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.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 10: Comparing Antiwar Movements Past and Present
As a participant in anti-Vietnam War protests, I felt some clear comparisons to today’s antiwar protests was in order, so I wrote an assessment at New York:
For many a baby-boomer, the sights and sounds of student protests against U.S. complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza brought back vivid memories of the anti–Vietnam War movement of their youth and of the conservative backlash that ultimately placed its legacy in question. Some of today’s protestors consciously promote an identification with their forebears of the 1960s and 1970s. And some events — notably the huge deployments of NYPD officers at Columbia University 56 years to the day after police crushed an anti–Vietnam War protest at the school — are eerily evocative of that bygone era.
As someone who was involved in a minor way in the earlier protests (mostly as a member of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), I’m both fascinated by the comparisons and alert to the very big differences between the vast and nearly decadelong demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the nascent movement we’re seeing today. Here’s how they compare from several key perspectives.
Size: Gaza protests are smaller than anti-Vietnam demonstrations.
While early protests against Israeli military operations in Gaza were often centered in Arab American and Muslim American communities, the latest wave is principally college-campus-based, albeit widespread, as the Washington Post reported:
“The arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University on April 18 set off the latest wave of student activism across the country.
“The outbreak of nearly 400 demonstrations is the most widespread since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. From the Ivy League to small colleges, students have set up encampments and organized rallies and marches, with many demanding that their schools divest from Israeli corporations.”
The size of these protests has ranged from the hundreds into the thousands, but they can’t really be regarded as a mass phenomenon at this point.
There are, however, similarities to the earliest phase of the anti–Vietnam War movement: the campus-based “teach-ins” of 1965 (the year U.S. ground troops were first deployed in Vietnam). These began at the University of Michigan and then went viral, as a history compiled by students of the university recalled:
“The March 1965 teach-in at the University of Michigan inspired a wave of more than fifty similar teach-ins at universities around the nation and directly challenged the Johnson administration’s ability to shape public opinion about the War in Vietnam. At Columbia University, just two days after the UM event, professors held an all-night teach-in attended by 2,000 students …
“At UC-Berkeley, after an overflow crowd attended the initial UM-inspired teach-in, the Vietnam Day Committee organized a second outdoor event that drew 30,000 students.”
The anti–Vietnam War movement soon outgrew its campus origins as the war intensified and U.S. deployments soared. By 1967, monster rallies and marches were held in major cities — notably a New York march that attracted an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 protesters and a San Francisco rally that filled Kezar Stadium. At the New York event, the expansion of the antiwar movement to encompass elements of the civil-rights movement that had in part inspired the early protesters was exemplified by the participation of Martin Luther King Jr., who had just made his first overtly antiwar speech at Riverside Church.
By then the antiwar movement was beginning to attract support from a significant number of politicians, mostly Democrats but some Republicans.
The pro-Palestinian protest movement could eventually grow to this scale and breadth of support, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Durability: Gaza protests are new; anti–Vietnam War movement lasted a decade.
The fight to end American involvement in Vietnam lasted as long as the war itself; protests began in 1964, grew to include a mainstream congressional effort to cut off U.S. military aid, and continued as the South Vietnam regime collapsed in 1975. It had multiple moments of revived participation. Once such moment was Moratorium Day in October 1969, when an estimated 2 million Americans joined antiwar demonstrations once it became clear that Richard Nixon had no intention of ending the war begun by Lyndon Johnson. Another was the massive wave of protests in May 1970 when Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia; student walkouts and strikes occurred on around 900 college campuses and students were killed in Ohio and Mississippi.
It’s unclear whether the pro-Palestinian protests have anything like that kind of staying power. That’s a significant issue, since the goal shared by many protesters — a fundamental shift in the power relations between Israelis and Palestinians — could be harder to execute than an end to the Vietnam War.
Focus: Gaza protests have less clear-cut goals than Vietnam demonstrations.
Most pro-Palestinians protesters have embraced multiple demands and goals: an immediate permanent cease-fire in Gaza; termination of U.S. military assistance to Israel; and an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Campus-based protesters have also called for termination of university investments in companies operating in Israel and, in some cases, closure of academic partnerships with Israeli institutions.
If this is going to become a sustained movement rather than a scattershot series of loosely connected local protests, some clarification of tangible goals will be necessary. Some of these aims are more achievable than others. If, for example, the Biden administration and the Saudis succeed in negotiating a significant cease-fire that temporarily ends the carnage in Gaza, does that take the wind of out of the sails of protesters seeking a definitive withdrawal of support for Israel? That’s unclear at this point.
For the most part, the anti–Vietnam War protest movement had one principal goal: the removal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam. Yes, factions of that movement expanded their goals to include such war-adjacent issues as university divestment from firms manufacturing weapons, closure of ROTC programs, draft resistance, and non-war-related issues like Black empowerment and anti-poverty efforts. But there was never much doubt that bringing the troops home was paramount.
Leadership: Gaza protests include more radical organizers.
One of the reasons for a perception of unfocused goals in the current wave of protests stems from organizers with more radical positions and rhetoric than some of their followers. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out, two major groups helping organize pro-Palestinian protests subscribe to ideologies incompatible with mainstream support:
“The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory statement instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets …
“A second group that has helped organize the demonstrations at Columbia is called Within Our Lifetime. Like SJP, WOL takes an uncompromising eliminationist stance toward Israel, even calling for ‘the abolition of zionism.’”
This was intermittently an issue in the anti–Vietnam War movement, particularly as such campus-based pioneers of protests as Students for a Democratic Society drifted into Marxist sectarianism. I vividly recall an antiwar march I attended in Atlanta in 1969 wherein the organizers (mostly from the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance) put Vietcong flags at either end of the march and controlled bullhorns bellowing slogans like “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh / The NLF is gonna win,” referring to the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. This effectively turned a peace rally into something very different.
But over time, the extremist wing of the anti–Vietnam War movement went its own way, falling prey to fragmentation (the collapse of SDS into at least three factions that included the ultraviolent and Maoist Weatherman group epitomized its self-marginalization) and irrelevance. If the pro-Palestinian protest movement is to last, it needs to shed its more extreme elements.
Relevance: Gaza protests aren’t impacting U.S. politics as deeply.
There was never any doubt that anti–Vietnam War protesters were talking about something that vitally affected Americans, even if it took them a while to get on board. 2.7 million American citizens served in the Vietnam War with 58,000 losing their lives. 1.9 million young Americans were conscripted into the military during that war. While what Americans did to the people of Indochina wasn’t often called “genocide,” millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians perished at the hands of the U.S. and its allies, and the humanitarian disaster did increasingly trouble the consciences of many people not directly affected by the conflict. As many military leaders and reactionary politicians bitterly argued for decades, U.S. public opinion eventually ended the Vietnam War.
While the rise in sympathy for Palestinians and support for some sort of cease-fire has been palpable as deaths soar in Gaza, it remains unclear how invested Americans are in any sort of policy change toward the conflict. Yes, unhappiness with Joe Biden’s leadership in this area is a real political problem for him, but much of the unhappiness stems from conservatives (particularly conservative Evangelicals) who want stronger support for Israel. And the effort to make this issue an existential threat to Biden’s renomination during the 2024 Democratic primaries failed in contrast to the major role played by anti–Vietnam War sentiment in sidelining LBJ in 1968.
Making Gaza a crucial issue in American politics grows more challenging to the extent protesters choose more radical goals, like a single secular (i.e., non-Zionist) Palestinian state. And at the same time, more modest goals could undermine the strength and unity of the protest movement if protesters reject half-measures (much as anti–Vietnam War protesters rejected “Vietnamization,” phony peace talks, and other steps that prolonged the war).
Legacy: Gaza protests could provoke a similar backlash.
Arguably, the many sacrifices and eventual triumph of anti–Vietnam War protesters were more than offset by a conservative backlash that treated the “disorder” and alleged lack of patriotism associated with protests as a social malady to be remedied with heavy-handed repression. In the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon and George Wallace, the two candidates who engaged in law-and-order rhetoric and often espoused more violent steps to win the war, won 57 percent of the national popular vote. Other successful conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan made crackdowns on “coddled” student protesters a signature issue.
Today, Donald Trump and other Republicans are eagerly making pro-Palestinian protests part of a law-and-order message aimed at both student protesters and the “elite” faculty and administrators who are allegedly encouraging them. If protesters deliberately or inadvertently help Trump get back into the White House, they may soon encounter a U.S. administration that makes “Genocide Joe” Biden’s look like an oasis of pacific benevolence.
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.