John Kerry leads George Bush among LV’s in: in FL +1; PA +6; OR +9 and WA +7. He trails Bush in: AR -5 and NC -3 (stat. tie), according to SurveyUSA Polls conducted 10/15-17.
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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 MN numbers sure sound like they match on the Lawn sign war!
Since this is a thread on state data, I thought it would be helpful to have some pre/post debate apple-to-apple comparisons of state polling data. So…I went to race2004.net for a list of state polling data. Before examining the data, I selected surveys dated their from 9/15 to 9/30 as pre-debate, surveys dated 10/10 or later as post-debate. I found 36 polls across 22 states that were represented in both time periods. In 25 of those polls, Kerry gained. Another 6 showed no change. Another 5 showed Bush gaining. The median change was a 2% Kerry gain. The average change was 2.44% toward Kerry. I don’t know that this tells us where things stand in the electoral college right now, but it sure does suggest that Kerry gained some ground with the debates. Here’s the list, from largest Kerry gain to largest Bush gain:
Ohio, Ohio Poll, Kerry +11
Oregon, SUSA, Kerry +10
Iowa, Rasmussen, Kerry +7
South Carolina, SUSA, Kerry +7
New York, SUSA, Kerry +7
New Jersey, Rasmussen, Kerry +6
New Jersey, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +5
Georgia, SUSA, Kerry +5
Michigan, Rasmussen, Kerry +4
Arkansas, SUSA, Kerry +4
Ohio, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +4
Pennsylvania, Rasmussen, Kerry +4
New Jersey, Quinnipiac, Kerry +4
New Hampshire, Research 2000, Kerry +4
Alabama, Rasmussen, Kerry +3
Iowa, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Wisconsin, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Michigan, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Pennsylvania, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +2
Rhode Island, SUSA, Kerry +2
Illinois, Rasmussen, Kerry +2
South Dakota, Rasmusen, Kerry +2
Washington, SUSA, Kerry +2
Minnesota, Strategic Vision (R), Kerry +1
Arkansas, Rasmussen, Kerry +1
Minnesota, Rasmussen, no change
Wisconsin, Rasmussen, no change
Ohio, Rasmussen, no change
Florida, Rasmussen, no change
Pennsylvania, Quinipiac, no change
New Jersey, FD Univ, no change
Oregon, Research 2000, Bush +1
Arkansas, Zogby, Bush +2
Texas, SUSA, Bush +2
Oklahoma, Wilson Res (R), Bush +5
California, Rasmussen, Bush +5
Could Ruy or someone else on the site comment on the WaPo and Rasmussen aggregate “swing state” poll numbers? These have been looking good, but I’ve never seen anything that discusses whether an aggregate result among a group of swing states really tells you anything useful about the EV outcome for those states would be.
No to mention that the Newark Star Ledger has Kerry up by +13 in God’s Country, and the CBS poll, which has the horserace tied, shows the prez approval at only 44%. Surely, if the latter is close to being right, Bush is in big trouble.
Anyone have a quote for Zogby calling a Kerry win ?
I just read that Zogby went out on a limb and predicted that Kerry was going to be the 44th president. He said that there is more to polling than statistics:
‘Polling can be uncertain only if you rely on statistics alone,’ is Mr Zogby’s riposte. ‘That’s why an effective pollster has to rely on culture, history and sociology. I repeat, polling is the study of human behaviour, not simply a sampling of people’s preferences.’
That may well explain his success. His big test will come on Nov 2. In Singapore last Friday, he flatly predicted that Mr Kerry would become the 44th President of the United States.
I sure hope he’s right. It’s comforting to know that he was one of the 2 polls to get it right in 2000.
Hg
I still say that the Kerry campaign must stop Dukakissing on the Bai article like they did on the flipflop spin. My guess is that, with the same performance in the debates, if he had prodded the press on the flipflop issue along the lines of Chait’s article in the 10/18 New Republic SIX MONTHS ago, and dismissed it as a mere spin in the ways I’ve suggested since, and put forward an NYU+ length speech to counter Bush’s monday blowout in NJ on terror, and challenged the Bai spin, and the media that have magnified its already distorted portrayal, he would be running consistently ahead by 4-5 points in the polls, and pulling along Democrats into the House and Senate too. In an honest election, where the Clarke interview with Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, where he points out 9/12 Bush was only interested in Iraq ACROSS THE COUNTRY — the Republicans would be in trouble in both Houses of Congress and would have a 92 type futile race for the White House. But that’s not the agenda.
In another thread I noted that it is probably appropriate for pollsters to assume a higher Republican turnout (as a percentage of registered Republicans) than Democratic turnout (as a percentage of registered Democrats). I was surprised that a few posters chose to attack this observation (some quite forcefully). This I believe is a well-documented phenomenon of American politics. It stems from the fact that Republicans tend to be more affluent, more focused on politics, have better access to the polls, etc. Some asked for statistics backing this up, so I went and looked up turnout statistics for some California counties. Obviously this is not a rigorous analysis, but what I found does indicate that Republicans turnout in greater percentages than Democrats. And I’ve read in many places that this is true nationally – I’ll provide cites as they turn up. Some people on this blog just don’t like to hear this apparently, and seem to suggest as a point of contention that I’m saying Republicans turn out in greater total numbers – I’m not. The advantage in Democratic party id partially or totally offsets the higher Republican turnout percentage to some extent. As an example, here’s results from Contra Costa county, which is heavily democratic and went for Al Gore in 2000:
Registration & Turnout
Democratic
Completed Precincts: 907 of 907
Reg/Turnout Percentage
Democratic Registration 223,155
PRECINCT REGISTRATION 223,155
PRECINCT BALLOTS CAST 99,416 44.6%
ABSENTEE BALLOTS CAST 37,480 16.8%
TOTAL BALLOTS CAST 136,896 61.3%
Registration & Turnout
Republican
Completed Precincts: 907 of 907
Reg/Turnout Percentage
Republican Registration 153,790
PRECINCT REGISTRATION 153,790
PRECINCT BALLOTS CAST 71,717 46.6%
ABSENTEE BALLOTS CAST 32,706 21.3%
TOTAL BALLOTS CAST 104,423 67.9%
Notice that Gore carried the county by ~31,000 votes, despite a registration advantage of 70,000. The reason for the narrower gap was the much higher Republican percentage turnout (68% R vs 61% D). If this is indeed indicative of national turnout habits, and I believe it is, then it is appropriate for Gallup to weight registered Democrats for 8% less turnout than registered Republicans. Alan asserts this is “totally unrealistic” – I disagree.
In my opinion, the big flaw in the Gallup polls is not the turnout weighting, but rather their insistence on oversampling registered Republicans. There just doesn’t seem to be a good reason for this. Their assertion that party id is fungible isn’t borne out by exit polls from the past several presidential elections. To gain an accurate sampling of the electorate, they should weight for best-known state or national party id distribution, as Zogby does, and also for expected party percentage turnout.
I think the NC poll is the most impressive. We’ll see how is really turns out though.
SUSA has the best record of any polling firm over the past 10 years.
I have to say, though, that I don’t place much trust in SUSA polls. These were the same people, after all, who called Maryland and New Jersey close in 2000, where Gore then went on to win by 15 points.
Although this isn’t the only poll I’ve seen with Kerry leading in Florida, so I’m inclined to believe he’s genuinely ahead.