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.

The duel of the newsweekly polls continues. The new Time poll implausibly, when compared to other public polls, showed a substantial, sudden move toward Bush among RVs, going from a dead heat last week (46-46) to a 7 point lead this week (50-43).
The new Newsweek poll, on the other hand was a model of stability, going from a 1 point lead for Bush among RVs last week (48-47) to a dead heat this week (47-47). (The poll showed more movement in Kerry’s direction among LVs, but that clearly reflected differences between the two polls in who was screened into the LV sample, rather than substantial change in voter sentiment.)
Newsweek, as they did last week, provided a number of interesting subgroup horse race numbers for their 3-way RV matchup that are worth taking a look at:
1. Independents favor Kerry/Edwards by 14 points, 52-38.
2. Swing voters favor Kerry/Edwards by 8, 41-33.
3. First-time voters favor Kerry/Edwards by 3, 47-44.
4. Early voters favor Kerry/Edwards by 6, 50-44.
5. Young voters (18-29) favor Kerry/Edwards by 14, 54-40, and seniors (65+) favor Kerry/Edwards by 5, 48-43.
6. Men favor Bush-Cheney by 51-43 and women favor K/E by 49-42.
Note that this last finding reverses the rather strange reverse gender gap pattern in Newsweek‘s last poll, wher men favored K/E and women favored B/C.
Two other findings from the Newsweek poll illustrate the difficult challenge Bush faces in making the case for his re-election on two central issues. First, when asked whether “Bush’s economic and tax policies” have done more to help or hurt economic conditions in the country, just 33 percent say these policies have helped the economy, compared to 62 percent who say they’ve either hurt the economy (43 percent) or made no difference (19 percent). Second, when asked whether the war with Iraq has made Americans safer from terrorism or not, 53 percent say no and only 42 percent say yes.
Iraq and the economy: for Bush, difficult issues to defend but even more difficult to avoid.

The Washington Post had a good front-page article today, “A Fading ‘Nader Factor’?”. The article points out, as I have repeatedly, that Nader’s vote is likely to be a lot smaller than last time and, hence, less dangerous to the Democrats.
But the article also provides empirical backing for the idea that the Nader will not only be smaller, but also less likely to hurt the Democratic candidate than last time. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

A survey conducted this month for the Democratic National Committee by pollster Stanley Greenberg showed Nader averaging 1.5 percent of the vote in a dozen battleground states where his name appears on the ballot, compared with about 3 percent in the summer. It also showed that most of the support Nader lost had shifted to Kerry and indicated that his remaining backers would be as likely to vote for Bush as for the Massachusetts Democrat, if Nader were not running.

And it’s not just Greenberg who says this:

Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, said his research has shown for months that when Nader is removed from poll questionnaires, the margin separating the two major candidates is unaltered.

So one less problem to worry about. Let’s concentrate on what’s really important: mobilization, mobilization, mobilization.

The new Ohio University/Scripps Survey Research Center poll, conducted October 17-21, gives Kerry a 6 point lead among registered voters (49-43). And see Chris Bowers over at MyDD for a roundup of all the recent Ohio polls and just how good they make Kerry’s situation look in Ohio.
So: both Pennsylvania and Ohio are looking good for Kerry. And if that conventional wisdom is correct that the victor in the 2004 election will be the candidate that carries 2 of 3 key big states (Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida), he’s therefore looking very good overall.

Paul Krugman’s important column in The New York Times today leads with this:

If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won’t be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.
Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.
This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break against the incumbent – not always, but we’re talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger zone.
Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes.

But he goes on to point out that this picture is not the one you would get from watching cable news, where polls of Gallup and Fox News set the frame for the state of the horse race. And he specifically cites the data reported on DR and other blogs exposing the bias of Gallup’s likely voter samples against minority and young voters.
As Krugman emphasizes, this distorted view of the state of the campaign not only misleads voters and the public, it potentially can be used to cover up actual disenfranchisement of minority and young voters on election day. Perhaps Krugman’s column will finally help get “the Gallup problem” the attention it so richly deserves.

Kerry leads Bush, 50-45, among RVs in a 2-way matchup in Gallup’s new Ohio poll. (Oddly, their 3-way RV matchup gives Kerry a slightly larger lead, 50-44.) Their LV matchup, which should be viewed with skepticism, is better for Bush, but even there Kerry leads by a point.
Gallup has also released three other state polls recently (all figures 2-way RV matchups): Oregon (52-45 Kerry); Colorado (49-48 Bush); and Wisconsin (51-45 Bush).

Poll results in the battleground states have generally been good for Kerry lately, especially in the most important of these states.
In that light, it’s interesting to note that four recently-released national polls give Kerry leads of 6-7 points in the battleground states overall. In 2000, these states broke evenly between Gore and Bush, so a 6-7 point Kerry lead, if real, would be quite significant.
Here are the polls and the numbers:
Marist (10/17-19): 50-43
Pew (10/15-19): 49-43
NBC/WSJ (10/16-18): 49-43
Harris (10/14-17): 51-44
If this pattern coninues, Bush will be in big trouble come November 2.

We posted a brief notice on the new Pew poll earlier, which showed the race in a dead heat. But it’s worth calling attention to Bush’s approval ratings in that poll which are so bad as to make Bush’s terrible ratings in the latest CBS/NYT poll look robust by comparison.
Bush’s overall approval rating in the poll is 44 percent, just one point above the worst ever recorded for Bush in this poll And very inauspicious for an incumbent seeking re-election, of course,
But it is his ratings in specific areas like the economy, Iraq and foreign policy that are truly remarkable. They are all under 40 percent (!) and the worst ever recorded for Bush in this poll: 38 percent on the economy; 37 percent on Iraq and also 37 percent on foreign policy.
And let’s not forget handling “terrorist threats”, his best and perhaps only area of strength. He receives his worst rating ever in this area as well: 49 percent, putting him below the 50 percent level even in his strongest area.
If Pew is accurately capturing voters’ assessment of the job Bush has been doing, it’s going to be quite difficult for him to convince these same voters to stay the course and keep him in office.

By Alan Abramowitz
Jeff Jones of Gallup recently posted this reply to critics on their editors’ blog:

Some consumers of the polls (including the Gallup Poll) have questioned poll results because party identification and other characteristics do not match the 2000 exit poll data. There are very good reasons why they may not match the exit poll data.
First, some treat the exit poll as a census. It is not a census, it is a survey based on sampling of voting precincts. There is a reason it is called an “exit poll” and not an “exit census.” That’s because it is a poll, and as such is subject to sampling variation and other polling errors just as any other poll would be. In fact, because exit polling relies on quota sampling (hand selection of survey spots according to population size and other factors), it has a higher degree of potential error than do the random samples on which telephone surveys are based. Thus, there is no basis on which to believe the exit poll numbers are in any way more accurate than any other number you get from a poll. They are all estimates. The one advantage of the exit poll is that they know everyone they interview is a voter, while pre-election polls rely on models to determine who is likely to vote and who is not. However, that does not mean their estimates are necessarily better, and they are definitely not error-free estimates of the electorate as many treat them. In fact, when multiple exit polls existed in the past, they very routinely differed in their estimates of the vote as well as their estimates of the demographic characteristics of the electorate. Even today the Los Angeles Times exit poll differs from the larger exit poll used by the networks.
Second, the exit poll measure of political party ID is fundamentally different from ours. We know that survey results can differ depending on how the data are collected. Our questions are read and responses obtained verbally over the phone. Their responses are obtained in self-administered questionnaires that present the questions in a visual format. Most survey research experts would be extremely cautious in comparing data obtained by a telephone interview versus that obtained in a self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire. That is in addition to question wording differences in the party ID question that can also have an effect on the results.
Third, a lot has changed since 2000. In the post-9/11 environment, terrorism has become one of the chief problems for government to deal with. The Republican Party has a large perceptual advantage on the terrorism issue. To assume that everything is as it was four years ago is a very risky assumption. While it is possible that in the end things could change once again so that partisanship looks much like it did in 2000, that is by no means certain or even likely.

My reply:
Mr. Jones’s comments are inaccurate and misleading. First of all, yes, the national exit poll is based on a sample. But it’s a huge sample–over 13,000 respondents in 2000. Because of its size, and because, as Jones acknowledges, the exit poll includes only individuals who have definitely voted, the margin of error should be much smaller than with pre-election telephone polls. Second, there is no reason to believe that a self-administered questionnaire would produce significantly different results from a telephone survey for an attitude as basic as party identification as long as the question asked is worded identically. The problem with the Gallup party ID question, as I have indicated elsewhere, is that it is a poorly worded question. Because of its lead-in, “in politics today,” the Gallup question, in contrast to the question used by the National Election Studies, the CBS/New York Times Poll, and the national exit poll, measures a combination of current political preferences along with long-term partisan commitment. Finally, and this is most important, there is simply no reason to believe that the distribution of party identification in the American electorate has changed significantly since the 2000 presidential election.
Indeed, an examination of national exit polls and CBS/New York Times polls conducted since 1992 shows that there has been no significant change in party identification for the past 12 years despite wars, recessions, and quite variable election results. Even in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the CBS/New York Times polls found no noticeable change in the distribution of party identification. The distribution of party identification in CBS/New York Times polls this year, approximately a four point Democratic advantage, is almost identical to the average for the past 12 years. It is therefore highly unlikely that the distribution of party identification in this year’s national exit poll will differ substantially from that in the previous four national exit polls, all of which showed a Democratic advantage of between
3 and 5 points.
Unfortunately, Mr. Jones’s comments are typical of the head-in-the-sand attitude that the Gallup Poll has displayed in recent years in response to any criticism of their work. During the 2000 campaign, we would remind readers, the Gallup tracking poll was the laughingstock of the polling community as its likely voter results gyrated wildly from week to week and sometimes from day to day, producing a ludicrous estimate of a 13 point lead for George Bush on October 26th. Although Gallup quietly abandoned their tracking poll this year, they continue to display the same arrogance and insensitivity to criticism that we saw then. Evidently party identification is not the only attitude that is impervious to change.

By Alan Abramowitz
In today’s New York Times op-ed, “Polls Apart“, Pew Research Center pollster, Andrew Kohut, observes:

The round of national surveys taken after the third presidential debate indicates that the polls are not going to give us a clear picture of who will win the election until the final days of the campaign, if then….It’s worth recalling that four years ago voters were similarly divided between the candidates. But the opinions about Al Gore and Mr. Bush did not bounce around, because there just wasn’t all that much enthusiasm for either man.

Andrew Kohut is correct that the polls probably will not give us a lear idea of who is going to win this year’s presidential election. However, the problem is not that voters’ preferences are more volatile than normal this year, as Kohut claims. The problem is that poll results are volatile due to the effects of sampling error, differences in weighting procedures, and different methods of identifying likely voters. As a result, even polls conducted at exactly the same time can produce divergent results. Nor is this situation unique to the 2004 election. The same volatility was evident prior to the 2000 election when, for example, the Gallup tracking poll released on October 26 showed George Bush leading Al Gore by 13 points while the Zogby tracking poll released the same day showed Gore leading Bush by 2 points.