A few days ago, I highlighted some recent polls that showed solid leads for Kerry in the battleground states as a whole, states that were split about evenly between Gore and Bush four years ago.
Since then, Democracy Corps has released new data showing more of the same (a 7 point lead for Kerry in the battleground states). And Mystery Pollster looks at a substantially wider range of recent polls and finds Kerry’s battleground performance running ahead of his national performance in every single one. As Chris Bowers points out over at MyDD, these data show Kerry averaging a 49-45 advantage in the battleground.
And, not to pile on, but check but the latest unemployment data from the battleground states. Not a pretty picture, by and large, for BC04: Wisconsin and Iowa show increases in their unemployment rates in the last month and Ohio’s remains stubbornly high at 6 percent.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 3: Democrats Should Call Out Trump’s Big Lies on Abortion
Everyone knows that Donald Trump can’t be trusted on abortion policy (or many other things). But his particular lies on abortion are worth noting, as I explained at New York.
There is no exercise more exhausting and probably futile than examining a Donald Trump speech or social-media post for lies, half-truths, and incoherent self-contradictions. But it’s important on occasion to highlight some very big whoppers he tells that are central to his political strategy. It’s well known that Trump’s own position on abortion policy has wandered all over the map, and it’s plausible to suggest his approach is entirely transactional. Now that he’s staked out a “states’ rights” position on abortion that is designed to take a losing issue off the table in the 2024 presidential election, he’s telling two very specific lies to justify his latest flip-flop.
The first is his now-routine claim that “both sides” and even “legal scholars on both sides” of the abortion debate “agreed” that Roe v. Wade needed to be reversed, leaving abortion policy up to the states:
This claim was the centerpiece of Trump’s April 9 statement setting out his position on abortion for the 2024 general election, as CNN noted:
“In a video statement on abortion policy he posted on social media Monday, Trump said: ‘I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade. They wanted it ended.’ Later in his statement, Trump said that since ‘we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,’ states are free to determine their own abortion laws.”
This is clearly and demonstrably false. The three “legal experts” on the Supreme Court who passionately dissented from the decision to reverse Roe are just the tip of the iceberg of anguish over the defiance of precedent and ideological reasoning underlying Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Society of American Law Teachers immediately and definitively issued a “condemnation” of the Dobbs decision. When the case was being argued before the Supreme Court, the American Bar Association filed an amicus brief arguing the constitutional doctrine of stare decisis required that Roe be left in place. None of these views were novel. Back in 1989 when an earlier threat to abortion rights had emerged, 885 law professors signed onto a brief defending Roe.
Sure, there was a tiny minority of “pro-choice, anti-Roe” liberals over the years who claimed resentment of the power of the unelected judges who decided Roe would eventually threaten abortion rights (not as much, it turns out, as the unelected judges that decided Dobbs). And yes, there have always been progressive critics (notably Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) of the particular reasoning in the original Roe decision, but by no means have any of them (particularly Ginsburg) favored abandoning the federal constitutional right to abortion even if they supported a different constitutional basis for that right. So Trump’s claim is grossly nonfactual and is indeed not one that any self-respecting conservative fan of Dobbs would ever make.
The second big lie that Trump has formulated to defend his latest states’-rights position is that he’s just supporting the age-old Republican stance on the subject, as he has just asserted at Truth Social:
“Sending this Issue back to the States was the Policy of the Republican Party and Conservatives for over 50 years, due to States’ Rights and 10th Amendment, and only happened because of the Justices I proudly Nominated and got Confirmed.”
Yes, of course a growing majority of Republicans have favored reversal of Roe as a way station to a nationwide ban on abortion, but not as an end in itself. The GOP first came out for a federal constitutional amendment to ban abortion from sea to shining sea in its 1980 party platform, and every single Republican presidential nominee since then has backed the idea. There have been disagreements as to whether such a constitutional amendment should include exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. But the last GOP presidential nominee to share Trump’s position that the states should be the final arbiter of abortion policy was Gerald R. Ford in 1976, as the New York Times reported at the time:
“[Ford] said that as President he must enforce the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that forbids states to ban abortions. But he has come out in favor of a constitutional amendment that would overturn that ruling and return to the states the option of drawing up their own abortion laws.”
Ronald Reagan, who challenged Ford’s nomination in 1976 and was already a proponent of a “pro-life” constitutional amendment, and the GOP formally adopted that position in 1980; four years later, it adopted its long-standing proposal that by constitutional amendment or by a judicial ruling the protection of fetal life under the 14th Amendment should be recognized and imposed on the country regardless of what states wanted. Anti-abortion leader Marjorie Dannenfelser noted this well-known history in a not-so-subtle rebuke to Trump’s revisionist history, as NBC News reported:
“’Since 1984, the GOP platform has affirmed that 14th Amendment protections apply to unborn babies and endorsed congressional action to clarify this fact through legislation,’ Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement to NBC News. ‘Republicans led the charge to outlaw barbaric partial-birth abortions federally, and both chambers have voted multiple times to limit painful late-term abortion. The Senate voted on this most recently in 2020. In January 2023, House Republicans also voted to protect infants born alive during an abortion.’”
It’s pretty clear that anti-abortion activists know Trump is lying about both Roe v. Wade and the GOP tradition and will support him anyway. But the rest of us should take due notice that the once and perhaps future president’s word on this subject, including his current pledge to leave abortion policy to the states, cannot be trusted for even a moment. Absent the abolition of the Senate filibuster (which, lest we forget, Trump backed as president out of impatience with the Senate’s refusal to bend the knee to his every demand), there isn’t going to be a complete federal ban on abortion in the foreseeable future. But Trump can be counted on to use the powers of the presidency to make life miserable for women needing abortion services, among the many “enemies of the people” he wants to punish.
AS to kerry needing to win more states:
with regard to red blue states that are strong for either one diff of just 20 votes:
Bush has 216 EV
Kerry: 194 EV
Weak states, where the state is at some risk to go to one or the other, usually trending but within margin of error, and not taking into account undecidededs
Bush Weak: 74
kerry Weak: 45
Bush is at more risk (note the 30 vote difference)
Undecided EV where they are tied or different polls og to each one: 128 EV
Taking in account just decided voters the election is very close, if undecideds are factored in Kerry is ahead
I’m encouraged by this post, but there are caveats. I don’t see that the link identifies the “Battleground States”. Also, it identifies a 7% lead based on Democracy Corps polls, which are partisan and lean democratic, at least by 2-3 points, typically, compared to media polls. Also, Kerry needs to win a lot more of the battleground states than Bush, since the Bush safe states comprise a lot more electoral votes than the Kerry safe states, and most battleground states are blue. In short, this is a very “tweakable” statistic, and we need a lot more information.
http://www.electoral-vote.com is an ok site, but very simplistic. they take the latest poll and go with that, no detailed statistical analysis. the Hawaii issue is a good one, Hawaii is NOT going to go to Bush, every poll has kerry with a large lead and anybody who have leved there know its as likley to to to Bush as MA. the problem was a bogus poll reported in some blogs had bush barely ahead. Everbody is discounting the poll, yet http://www.electoral-vote.com used it to give state to bush
If you really want a true analyssi of the state of the college and the cahnges for Kerry go to
http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/pollcalc.html
Sam Wang does what is know as a meta-analysis. it may be beyond most readers math level, but he does several million calcualtions and calculates the probability of every possible outcome and then does a 50th-percentile (expected) outcome, as well as a 95-percent confidence interval.
for today its
Predicted median with undecideds: Kerry 307 EV, Bush 231 EV (probability map)
Median outcome, decided voters only: Kerry 259 EV, Bush 279 EV
Among decided voters: Bush leads Kerry by 0.5%
so the election is very close with just decideds, taking into account undecideds Kerry is way ahead.
There is encouraging news Monday from two tracking polls that have had Bush ahead for weeks and weeks until today. Kerry now leads Bush in the just updated Washington Post tracking poll and the Rasmussen tracking poll. No doubt these polls have their flaws, but as relative measures (relative to themsleves) they are both showing a clear tend over the last three days of Kerry picking up strenghth. I belive it’s starting to break pretty clearly for Kerry.
Re: zogby
why do people keep insisting on treating one pollster as if they are the end all- be all of polling on either the left or right? There are multiple polls so why not take the approach of reading ALL polls in context. Now, as one poster here mentions below, the problem comes when its hard to figure out the context.
from electoral-vote.com website: highlighting wild swings in current polling.
In contrast to previous Mondays, there are many new polls today, with 19 states getting new numbers (although most didn’t change sides). In addition to the ususual polls, Zogby has begun daily tracking polls in 10 battleground states, which I will also toss into the hopper. According to Zogby’s polls, conducted Oct. 21-24, Bush is currently leading in six states (FL, NM, NV, WI, IA, and OH), while Kerry is leading in four states (CO, MN, PA, MI). Some of these results are very surprising. Is Kerry really leading by 4% in Colorado? Is Bush really leading by 5% in New Mexico? I don’t believe either of those. They are in conflict with too many other polls. Another example: the current Ohio University poll gives Kerry a 6% lead in that state, whereas Zogby puts Bush ahead by 5%. The MoE on these polls is 4%, so an 11% change in a couple of days in a state with so few undecideds is impossible. I think there are serious problems with the all the polls.
What you have to remember about electoral-vote.com is that he only uses the most recent
poll as opposed to doing any averaging or tracking.
Also, he doesn’t do things which I do as a
matter of course: 1) subtract 2 points from
Bush on all SUSA, Rasmussen, Strategic Vision,
and Mason-Dixon polls and give them to Kerry;
2) Throw out Gallup polls altogether; 3) simulate new-for-this-election voters by giving a net 2% to Kerry where applicable; and 4) give
undecideds to Kerry by a large margin
(67%/75%/80%/86%, to see the effects of each).
This is a good blog, but annoyingly one-sided at times. I always need to hold my nose and browse the ‘winger blogs for the polls and news Ruy does *not* mention. It seems this week’s Monday hasn’t been a good day for Kerry in the state polls; Slate, electoral-vote.com, PollingReport.com and (of course-) the right-wing pair of FederalReview.com and ElectionProjection.com all report “Shrub” is ahead, albeit not by much. But thanks to “Shrub’s” gains in the smaller Mid-Western states and the Southwest (including Hawaii of all places!), there are now reasonably credible scenarios where Kerry wins *all* three major battleground states (PA, OH, FL) and still loses. I don’t like this at all.
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I don’t think this signals the beginning of a trend (last week was generally pretty good) since the poll movements have been fairly small. But I will be nervously watching the President’s approval ratings during this week. If they suddenly start moving above the 50% mark, it’s not a very good sign for Nov.2.
MARCU$
Are the polls accurate? Is Bush really up by 2-3 points? Zogby has Bush up by 2, for instance. I went over to 2.004k.com and counted up sure state winners for Kerry. I came up with 253 electoral votes without even trying. That leaves Florida, Iowa (my state, where early voting gives Kerry the lead, and GOTV in heavily Democratic Johnson County alone is going on 24/7), Colorado, Hawaii, and Arkansas…what am I forgetting?–all states Kerry could easily win. Anyone?
Wow!
Kerry leads Bush by 2 in the latest Rasmussen. Anyone have any idea why there is a disconnect between Rasmussen and Zogby? And, yes I remain obsessed!
Jody
Alan is right, these tracking polls are nuts. Rasmussen has Kerry two points ahead, Zogby has Bush ahead +3, and TIPP has Bush up by +8! The ABC and WaPost are not out yet but yesterday they had Bush a mere +1.
I always believed the tracking polls provided a better snapshop of public opinion but it seems the survey polls are more consistent lately.
It will be fascinating to see how the news about the 380 tons of missing pure high explosives impacts the final days of the race.
Whoa! Rasmussen today shows a 2-point lead for Kerry! This seems to run counter to the Zogby poll today, which shows Bush’s lead expanding to 3 points…but I think GW had an unusually good day of Zogby polling on Friday or Saturday.
The site (www.electoral-vote.com) does swing widely. They use a number of polls that are paid by political parties (notably, the Strategic Vision poll paid for by Republicans). These tend to favor the people paying for the polls.
Zogby’s battleground state polls out today seem to be throwing everything towards Republicans. However, the numbers are out of whack with conventional wisdom (undecideds going toward Bush, Hispanics towards Bush, etc.?). I am not ready to accept those numbers. It’s almost like they got something backwards (????). I know based on the phone calls I made in San Diego County for the Kerry/Edwards campaign, I did not have a single Hispanic out of 30 that said they favored Bush. I think we need to see a few more days worth of data before we believe those numbers.
Is it me or has Zogby’s polls gone crazy in the last week?Bush’s lead is widening, Kerry’s support is dropping out among all groups. He has this quote today
“The President has opened up a 12-point lead among Independents and now also leads among those voters with active passports.”
Virtually every other poll I’ve seen has Kerry ahead by 10 points or so among independent voters. What does the active passports comment have to do with anything, anyway? I have no idea what influence voters with passports have.
To make things more strange, Kerry’s down in almost all the swing states. The ones that seem most strange to me are the 4 point lead in Colorado (Kerry 49, Bush 45), and Bush’s 5 point lead in Ohio (Kerry 42, Bush 47).
I had been believing Zogby’s numbers were more reliable than most, as he and CBS were the only ones to predict the 2000 election for Gore. The also always had the race closer than the rest of the polls. These numbers just keep getting more bizarre though.
Any thoughts?
Justin
Electoral-Vote.com is a good site. Which is why after visiting it this morning and seeing Bush jump ahead signifincantly in their prediction, I had to come here to make sense of it.
There is one thing that bothers me though. Sure, we keep on saying that the undecideds generally go to the challenger this close to the election. Also, we’ve been complaining about the LV qualifications and questions in that they underrepresent minorites and youth. But couldn’t LV question underrepresent unintellectual Bush voters as well? Say they only get 3 out of the 7 questions wrong and so the pollster doesn’t consider them likely, that doesn’t mean they AREN’T voting for Bush. Both sides have quite an energized base. And I think we’ve almost reached the point that undecideds really aren’t going to be deciding this election, “base turnout” will.
He sure does have a link section, scroll down, it’s on the right.
I certainly empathize with the unemployed in Ohio, and understand that the official unemployment rate is lower than the real unemployment rate; but I wonder how they would like to try on the unemployment rate here in central California–it is typically double the current rate in Ohio *when times are good.* When times are bad, it goes over 20%. And the area votes Republican (big surprise).
I keep seeing references to campaign “internal polls”. How can these really be different from the published ones? Aren’t they taken by the same doofusses, and subject to the same rather larger errors? Don’t organizations like Zogby also do internal or private polling for politicians? I wish someone could shed some light on this.
I’ve been checking out this site lately and they have gone from Kerry in the lead to swinging wide for Bush with the recent polls. As he says himself, he isn’t sure he believes most of them.
Interestingly, he is taking undecided voters into account; saying that they usually go for the challenger.
http://www.electoral-vote.com
Ruy, you should do a post (or have a link section) with all of the poll data sites you are aware of (or, the good ones anyway.) Its nice to see how different people read the tea leaves.
Ruy, you say, “And, not to pile on, but…”
As far as I’m concerned, on this subject you can pile on all you’d like. And more.
🙂
Zogby has Bush turning it around in OH….Any info on the Zogby detail — party ID, etc.?
Eric
Quite possibly, something very real might lie behind the disparity between the head-to-heads in the battleground states and the head-to-heads nationally.
It may be, for example, that the message that gets out to voters in the battleground states is qualitatively (and perhaps quantitatively) different from what gets through to voters in other states. One obvious difference is that the battleground states get more information, because there are so many campaign events and so much advertising, while in the other states it is only the free media that communicates anything at all. Moreover, the message of the candidates is also mainly geared to the circumstances and concerns of the battleground states.
It’s quite possible that the Kerry message that gets through to voters in battleground states is just distinctly more effective than the message that the free media communicates in the other states.
If true, one very curious consequence might very well be that there will a large gap between the popular voter and the electoral vote, with Bush doing very well, perhaps even winning, the popular vote, by running up the vote in non-battleground states (in both the states he will certainly lose and the states he will certainly win), but losing decisively nonetheless in the electoral vote.
I would like to know what bloggers and the like can do the make explosives-gate as important a political issue as possible.
Explosives-gate is, of course, the recent reports that over 350 tons of high explosives were taken from an unsecured ammunition facility and that the ***Bush administration attempted to keep news about this from being released*** until after the election.
I think this should really dent Bush’s perception that he can be trusted to wage either the war in Iraq or the war on terror.