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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March 4: Despite the Criticism, Biden’s Doing Well
After reading a few days worth of carping about Joe Biden’s performance, I decided enough’s enough and responded at New York:
Joe Biden has been president of the United States for 43 days. He inherited power from a predecessor who was trying to overturn the 2020 election results via insurrection just two weeks before Inaugural Day, and whose appointees refused the kind of routine transition cooperation other administrations took for granted. His party has a four-vote margin of control in the House, and only controls the Senate via the vice presidential tie-breaking vote (along with a power-sharing arrangement with Republicans). Democratic control of the Senate was not assured until the wee hours of January 6 when the results of the Georgia runoff were clear. Biden took office in the midst of a COVID-19 winter surge, a national crisis over vaccine distribution, and flagging economic indicators.
Biden named all his major appointees well before taking office, and as recommended by every expert, pushed for early confirmation of his national security team, which he quickly secured. After some preliminary discussions with Republicans that demonstrated no real possibility of GOP support for anything like the emergency $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief and stimulus package he had promised, and noting the votes weren’t there in the Senate for significant filibuster reform, Biden took the only avenue open to him. He instructed his congressional allies to pursue the budget reconciliation vehicle to enact his COVID package, with the goal of enacting it by mid-March, when federal supplemental unemployment insurance would run out. Going the reconciliation route meant exposing the package to scrutiny by the Senate parliamentarian
,It also virtually guaranteed total opposition from congressional Republicans, which in turn meant Senate Democratic unanimity would be essential.The House passed the massive and complex reconciliation bill on February 27, right on schedule, with just two Democratic defections, around the same time as the Senate parliamentarian, to no one’s great surprise, deemed a $15 minimum wage provision (already opposed by two Senate Democrats) out of bounds for reconciliation. The Senate is moving ahead with a modified reconciliation bill, and the confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet is chugging ahead slowly but steadily. Like every recent president, he’s had to withdraw at least one nominee – in his case Neera Tanden for the Office of Management and Budget, though the administration’s pick for deputy OMB director is winning bipartisan praise and may be substituted smoothly for Tanden.
Add in his efforts to goose vaccine distribution — which has more than doubled since he took office — and any fair assessment of Biden’s first 43 days should be very positive. But the man is currently being beset by criticism from multiple directions. Republicans, of course, have united in denouncing Biden’s refusal to surrender his agenda in order to secure bipartisan “unity” as a sign that he’s indeed the radical socialist – or perhaps the stooge of radical socialists – that Donald Trump always said he was. Progressives are incensed by what happened on the minimum wage, though it was very predictable. And media critics are treating his confirmation record as a rolling disaster rather than a mild annoyance, given the context of a federal executive branch that was all but running itself for much of the last four years.
To be clear, I found fault with Biden’s presidential candidacy early and often. I didn’t vote for him in California’s 2020 primary. I worried a lot about Biden’s fetish for bipartisanship. I support a $15 minimum wage, and as a former Senate employee, have minimal respect for the upper chamber’s self-important traditions. But c’mon: what, specifically, is the alternative path he could have pursued the last 43 days? Republican criticism is not worthy of any serious attention: the GOP is playing the same old tapes it recorded in 2009 when Barack Obama (and his sidekick Biden) spent far too much time chasing Republican senators around Washington in search of compromises they never intended to make. While they are entitled to oppose Biden’s agenda, they are not entitled to kill it.
Progressive criticism of Biden feels formulaic. Years and years of investment in the rhetoric of the eternal “fight” and the belief that outrage shapes outcomes in politics and government have led to the habit of seeing anything other than total subscription to the left’s views as a sell-out. Yes, Kamala Harris could theoretically overrule the Senate parliamentarian on the minimum wage issue, but to what end? So long as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose the $15 minimum wage, any Harris power play could easily be countered by a successful Republican amendment to strike the language in question, and perhaps other items as well. And if the idea is to play chicken with dissident Democrats over the fate of the entire reconciliation bill, is a $15 minimum wage really worth risking a $1.9 trillion package absolutely stuffed with subsidies for struggling low-income Americans? Are Fight for 15 hardliners perhaps conflating ends and means here?
Media carping about Biden’s legislative record so far is frankly just ridiculous. Presumably writing about the obscure and complicated details of reconciliation bills is hard and unexciting work that readers may find uninteresting, while treating Tanden’s travails as an existential crisis for the Biden administration provides drama, but isn’t at all true. The reality is that Biden’s Cabinet nominees are rolling through the Senate with strong confirmation votes (all but one received at least 64 votes), despite a steadily more partisan atmosphere for confirmations in recent presidencies. The COVID-19 bill is actually getting through Congress at a breakneck pace despite its unprecedented size and complexity. Trump’s first reconciliation bill (which was principally aimed at repealing Obamacare) didn’t pass the House until May 4, 2017, and never got through the Senate. Yes, Obama got a stimulus bill through Congress in February 2009, but it was less than half the size, much simpler, and more to the point, there were 59 Senate Democrats in office when it passed, which meant he didn’t even have to use reconciliation.
There’s really no exact precedent for Biden’s situation, particularly given the atmosphere of partisanship in Washington and the whole country right now, and the narrow window he and his party possess – in terms of political capital and time – to get important things done. He should not be judged on any one legislative provision or any one Cabinet nomination. So far the wins far outweigh the losses and omissions. Give the 46th president a break.
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.