John Kerry and George Bush are tied at 46 percent of nation-wide RV’s, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll, conducted 10/14-17. Bush’s approval rating is 44 percent.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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November 30: Biden Has a Relatively Low Popularity Requirement For Beating Trump
Staring at the polls and recent precedents, I offered some blunt thoughts at New York on exactly how popular Biden needs to be in 2024:
There’s abundant evidence that if it were held today, a general election rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump would show the 46th president in serious trouble. He’s trailing Trump in national and most battleground-state polls, his job-approval rating is at or below 40 percent, his 2020 electoral base is very shaky, and the public mood, particularly on the economy, is decidedly sour.
The standard response of Biden loyalists to the bad recent polling news is to say “The election is a year away!,” as though public-opinion data this far out is useless. But it’s only useless if Biden turns things around, and while there’s plenty of time for that to happen, there has to be a clear sense of what he needs to secure victory and how to go about meeting those needs. Vox’s Andrew Prokop provides a good summary of possible explanations for Biden’s current position:
“One theory: Biden is blowing it — the polls are a clear warning sign that the president has unique flaws as a candidate, and another Democrat would likely be doing better.
“A second theory: Biden’s facing a tough environment — voters have decided they don’t like the economy or the state of the world, and, fairly or not, he’s taking the brunt of it.
“And a third theory: Biden’s bad numbers will get better — voters aren’t even paying much attention yet, and as the campaign gears up, the president will bounce back.”
The first theory, in my opinion, is irrelevant; Biden isn’t going to change his mind about running for reelection, and it’s simply too late for any other Democrat to push him aside. And the second and third theories really point to the same conclusion: The president is currently too unpopular to win in 2024 and needs to find a way to change the dynamics of a general-election contest with Trump.
There’s not much question that Biden needs to improve his popularity at least modestly. There is only one president in living memory with job-approval ratings anything like Biden’s going into his reelection year who actually won; that would be Harry Truman in 1948, and there’s a reason his successful reelection is regarded as one of the great upsets in American political history. There are others, including Barack Obama, who looked pretty toasty at this point in a first term and still won reelection but who managed to boost their popularity before Election Day (Obama boosted his job-approval rating, per Gallup, from 42 percent at the end of November 2011 to 52 percent when voters went to the polls 11 months later).
Given the current state of partisan polarization, it’s unlikely Biden can get majority job approval next year even with the most fortunate set of circumstances. But the good news for him is that he probably doesn’t have to. Job-approval ratings are crucial indicators in a normal presidential reelection cycle that is basically a referendum on the incumbent’s record. Assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, 2024 will not be a normal reelection cycle for three reasons.
First, this would be the exceedingly rare election matching two candidates with presidential records to defend, making it inherently a comparative election (it has happened only once, in 1888, when President Benjamin Harrison faced former president Grover Cleveland). In some respects (most crucially, perceptions of the economy), the comparison might favor Trump. In many others (e.g., Trump’s two impeachments and insurrectionary actions feeding his current legal peril), the comparison will likely favor Biden.
Second, Trump is universally known and remains one of the most controversial figures in American political history. It’s not as though he will have an opportunity to remold his persona or repudiate words and actions that make him simply unacceptable to very nearly half the electorate. Trump’s favorability ratio (40 percent to 55 percent, per RealClearPolitics polling averages) is identical to Biden’s.
And third, Trump seems determined to double down on the very traits that make him so controversial. His second-term plans are straightforwardly authoritarian, and his rhetoric of dehumanizing and threatening revenge against vast swaths of Americans is getting notably and regularly harsher.
So Biden won’t have to try very hard to make 2024 a comparative — rather than a self-referendum — election. And his strategic goal is simply to make himself more popular than his unpopular opponent while winning at least a draw among the significant number of voters who don’t particularly like either candidate.
This last part won’t be easy. Trump won solidly in both 2016 and 2020 among voters who said they didn’t like either major-party candidate (the saving grace for Biden was that there weren’t that many of them in 2020; there will probably be an awful lot of them next November). So inevitably, the campaign will need to ensure that every persuadable voter has a clear and vivid understanding of Trump’s astounding character flaws and extremist tendencies. What will make this process even trickier is the availability of robust independent and minor-party candidates who could win a lot of voters disgusted by a Biden-Trump rock fight.
So the formula for a Biden reelection is to do everything possible to boost his job-approval ratings up into the mid-40s or so and then go after Trump with all the abundant ammunition the 45th president has provided him. The more popular Biden becomes, the more he can go back to the “normalcy” messaging that worked (albeit narrowly) in 2020.
If the economy goes south or overseas wars spread or another pandemic appears, not even the specter of an unleashed and vengeful authoritarian in the White House will likely save Biden; the same could be true if Uncle Joe suffers a health crisis or public lapses in his powers of communication. But there’s no reason he cannot win reelection with some luck and skill — and with the extraordinary decision of the opposition party to insist on nominating Trump for a third time. Yes, the 45th president has some political strengths of his own, but he would uniquely help Biden overcome the difficulty of leading a profoundly unhappy nation.
State by state polls appear more central than national polls. Bush and Kerry can have 40% leads in Utah and Rhode Island, but 39 of those 40 points do not do anything.
However http://www.davidwissing.com has been kind enough to pile up about ten national polls and note that they fall in two groups of about the same size. One group shows a tie. The other shows Bush up by 5 or so. And, since I read D and R blogs (L blogs are more focussed on doing politics than on polls), I see substantial numbers of people who are D or R arguing, one poll at a time, that the polls giving the wrong answer should be dumped, because a whole family of polls says their side is right, with inadequate attention to the feature that the polls are in two families, and the number of members in the other family is about the same.
Without saying who is right, I am reminded of the early warning systems at Pearl Harbor, which gave signal after signal — radar, submarine in harbor,…–of the incoming event, and signal after signal was ignored as an isolated and obviously wrong datum.
AMEN ON GOTV!
If Bush’s approval rating is 44% and he has 46% of the voting population at this point, then my guess is that about 47% is his ceiling, because he’s getting votes from people who don’t like the job he’s doing, but think that Kerry’ll do worse. And this poll, I’m sure, doesn’t poll people with cell phones who are younger voters. In a 1936 telephone poll, the people doing the poll predicted FDR’s opponent the winner, and people who had phones tended to be Republicans at that time.
old records show that upon election day 2000 the polls were showing that Illinois was going to be close, something within the margin of error, but Gore carried that state by 12%
I find it unlikely that Bush can be leading among independents by anything near an 18-point margin. While I don’t dismiss Fox News polls out of hand–at times, they have been more pro-Kerry than several others–this clearly seems out of whack. Those results among independents are not even close to anything that any other poll (even Gallup) has put forth. I haven’t seen the Fox poll on any other site except Fox News itself and some references in blogs; maybe this is why.
one dumb question:
are we to ignore LV’s until elction day or eve? or at what day do LV polls have some relevancy?
on an additonal note , i am invovled in A.C.T . GetOutTheVote effort in a swing state. i can only say that it is a very impressive, effcient organization who i beleive will do a remarkble job on t/o in earlyvoting and election day. readers should be very much encouraged by this on the ground effort.
also recommend you find any GOTV organizaiton in your locale to help on election day t/o. any and all organizations can use you.
a consensus opinion from talking heads is that presidents poll on election day at their approval rating, regardless of challengers numbers.
that means bush would recive 44% of vote today.
after headline on chris matthews, scarbourgh country and cnn blare “bush ahead in gallup” the program’s guests reject that conclusion almost unanimously. Even scarbourgh admitted his guest made sense regarding “approavl rating” test and battleground state polls favoring kerry.(thus leaving gallup poll meaningless)
matthews had nearly the same guests drawing the same conclusions where upon matthew blihtely opined to tony blankely that bush was going to win. blankely (washington times) didn’t seem qutie as certain. he also answereded all the questions put to ron ssuskind by matthews for suskind.
i ceratiinly hope post election these “commentators” are challenged on their predicions and methodology.
Some more good news, if off-topic.
There’s a poll showing the Kentucky Senator race tied. And another showing the Democrat within 7% of Specter in Pennsylvania. Maybe there are a couple other places in which the Democrats can pick up a Senator and regain control at least of that part of Congress. Here’s hoping.
The MSNBC/WSJ will be comforting because the Fox poll is not. Fox does weight by party indirectly because it weights by urban/suburban/rural. Today’s poll assumes 36% D, 34% R and 30% I. Not unreasonable. But, they have Bush up 49-42 because Bush leads among Indpendents by 51-33. What does it mean Ruy?
The apparent recent swing toward Kerry is good news, but I expect advantage will swing back to Bush and then to Kerry at least one more time before voting day. It’s been that kind of election so far, sigh.
And you just know Bush/Rove will drop some big media bomb in the next few days. High profile arrests or terror alert or major military offensive. Double sigh.
Incumbents almost always poll their approval rating. If Bush’s approval rating is just 44%, then I’d say he’s in some serious trouble. Factor in the late-deciders going for Kerry and we could be looking at the first majority Democrat win since 1976.
i have read about four separate columnists (all bush partisans) writing about bush opening up a ‘widening’ lead. Do they ONLY look at the Gallup poll or what? Maybe their anticipating that Kerry will do with the soft-on-terrorism Bai spin what he did with the flipflop template. After all, THE AGENDA UBER ALLES
The one common thread in all of the polls is that
Bush is running between 46 to 48%. These numbers have held true in every poll for the last 10 months or more. It is extremely difficult for an incumbent president to be re-elected with support
under 50%. This has been reported on this website
as well as others many times. The reason for John
Kerry’s numbers changing have to do mainly with
Party ID weighting as has also been reported. I would pay attention to Bush’s poll numbers and
job approval numbers, as they will be more in line
with his actual vote totals after the election. This translates to a President is serious political trouble,a story that is not getting much play in the media.
This is not a comment but an FYI on the most recent Ohio poll, 10/19/04, here reported on by the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper:
Poll: Presidential race a dead heat here
——————————————————————————–
Enquirer staff report
The latest Ohio Poll finds the race for president is a statistical dead heat in Ohio.
The poll says 48 percent of likely voters support Sen. John Kerry, while 46 percent support President George W. Bush. Five percent are undecided, while 1 percent support another candidate.
The results are similar to the August Ohio Poll, conducted after the Democratic National Convention. Bush led Kerry by 11 percentage points in the September Ohio Poll.
The poll also found that in the race for U.S. Senate, Sen. George Voinovich leads Eric Fingerhut, 62 percent to 35 percent.
The poll was conducted Oct. 11-17 by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati. A random sample of 757 likely voters was interviewed by telephone. The sampling error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
Looks like the internet and sites like this one are beginning to have an impact. The NYT today includes a story about the discrepancies among polls based on RV/LV methodology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/politics/campaign/19poll.html
Some good coverage of all the issues everyone here is familiar with. In particular high voter registration is this years wild card. However, there was still no mention of the problem of weighting for party ID.
Dear EDM:
At my site I’ve listed email addresses for Sinclair advertisers.
http://www.guerillastickers.com/Boycott%20Sinclair.htm
You can cut and paste the addresses into your email browser.
Send them an email and urge them to cease advertising on Sinclair-owned stations. Furthermore, tell them that, for the time being, you intend to boycott their products and services.
I got the list from this site: http://boycottsbg.com/
but the link to “email addresses” was down.
I cut and pasted myself.
Have fun!
S. H. Horton
Thought you might enjoy a little look back on Gallup’s polls from 2000 (ALL LV):
Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.
Oct17 Bush 48 Gore 42
Oct18 Bush 49 Gore 39
Oct19 Bush 50 Gore 40
Oct20 Bush 51 Gore 40
Oct21 Bush 50 Gore 41
Oct22 Bush 46 Gore 44
Oct23 Bush 45 Gore 46
Oct24 Bush 48 Gore 43
Oct25 Bush 49 Gore 42
Oct26 Bush 52 Gore 39
Oct27 Bush 49 Gore 42
Oct28 Bush 49 Gore 42
Oct30 Bush 47 Gore 44
Oct31 Bush 48 Gore 43
Nov1 Bush 47 Gore 43
Nov2 Bush 48 Gore 42
Nov3 Bush 47 Gore 43
Nov4 Bush 48 Gore 43
Nov5 Bush 47 Gore 45
Nov6 (last poll before the election)
Bush 48 Gore 46
Bush got 47.9% Gore 48%
This sounds interesting. From Josh Marshall’s blog (“Talking Points Memo”) today:
(October 19, 2004 — 11:23 AM EDT // link // print)
NBC/WSJ has its new poll out tonight. And I hear it’s got welcome news for Kerry. Dead even among likely voters.
— Josh Marshall
I, for one, would be delighted to go into election day with the race showing a tie and the polling internals as they are today. Undecideds break more toward the challenger as has been said many times; Democrats have the proponderance of newly registered voters and still have the superior groiund game in battleground states. Tie goes to the challenger.
TPM adds another positive poll indicator,
NBC/WSJ poll tonight has a tie among LIKELY voters. The tidal wave is starting to reach shore.
If Bush’s approval rating truly is at or about 46%, then he is in deep, deep doodoo. The kind liable to swallow one up.
It may not sound like it, but I mean this to be a serious question. Is anyone forecasting the percentage of votes that will not be counted? For example if 50% of the voters turn out to be Democrats, will 100% of their votes be counted?
I will agree with Zogby to this extent — if we have (or had!) an honest election, it’s a Kerry win.
But we know the Republicans are actively suppressing the vote to a possibly unprecedented degree nationally. Jeb Bush was Governor only of Florida in 2000; with W as prez, we’re all Floridians now. But unless something is done using those electronic ballots an honest election means a Kerry win — in my view there should simply be a national law requiring that EVERY vote have a paper ballot, period. Scans are OK, computers that spit out a card that must be cast are OK, and traditional ballots are OK. Punch cards should be phased out nationally too — even though they ARE paper ballots.
But an honest election means also Democrats fighting to win. Kerry’s performance in the debates was quite adequate — although against Bush [and for all the protestations about his wisdom, Cheney] I thought it could have been much MORE of a blowout. It’s like seeing political heavyweights like Jesse Jackson and Dick Gephardt go up against Ann Coulter and punt (tho not as bad as that).
But Kerry must refrain from Dukakissing. It’s the ONLY way the Democrats can lose in the absence of something spectacular, like the widely predicted Osama surprise. Kerry needs to resolve the terrorism issue in ways I’ve described in previous posts; had he really confronted the flipflop spin effectively, I would agree with Zogby.
If that approval rating in the CBS poll is reasonably accurate and our 50%”rule” for the incumbent is valid, the Monsieur Bush is in deep trouble.
But…. stories of voter suppression efforts — what happens “on the ground” — multiply like rabbits and just may save it for Bush.
We’re getting more like some banana republic or Soviet Russia.
An eensy bit off-topic, but since you didn’t blog on it, it is fresh, and others have expressed concern in the past, I wanted to mention that the new Rutgers poll has New Jersey at 51% Kerry and 38% Bush with a 3.8% MOE.
That’s for those who doubted me when I said to ignore those other polls, and that NJ would be solidly Dem come the election. My take is that most of the polls are way off the mark and it will be a big Kerry victory in NJ, and probably in the US generally.