Here are two things we can safely say about this election:
1. It will be a high-turnout election.
2. High turnout will benefit the Democrats.
Here’s how we know it will be a high-turnout election:
First and foremost, this is a very high interest election. Data across a wide range of polls have persistently shown that voters are expressing more interest in this campaign and are following it more closely than they were at comparable points in the 2000 and 1996 campaigns. These indicators suggest that, on the basis of interest alone, voter turnout could be comparable to that in 1992.
And besides high interest, this is an election where there have been high levels of new registrations and voter contact by the “ground games” of both parties. Therefore, not only are voters more interested, they are also more likely to have been provided with the opportunity to mobilize that interest and convert it into voting on election day (or before). This suggests that turnout could potentially surpass that in 1992.
Here’s how we know that high turnout is likely to benefit the Democrats:
The basic reason is simple. Democrats enjoy support from a number of “peripheral” constituencies this year whose participation levels are typically low and can be difficult to get to the polls. But in a high turnout election, electoral intensity draws these constituencies into the process and tends to produce not only an increase in their turnout–after all, most groups will experience at least some increase in turnout–but an increase in turnout that is higher than that of more mainstream constituencies. Therefore, the higher the turnout, the higher the payoff for the Democrats, because their peripheral constituencies are disproportionately mobilized into the process.
One such constituency is young voters (18-29). While there have been exceptions, and Kerry’s lead has varied over time, most polls most of the time have shown Kerry with a healthy lead over Bush among young voters in general, and college students in particular.
Another constituency is new voters. Again, while not all polls agree and Kerry’s lead has varied over time, most polls most of the time have shown Kerry with a strong lead over Bush among new voters.
Underscoring the new voters pattern is Democratic success in generating new registrations this year, particularly, of course, in the battleground states. While there is some dispute over who won these “registration wars”–and we may not have a final answer until after the election when more and better data will be available–I am persuaded that the Democrats have had greater success registering voters where they matter the most. And a high turnout election is just what is needed to bring these new registrants, whose participation rates are typically less than that of already-registered voters, to the polls.
Another key–perhaps the key–constituency is minority voters, whose support for the Democrats is exceptionally high. Bush’s black support generally registers in the 7-10 percent range (though there are exceptions; see my recent discussion of one of those exceptions) and Bush’s Hispanic support has been running around 30 percent in nationwide or multistate polls of Hispanics. (Such polls–as opposed to regular national polls–provide for the Spanish-language interviewing and other arrangements needed to get a proper sample of Hispanic voters and therefore provide better measures of Hispanic sentiment.)
Finally, recent work by Victoria Lynch of the DLC, based on National Election Studies data, shows that peripheral voters in general–those who are not highly committed to voting and tend to surge in and out of the electorate depending on their interest in the election–tend to lean naturally toward the Democrats, not the Republicans. As the DLC’s memo on the report summarizes these tendencies:

Peripheral voters are much more like Democrats than Republicans in supporting an activist government; in their commitment to equal opportunity; and in their rejection of cultural conservative “wedge issues.” Demographically, peripheral voters are more like Democrats than Republicans in that they are relatively younger, less educated, more likely to consider themselves “working class,” less likely to attend worship services regularly, and much more likely to self-identify as ideological “moderates” rather than conservatives. Indeed, this analysis casts a lot of doubt on Republican claims that non-voting Christian conservatives are a big part of the pool of “mobilizable” peripheral voters — in part because these voters are disproportionately disengaged from civic as well as political involvement, and do not readily follow opinion-leaders, much less the “voter guides” distributed in churches that they do not regularly attend.

The last point is important because it helps debunk Karl Rove’s infamous–and specious–claim that there were 4 million “missing” conservative white evangelical voters in the 2000 election who could potentially be turned out in this election. (If further debunking of the missing 4 million is needed, let me recommend Marisa Katz’ demolition job on The New Republic’s website.)
So, in sum, a high turnout election seems very likely and a consequent advantage for the Democrats very likely as well. And the Democrats’ ground game seems to be running in high gear and fully capable of maximizing that advantage (see Harold Meyerson’s excellent new piece on Democratic mobilization efforts). In a close election–and that seems a very distinct possibility–this turnout advantage for the Democrats could not only be important, but decisive.

But it’s still pretty damn important, so it’s very interesting indeed to note that both consumer confidence indices (University of Michigan and the Conference) fell sharply this month.
Here’s the Wall Street Journal on the University of Michigan index:

The recent surge in oil prices and heightened concerns about sluggish job growth helped push the University of Michigan’s consumer-sentiment index as of mid-October below the benchmark reading of 90 — a level considered by some political analysts important for an incumbent president’s re-election prospects. Of the six presidents seeking re-election since 1972, the three who lost faced voters when the Michigan index was below that figure.

And here’s Bloomberg News on the Conference Board index:

U.S. consumer confidence fell for a third straight month in October, a private survey showed, suggesting rising voter discontent with the economy a week before President George W. Bush seeks re-election.
The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index dropped to 92.8 from a revised 96.7 in September, lower than previously estimated. Americans’ assessment of the current economy and their outlook for the next six months fell.
The survey is the Conference Board’s last before the U.S. presidential election. Since the index began in 1967, every incumbent president facing re-election with consumer confidence below 99 on Election Day has lost.

Not good news for Mr. Bush, I’d have to say. And speaking of the economy, check out this very useful report, “Less Cash in Their Pockets: Trends in Incomes, Wages, Taxes, and Health Spending of Middle-Income Families, 2000-03“, from the indispensable Economic Policy Institute. A very complete analysis that makes clear why voters by 2:1 say the country is worse off, rather than better off, as a result of Bush’s economic policies (lastest LA Times poll). And why two-thirds of voters believe their family is not better off today than four years ago (latest CBS/NYT poll).
Unconfident consumers with sinking incomes. Sounds to me like a recipe for incumbent defeat.

Peter Dizikes had an excellent article on the sputtering Nader campaign yesterday in Salon. This excerpt from his article provides a nice summary of Nader’s woes:

As those of us who have seen Nader in person this month know, his campaign is a relatively low-energy, low-interest affair. Crowds are down. Campaign funds are minimal. The candidate who drew about 3 percent of the popular vote in 2000 is at 1 percent in this year’s polls and could finish lower.
To see just how Nader is struggling, consider the trajectory of his campaign in 2000, and contrast it to his 2004 effort. On Aug. 25, 2000, Nader drew 10,579 supporters, who paid $7 each, to a “super rally” at the Portland Coliseum. There followed a string of “super rallies” with five-figure attendance numbers: 11,500 in Minneapolis, 12,000 at the Fleet Center in Boston, 10,000 in Chicago, and about 15,000 inside New York’s Madison Square Garden, at $20 a ticket.
In 2004, Nader events are far smaller. On Oct. 5, for example, Nader spoke to about 65 supporters in Portland, Maine, before moving on to the University of New Hampshire event, where just over 100 supporters showed, and finishing the day speaking to an audience of about 500 at the University of Vermont. Nader’s largest crowd of the month appears to have been about 800 in Berkeley, on Oct. 11, but I counted a more typical 225 in the audience last Saturday as Nader spoke on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, N.J. Nader will end October having held over 30 campaign events, yet his total audience for the month could comfortably fit inside Madison Square Garden. At many events, anti-Nader groups protest outside; inside, former supporters often confront him during the question-and-answer sessions.
Meanwhile, the celebrity supporters who adorned Nader’s campaign in 2000 — including Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and, yes, Michael Moore — have jumped ship. A long list of academics and public figures from Nader’s 2000 “Citizens Committee” — Noam Chomsky, Studs Terkel, Cornel West and dozens more — now back John Kerry. Even Winona LaDuke, Nader’s vice presidential candidate in 2000, endorsed the Democratic candidate this month, saying, “I’m voting my conscience on Nov. 2. I’m voting for John Kerry.”

But check out the whole article. It’s full of juicy stuff including Nader’s current fundraising strategy (begging penniless college students for money).

By Alan Abramowitz
Here’s where the presidential race stands right now based on an analysis of the most recent national polls conducted by 10 leading polling organizations. For this analysis I have excluded all partisan polls, internet polls, and robo-dial polls. That leaves out Democracy Corps, Harris, Economist/YouGov, and Rasmussen. Some of these polls, especially Democracy Corps, are in my opinion very reputable, but for the sake of fairness I’m excluding them. Included in the analysis are the following polls: Gallup, CBS/New York Times, NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington Post, Zogby, Time, Newsweek, Pew, AP/Ipsos, and LA Times. All of these polls except Zogby report results for registered as well as likely voters.
Among likely voters, Bush was leading in 5 polls, Kerry in 2, and 3 were tied. The average level of support for the candidates was Bush 48.2, Kerry 47.0, Nader 1.3.
Among registered voters, Bush was leading in 3 polls, Kerry in 2, and 4 were tied. The average level of support for the candidates was Bush 47.0, Kerry 46.0, Nader 1.9.
It is clear from these results that heading into the final weekend of the campaign, the presidential race right now is extremely close. George Bush appears to hold a very slight lead nationally, but his support remains below the 50 percent level that is generally considered necessary for an incumbent since undecided voters generally break toward the challenger by a wide margin.

The polls have generally been moving in the right direction lately for John Kerry, both nationally and on the state level, but Democrats are still inclined to be sent into a tizzy by any negative poll result they run across.
They shouldn’t. It’s time to revisit the thrilling polls of yesteryear to get a sense of just how much the polls in 2000 tended to overestimate Bush’s strength and underestimate Gore’s. I believe, for reasons I have discussed at length, the polls are likely overestimating Bush’s strength this year as well. But this year, Kerry is doing better in the polls than Gore did at the equivalent point in the 2000 race. Therefore, if current polls are overestimating Bush’s strength by the same amount as in 2000, Kerry should wind up doing better than Gore on election day–and Gore won the popular vote by half a point. And that’s not even factoring in the likelihood that, with Bush as the incumbent, Kerry will receive the bulk of undecided voters’ support on election day.
So let’s take that stroll down memory lane.
Start with this nugget from Alan Abramowitz:

During the final week of the 2000 campaign, 43 national polls were released, including multiple releases by several polling organizations such as Gallup. George Bush led in 39 polls, Al Gore in 2. Bush’s average lead in the polls was 3.6 percent.

Something to keep in mind when people complain that so far (two days) in this final week Kerry has “only” had small leads in the DCorps poll, the Harris Poll and the WP/ABC tracking poll twice (LVs and RVs)!
And here are some readings from specific 2000 polls:
1. The ABC tracking poll averaged a 4 point Bush lead in the last week and its final poll had a 3 point Bush lead.
2. Bloomberg News final poll (October 29) had a 3 point Bush lead.
3. Final Time poll (October 26) had a 6 point Bush lead.
4. Gallup’s tracking poll had Bush ahead by an average of 4 points in the final week and by 2 points in its final poll.
5. Marist College’s final poll (November 2) gave Bush a 5 point lead.
6. Final NBC/WSJ poll (November 5) had Bush up by 3 and their mid-October poll had him up by 6.
7. Final Newsweek poll (November 2) had Bush up by 2 and their October 27 poll had him up by 8.
8. Final Pew Research poll had Bush up by 2.
9. A November 4 CBS/NYT poll had Bush up by 5 (though the final CBS poll was dead-on, with a 1 point Gore lead).
10. Final ICR poll had Bush up by 2.
11. Voter.com Battleground survey (this year called GWU Battleground) averaged an 8 point Bush lead in the final week and its final poll gave Bush a 5 point lead.
12. TIPP tracking poll gave Bush a average 6 point lead in the final week and a final poll lead of 2 points.
13. Prior to its well-known final reading of a 2 point Gore lead, Zogby’s tracking poll gave Bush an average 3 point lead in the final week.
14. Final Hotline poll (November 5) gave Bush a 3 point lead.

Why? Because Mitchell Research has actually released a poll showing Kerry in the lead in Michigan (albeit by only a point). To understand the significance of this, you need to know that Mitchell Research has been the only firm to show Bush with a lead in Michigan in the entire post-labor day period. Specifically, there have been 17 polls in Michigan in September and October (prior to Mitchell Research’s new release), 15 of which showed Kerry in the lead (by an average of 5 points in both months) and only two of which–both from Mitchell Research–showed Bush with a lead (also by an average of 5 points).
You had to wonder if they were polling the same state. So if Mitchell Research finally has Kerry ahead, even by a point, that probably means he’s running away with the state.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a front-page story on Kerry and Gore seeking to mobilize black voters for the Democratic ticket. No doubt they are and for good reason. The more black voters that show up on election day, the better for John Kerry.
More controversial is the story’s assertion, based on a recent national poll of African-Americans by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, that Bush is generating much more support among blacks than he did in 2000.
Now it is true that the Joint Center’s poll has Bush’s support among blacks at 18 percent, double the 9 percent the Joint Center recorded in their 2000 poll. It is also far more than the support the 2000 exit poll found for Bush (8 percent) and the average support Republican presidential candidates in the last three elections (10 percent).
But how credible is their 18 percent figure? Not very, in my view. Or in the view of Cornell Belcher, a pollster who focuses on African-Americans, who, according to the Times story:

said his surveys in battleground states showed Mr. Bush in single digits. Nationally, Mr. Belcher said, he has found only 10 percent of blacks approve even “somewhat” of Mr. Bush’s job performance, while 89 percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

So who’s right? I think Belcher is. The overwhelming evidence from public polls is that Bush’s support among blacks is running very close to where it was in 2000 and not even in shouting distance of the Joint Center’s 18 percent figure. Consider these data, which I managed to ferret out from various polling sources:
1. A July poll of black RVs by BET/CBS News had Bush’s support at 10 percent.
2. Bush’s black support in the last week of WP/ABC tracking polls has been averaging 9 percent.
3. Bush’s average black support in the last four Pew polls has been 9 percent.
4. Bush’s average black support in the last week of national Zogby tracking polls has been 8 percent.
5. Bush’s support among black RVs averaged only 7 percent in three October Gallup polls.
Sounds like Bush can expect his black support in 2004 to closely resemble his black support in 2000.
Of course, defenders of the Joint Center poll might point out that, outside of the BET/CBS poll, it has a much larger sample size than the various subsamples averaged above. But larger sample size, by itself, doesn’t make the Joint Center estimate “better”. It merely means that, all else equal, the Joint Center estimate should have less random sampling error than any single estimate based on one of the national subsamples. But the various subsample estimates taken together–and, cumulatively, we’re talking about estimates based on thousands and thousands of black voters–should be relatively free of random sampling error and close to Bush’s true support level among blacks.
So the fact that all these various polls are finding Bush’s black support running in a very tight band between 7-10 percent is a sign that the Joint Center poll is off, not everbody else.
What could account for the Joint Center’s anomalous finding? Who knows, but one possibility is the way they asked the question:
“Suppose the 2004 Presidential election were being held today. Among the three major nominees, George W. Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader, who would you like to see win?”
This is, to say the least, a very strange way to ask a trial heat question. It doesn’t actually ask who the respondent is going to vote for, but rather who they “would like to see win” the election (possibly misheard by some respondents as simply who “would win” the election). The question also does not mention the partisan affiliation of the candidates so respondents do not receive the partisan cues of Democrat for Kerry (presumably less well-known among black voters than Gore) and Republican for Bush. Taken together, these wording problems may have led to enough confusion on the part of inattentive voters to create an unusually high support number for Bush.
I don’t know if that’s right. But I do know the Joint Center figure should not be taken seriously. The key task for the Democrats is, and will remain, mobilizing high numbers of black voters to go to the polls, not convincing them to vote for Kerry over Bush.

By Alan Abramowitz
It’s not just Gallup’s recent national polls that appear to be out of line with the results of most other recent polls. Some of their state polls have also produced rather bizarre results. Two notable examples are Gallup’s recent polls in the key battleground states of Florida and Wisconsin.
In Florida, Gallup just released a poll showing George Bush leading John Kerry by 9 percentage points among registered voters. Wow! No other poll in the past month has given Bush a lead of more than 3 percentage points in Florida. In fact, of the 12 other Florida polls released in the past two weeks, 6 have John Kerry leading while only 3 have Bush leading, and 3 have the race tied. On average, in these 12 polls, Kerry held a lead of 0.6 percentage points. Quite a difference.
In Wisconsin, Gallup just released a poll showing Bush leading Kerry by 8 percentage points among registered voters. No other poll this month has given Bush a lead of more than 3 percentage points in Wisconsin. Of the 5 other Wisconsin polls released in the past two weeks, 3 have Kerry leading, 1 has Bush leading, and 2 have the race tied. On average, in these 5 polls, Kerry held a lead of 1.5 percentage points.
If this keeps up, when this election is over, the folks over at Gallup are either going to look like idiots or geniuses. I’ll leave to you to guess which one is more likely.

The new Gallup poll shows the race moving in Kerry’s direction. In their last poll, October 14-16, they showed Bush with a 4 point lead, 50-46 in their 2-way RV matchup. This poll, conducted October 22-24, has Bush’s lead shrinking to a single point (49-48).
Even Gallup’s bogus LV sample has Bush’s lead shrinking from its outlandish 8 points in the previous poll to a merely unbelievable 5 points in the current poll. (Of course, USA Today–shame on them!–leads with and heavily emphasizes the LV results in their story on the new poll.)
Subgroup analysis of the Gallup RV data shows several patterns very favorable to the Kerry campaign:
1. Kerry leads among independents by 5, 49-44.
2. Kerry leads among moderates by 18, 57-35.
3. Kerry leads in the battleground states by 2, 49-47, and Bush’s approval rating in these same states has sunk to 46 percent.
On to November 2.

By Alan Abramowitz
It isn’t just the tracking polls that seem to be fluttering randomly in the wind. An analysis of polls by six major media outlets (Time, Newsweek, CNN/USA Today/Gallup, CBS/New York Times, Pew, and Fox) that released polls during the first half of October and during the second half of October reveals that there is a strong negative correlation (-.84) between the early October results and the late October results.
In other words, the better Bush was doing relative to Kerry in the early October poll, the worse the was doing in the late October poll. Some of this might be explained by the well known phenomenon of regression toward the mean. If a poll’s early October sample had either too many Bush supporters or too few Bush supporters just due to chance, it’s late October sample should be closer to the true population mean. But these results went well beyond regression toward the mean. Every poll that was above the overall mean in early October was below the overall mean in late October and every poll that was below the overall mean in in early October was above the overall mean in late October. What this bizarre pattern suggests is that the movements of the major media polls in October, like the movements of the tracking polls, reflect sampling error and peculiarties of the polls rather than real change in the underlying preferences of the electorate.