Kerry leads Michigan LV’s by 4% in FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll (Sept. 21-22)
Kerry lags by 2% Nevada RV’s in CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll (Sept. 18-21)
Bush leads by 3% Ohio LV’s in FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll (Sept. 21-22)
Kerry up 5% among Pennsylvania LV’s in FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll (Sept. 21-22)
Bush ahead by 10% West Virginia RV’s in CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll (Sept. 17-20)
Bush up by 6% among Wisconsin RV’s in ABC News Poll (Sept. 16-19)
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 28: RIP Joe Lieberman, a Democrat Who Lost His Way
I was sorry to learn of the sudden death of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. But his long and stormy career did offer some important lessons about party loyalty, which I wrote about at New York:
Joe Lieberman was active in politics right up to the end. The former senator was the founding co-chair of the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign on behalf of a yet-to-be-identified bipartisan “unity ticket.” Lieberman did not live to see whether No Labels will run a candidate. He died on Wednesday at 82 due to complications from a fall. But this last political venture was entirely in keeping with his long career as a self-styled politician of the pragmatic center, which often took him across party boundaries.
Lieberman’s first years in Connecticut Democratic politics as a state legislator and then state attorney general were reasonably conventional. He was known for a particular interest in civil rights and environmental protection, and his identity as an observant Orthodox Jew also drew attention. But in 1988, the Democrat used unconventional tactics in his challenge to Republican U.S. senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman positioned himself to the incumbent’s right on selected issues, like Ronald Reagan’s military operations against Libya and Grenada. He also capitalized on longtime conservative resentment of his moderate opponent, winning prized endorsements from William F. and James Buckley, icons of the right. Lieberman won the race narrowly in an upset.
Almost immediately, Senator Lieberman became closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The group of mostly moderate elected officials focused on restoring the national political viability of a party that had lost five of the six previous presidential elections; it soon produced a president in Bill Clinton. Lieberman became probably the most systematically pro-Clinton (or in the parlance of the time, “New Democrat”) member of Congress. This gave his 1998 Senate speech condemning the then-president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “immoral” and “harmful” a special bite. He probably did Clinton a favor by setting the table for a reprimand that fell short of impeachment and removal, but without question, the narrative was born of Lieberman being disloyal to his party.
Perhaps it was his public scolding of Clinton that convinced Al Gore, who was struggling to separate himself from his boss’s misconduct, to lift Lieberman to the summit of his career. Gore tapped the senator to be his running mate in the 2000 election, making him the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate of a major party. He was by all accounts a disciplined and loyal running mate, at least until that moment during the Florida recount saga when he publicly disclaimed interest in challenging late-arriving overseas military ballots against the advice of the Gore campaign. You could argue plausibly that the ticket would have never been in a position to potentially win the state without Lieberman’s appeal in South Florida to Jewish voters thrilled by his nomination to become vice-president. But many Democrats bitter about the loss blamed Lieberman.
As one of the leaders of the “Clintonian” wing of his party, Lieberman was an early front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A longtime supporter of efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, Lieberman had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq, like his campaign rivals John Kerry and John Edwards and other notable senators including Hillary Clinton. Unlike most other Democrats, though, Lieberman did not back off this position when the Iraq War became a deadly quagmire. Ill-aligned with his party to an extent he did not seem to perceive, his presidential campaign quickly flamed out, but not before he gained enduring mockery for claiming “Joe-mentum” from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
Returning to the Senate, Lieberman continued his increasingly lonely support for the Iraq War (alongside other heresies to liberalism, such as his support for private-school education vouchers in the District of Columbia). In 2006, Lieberman drew a wealthy primary challenger, Ned Lamont, who soon had a large antiwar following in Connecticut and nationally. As the campaign grew heated, President George W. Bush gave his Democratic war ally a deadly gift by embracing him and kissing his cheek after the State of the Union Address. This moment, memorialized as “The Kiss,” became central to the Lamont campaign’s claim that Lieberman had left his party behind, and the challenger narrowly won the primary. However, Lieberman ran against him in the general election as an independent, with significant back-channel encouragement from the Bush White House (which helped prevent any strong Republican candidacy). Lieberman won a fourth and final term in the Senate with mostly GOP and independent votes. He was publicly endorsed by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, among others from what had been the enemy camp.
The 2006 repudiation by his party appeared to break something in Lieberman. This once-happiest of happy political warriors, incapable of holding a grudge, seemed bitter, or at the very least gravely offended, even as he remained in the Senate Democratic Caucus (albeit as formally independent). When his old friend and Iraq War ally John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Lieberman committed a partisan sin by endorsing him. His positioning between the two parties, however, still cost him dearly: McCain wanted to choose him as his running mate, before the Arizonan’s staff convinced him that Lieberman’s longtime pro-choice views and support for LGBTQ rights would lead to a convention revolt. The GOP nominee instead went with a different “high-risk, high-reward” choice: Sarah Palin.
After Barack Obama’s victory over Lieberman’s candidate, the new Democratic president needed every Democratic senator to enact the centerpiece of his agenda, the Affordable Care Act. He got Lieberman’s vote — but only after the senator, who represented many of the country’s major private-insurance companies, forced the elimination of the “public option” in the new system. It was a bitter pill for many progressives, who favored a more robust government role in health insurance than Obama had proposed.
By the time Lieberman chose to retire from the Senate in 2012, he was very near to being a man without a party, and he reflected that status by refusing to endorse either Obama or Mitt Romney that year. By then, he was already involved in the last great project of his political career, No Labels. He did, with some hesitation, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. But his long odyssey away from the yoke of the Democratic Party had largely landed him in a nonpartisan limbo. Right up until his death, he was often the public face of No Labels, particularly after the group’s decision to sponsor a presidential ticket alienated many early supporters of its more quotidian efforts to encourage bipartisan “problem-solving” in Congress.
Some will view Lieberman as a victim of partisan polarization, and others as an anachronistic member of a pro-corporate, pro-war bipartisan elite who made polarization necessary. Personally, I will remember him as a politician who followed — sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly — a path that made him blind to the singular extremism that one party has exhibited throughout the 21st century, a development he tried to ignore to his eventual marginalization. But for all his flaws, I have no doubt Joe Lieberman remained until his last breath committed to the task he often cited via the Hebrew term tikkun olam: repairing a broken world.
The interesting thing about the ABC News poll is that it shows union household figures for Bush and Kerry, and something else I’ve not seen before: “Contact by the campaign” numbers.
The ABC News poll discusses the degree of partisanship in Wisconsin itself, as opposed to general arguments based on the 39D-35R numbers usually discussed on this site. The ABC News memo (see the section titled “Party” on p. 6) discusses how partisanship on election day has varied widely in Wisconsin — from +6 for Dems in 2000 to only +1 for Dems in 1996. Average it out (I wish ABC News had provided partisan numbers for 1992 and 1988 also, but oh well…) and that’s only +3.5% for the Dems.
Not much of a cushion. Look at the numbers: It makes Bush’s lead in the highly Republican Milwaukee suburbs +25, and Bush’s lead in the Northeast (Green Bay) +22. It’s heartening to see Kerry polling extremely strongy in the Southwest (Racine over to Walworth county). But it’s shocking to see Kerry polling LOWER in Milwaukee proper than Kerry is polling in the Southwest.
The ABC News poll says Kerry is up four points over Bush among union households. I’m hearing numbers that say that in south and west Milwaukee, as much as a quarter of all union households remain “undecided.” In some heavily union precincts, as many as 30%-35% of union households remained “undecided”! In an election with a virulently anti-union president (as Bush is), it is astonishing that union households would be anywhere this ambivalent about John Kerry as an alternative to George W. Bush.
Worse: Union turnout for Al Gore in 2000 proved decisive in pushing Wisconsin into the Democratic category. The ABC News poll points out that Gore won union voters by 16 points. John Kerry’s numbers are nowhere near that.
What makes me worried about Kerry’s campaign in Wisconsin is the following: “Registered voters are six points more apt to have been contacted by his campaign than by John Kerry’s, 25 to 19 percent. And six in 10 of those reached by Bush’s campaign support him, while Kerry’s supported by fewer than half of the Wisconsin voters his campaign has personally contacted.”
I don’t know what “personally contacted” means. Telephone? Face-to-face? In on Labor Day, many voters were saying that they had already burned out on telephone contacts, and had received almost no face-to-face contact (canvassing). Indeed, only progressive groups (League of Conservation votes, unions, etc.) had done face-to-face canvassing.
In one way, this result can be taken to mean that the Bush campaign is contacting random votes and finding massive support for Bush, while the Kerry campaign does the same and finds little support.
But, another interpretation could be that the Bush campaign is contacting its base. Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign is contacting its base but also attacking the Bush people. We’re given no analysis of whether the Kerry contacts are changing minds.
But the idea that the Bush campaign is more active in Wisconsin than Kerry’s makes me very nervous. (Will the Dems blame former Kerry campaign co-chair Matt Flynn for abandoning the Kerry ship for a Quixotic run at Congress, if Kerry loses?)
Smooth Jazz-
You do not give the source for that long article you posted. I gather it’s from someone on the right given (a) pointing out Democratic-related firms, but not Republican-related firms; and (b) various snarky comments about Democrats.
Makes me wonder about the validity of the analysis overall.
I will note one thing that stood out to me. There’s a 15% response rate for the NBC survey. I’d guess that’s fairly typical. If so, it really makes me wonder about these surveys. Some of the 85% non-response is doubtless because of random numbers that are not in fact residences. But with such a high non-response rate, small variations in people choosing not to respond would seem able to produce large variations in poll results.
I read some negative comment on RDD in an academic piece sometime in the last week or two, which also makes me wonder whether that is, in fact, a sufficient methodology for getting a random sample. It’s 9 pm here on a Friday night, so I don’t think I’m going to go searching right now. Perhaps over the weekend.
And who’s cherry-picking? I’d note that I used all the polls I could find about Wisconsin. It’s the sort of argumentation that you engage in that continually reminds me why I can’t vote Republican. And I came pretty close in ’00, when I thought about going for McCain, till Bush decided to trash him.
Loooking over the post above from Smooth Jazz:
Interesting that so many polls conducted with such similar methodologies should be coming up with such wildy different results. Although, I do note that a lot of the apparent discrepencies between polls that we have seen lately tend to be more in the “LV” subsamples than the unadulterated RV segments and the article really doesn’t get into LV screens to any meaningful extent.
So I would say this article tends to back up Mr. Tiexera’s assertion that we should give more credence to the RV data wherever available and poke the LV data with a long stick before going anywhere near it.
ABC and Gallup put Bush ahead in Wisconsin and West Virginia? That means it’s a dead heat.
Part of the problem in Wisconsin results from the poor governance by Democrats as Mayor of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County Executive, alienating goo-goos and giving suburban Republicans stories to frighten their children. We’re not seeing the movement toward Democrats in the Milwaukee suburbs that shows up very clearly in the Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City suburbs over the past 8 years.
I’ve lived in Madison for 27 years, and I would not be surprised to see Bush win here if the national election is very close. But if Kerry winds up winning nationally by 3 or 4 points, Wisconsin will very likely remain Democratic.
The last 2 times Zogby polled Wisconsin (Sep 17th and Sep 20th), they found Kerry ahead by 2.
Well Rick, if you assume that Gallup and ABC oversample Republicans in their state polls (as they did in their national polls) then these Bush leads are probably not as large as they seem, or even extant at all.
Penn and Wisconsin are two battleground states with among the worst-maintained lists of registered voters, with many erroneously purged, according to a recent study by Scripps Howard News Service.
Some other items pulled as well from Joshua Kurlantzick’s eye-popping piece, “2000, The Sequel”, in the current (Oct) issue of The American Prospect, on how the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress in 2002, may make things even worse than 2000:
(Link is: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8544)
*Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) introduced an amendment to HAVA in May ’03 that would require touchscreen machines to have a paper record. Bob Ney, Chair of the House Administration Committee, has not allowed Holt’s legislation out of committee. House and Senate Republicans have offered similar “smokescreen” legislation–that would take effect by the 2006 election.
*There has been major WH footdragging on getting up and running the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), authorized under HAVA to disburse money to states to upgrade voting systems, issue guidelines, and hold hearings to help make voting as fair as possible. EAC was supposed to be set up within 120 days of HAVA’s passage but did not even have office space until April of this year. Congress gave the EAC $2 million out of a proposed $10 million budget for ’04 and Bush asked for less than half of the $1 billion proposed in HAVA for overall election-reform efforts.
*Under HAVA all first-time voters have to have valid ID. NY PIRG says it is illegal for local election boards to tell poll workers not to accept a student ID as proof. U Wisc and Penn State Students for Kerry, do you copy? One study showed that in NY election officials in only 18 of 45 counties even understood voter-ID requirements.
*Some states simply do not count “provisional ballots”, intended to give those wrongly denied the opportunity to cast a vote on Election Day via the usual process the chance to have their votes tallied if their wrongful exclusion is established. HAVA offers no national guidelines for counting these provisional votes. This raises just a few questions for state and local election officials and newspaper editorial boards, among others.
*After 2000, Jeb Bush rejected the recommendation of a bipartisan task force that he make state and county election supervisors nonpartisan. Shortly afterward, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature made all top election officials appointees of the governor.
I have not seen these specific items, several strongly suggesting the GOP does not want the sorts of problems that turned up in 2000 and since to be fixed, reported by any of the media bigfoots. Another shocker.
A bit OT, but I thought I’d post a version of a comment I made on the Mystery Pollster site, regarding his argument that Party ID was quite unstable, and therefore should not be used as a weighting factor. In fact, as I point out, the results he quotes from studies deal ONLY with increases in the number of INDEPENDENTS:
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One significant weakness in your [i.e., the Mystery Pollster’s] logic, as you present it, is that you don’t get at the nerve of Ruy’s argument, which assumes that the DIFFERENCE between party identification for Republicans and that for Democrats has been stable.
The particular research you’ve quoted demonstrates something VERY different, namely that the number of INDEPENDENTS has varied a great deal. This is completely consistent with the idea that the difference between Republican PID and Democratic PID are stable. And, indeed, it stands to reason that a convention might polarize independents, drive them equally in both directions into the hands of the ideologically nearest party.
Indeed, one of the very studies you quote says that the largest amount of variation in Party ID comes from movement in and out of independence. It seems very plausible to believe that politically potent events or circumstances might in general simply polarize independents, leaving the difference essentially intact.
If you have any evidence that the DIFFERENCE between Rep and Dem Party ID varies as wildly as we’ve seen across these polls, that would be very good.
Otherwise, you’ve proved exactly zero.
Another note on Wisconsin. In the ABC poll, the breakdown was 35% R, 29% D, 36% I/Other. In the Moore (GOP) poll, it was 39% R, 39% D, 22% I/Other. In 2000 it was 32% R, 37% D, 31% I/Other.
So…it’s back to that issue we keep debating. Has there really been a sizeable shift to the Republicans in registration, or is something else going on. I lean toward the latter, but I don’t think we’ll know till election day.
Rick-
I don’t know what to make of Wisconsin. As with national polls, I’d point out variability. As best I can tell, there are 10 polls of Wisconsin released 9/12 or later:
ABC, Bush +6
Moore (GOP), Bush +3
Badger, Bush +14
TNS, Bush +10
Zogby, Kerry +2
Mason-Dixon, Bush +2
ARG, tied
Strategic vision (GOP), Bush +6
Gallup, Bush +8
Rasmussen, Bush +2
The median for those is Bush up by 4.5%. That’s probably not a terribly bad guess. That’s quite a recoverable lead, and then there’s turnout.
Just keep saying the mantra…it’s a close race. Let’s work hard to get Kerry the victory. And say it if the polls show us ahead, tied, or behind.
What do we make of Wisconsin? This looks like a point of concern.