Patriot Act as far as winning the elections. Kerry focuses on the issues — Bush on winning the election. But still, Kerry had a slightly better demeanor than Bush and was MUCH stronger on the substance. He answered the questions and devastated Bush’s arguments. The polls should (have) reflected that — though perhaps the talking heads (with the conservatives insisting it was a big win for Bush and the liberals taking a balanced approach of a narrow win for Kerry) have an impact.
Lookin’ good for K/E, but I’m still waiting for an Oct surprise(s). Read the Atlantic Monthly essay on Karl Rove if you don’t understand my anxieties.
Bush gave tired excuses for poor performances. He did not appear to have a real grasp of either Foreign Policy or Domestic issues.
Paul C. is right. Bush came off like a raving lunatic for the first 45 minutes. However, I thought Bush got the better of JK on the domestic issues, where his folksy, simple-minded stuff came across more succinctly than Kerry’s thoughtful, but long-winded responses.
Most people aren’t smart enough to follow along with complex lines of political reasoning, so I hope Kerry can sort of sharpen his domestic stuff before next Wed.
Thanks for the news on independents.
Bush did much better this time than last, but I still think that the main dynamic of the debates is to demolish the straw man that the Republicans have constructed. Kerry comes across as reasonable and presidential. Which he is. That completely undermines the Republican attacks. In contrast, there’s not a lot that Bush can do to undermine the Democratic attacks.
I am sure that Kerry beat Bush by 10 to 1 among people who only watched the first half hour of the debate. What did his people tell him –“George, if you say it loud enough, people will believe you.” My favorite line was Jeff Greenfield “Mr. Bush, two words — ‘anger management.’
way to go, kerry.
why won’t the main stream media report these internals?