A new Zogby America poll of nationwide LV’s conducted Sept. 8-9 has Bush at 47 percent and Kerry at 45 percent in a head to head match-up, within a 3.1 percent m.o.e.
4 comments on “New National Poll Shows Neck and Neck Race for White House”
Bob H on
I think Kerry is in a great position to surge ahead based on such things as:
A strong debate performance
An uprising in Iraq going beyond the present upsurge
A North Korean bomb test if he can convincingly make the case that it is due to Bush fumbles.
My dream result is:
*Kerry wins big, bigger than any thought
*The pro Bush polls are exposed and ridiculed
*The good polls are vindicated by being closest
From Zogby’s notes for the survey: “Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion and gender to more accurately reflect the voting population. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.”
As noted by others in previous posts, Zogby and some others are weighting party ID a little bit in their polls, while Time, Newsweek, etc. aren’t. I didn’t see in the notes to this poll what the exact weighting for Dems/Reps/Inds was.
This whole debate over whether to weight party ID or not is starting to get a little play in some of the media – the local NPR station in NY had a segment on it yesterday. Here’s an off-the-cuff observation: one would think that there would be some sort of established standards for an industry that’s been around for many decades. If a pollster is going to weight other factors, why would he/she exclude party ID from (at least to some extent) the same treatment? The arguments that I’ve heard that party ID should be a “floating variable” don’t make much sense if every other major demographic attribute gets weighted. One can sum up these polls with this motto: buyer beware – read the fine print.
In any event, the numbers are starting to settle in the wake of the GOP hatefest. It looks like Bush has established a 2-4 point lead. Kerry still has the issues environment on his side, so I remain optimistic that we’re going to win. BTW, Jeff’s post from yesterday about the demographic changes in the electorate over the past four years was great…I was aware of nearly all of those things, but he put all the pertinent data in a summarized and understandable format.
This contributes little to the discussion of facts, but…let me say what a good pick-me-up your blog is, Ruy. For those of us who care deeply about this election and its repercussions (but haven’t the time to parse the details), I count myself fortunate to be able to visit your site and routinely catch “the rest of the story.” Believe me, I pass it on to all my Donkey friends.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
I think Kerry is in a great position to surge ahead based on such things as:
A strong debate performance
An uprising in Iraq going beyond the present upsurge
A North Korean bomb test if he can convincingly make the case that it is due to Bush fumbles.
My dream result is:
*Kerry wins big, bigger than any thought
*The pro Bush polls are exposed and ridiculed
*The good polls are vindicated by being closest
From Zogby’s notes for the survey: “Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion and gender to more accurately reflect the voting population. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.”
As noted by others in previous posts, Zogby and some others are weighting party ID a little bit in their polls, while Time, Newsweek, etc. aren’t. I didn’t see in the notes to this poll what the exact weighting for Dems/Reps/Inds was.
This whole debate over whether to weight party ID or not is starting to get a little play in some of the media – the local NPR station in NY had a segment on it yesterday. Here’s an off-the-cuff observation: one would think that there would be some sort of established standards for an industry that’s been around for many decades. If a pollster is going to weight other factors, why would he/she exclude party ID from (at least to some extent) the same treatment? The arguments that I’ve heard that party ID should be a “floating variable” don’t make much sense if every other major demographic attribute gets weighted. One can sum up these polls with this motto: buyer beware – read the fine print.
In any event, the numbers are starting to settle in the wake of the GOP hatefest. It looks like Bush has established a 2-4 point lead. Kerry still has the issues environment on his side, so I remain optimistic that we’re going to win. BTW, Jeff’s post from yesterday about the demographic changes in the electorate over the past four years was great…I was aware of nearly all of those things, but he put all the pertinent data in a summarized and understandable format.
This contributes little to the discussion of facts, but…let me say what a good pick-me-up your blog is, Ruy. For those of us who care deeply about this election and its repercussions (but haven’t the time to parse the details), I count myself fortunate to be able to visit your site and routinely catch “the rest of the story.” Believe me, I pass it on to all my Donkey friends.