Sunday night, Gallup released their final national poll, based on an unusually large sample (over 2,000 adults), plus six polls in key battleground states (OH, FL, PA, IA, WI and MN). The results indicate that Kerry is finishing strongly and should be in a good position to pull off a victory on Tuesday.
In the national poll, Kerry is ahead by a point among RVs in a 2-way race (48-47) and by 2 points in a 3-way race (48-46). In 2000, it’s worth recalling, Gallup’s RV result was a better predictor of the final outcome than their LV result, as it has been in three of the last four presidential elections.
After allocating undecideds, Gallup’s LV result is a dead heat, 49-49. That’s a considerable improvement from their last poll, where Bush was running a 5 point lead, 51-46, among LVs. And keep in mind that in 2000 Gallup’s final LV result gave Bush a 2 point lead, while Gore went on to win the popular vote by half a point. In that context, a dead heat final estimate from Gallup makes Kerry look pretty good heading into election day.
Alan Abramowitz below has discussed the significance of Kerry’s solid lead among independents in the national poll (8 points among RVs; no LV breakdown available). The poll also shows Bush’s approval rating at just 43 percent in the battleground states and Kerry beating Bush by 10 points in those states (52-42).
Speaking of the battleground states, it struck me as quite significant that Gallup’s state polls showed Kerry with solid leads in both Ohio and Florida among both LVs and RVs, since those were the two states in the “big three” (OH, FL, PA) that seemed most competitive and were red states in 2000. And, while Gallup’s PA poll did show Bush with a lead among LVs, it also showed him trailing among RVs in a state where polls have very consistently shown Bush behind. The most reasonable assumption, it seems to me, is that Kerry is still the odds-on winner in that state.
The other results–a strong Bush lead among LVs in WI (but a small lead among RVs), a big lead for Kerry among both LVs and RVs in MN and close to a dead heat in IA–don’t change my impression that this is a good set of polls for the Kerry campaign. But I was surprised about how CNN and other media outlets played these polls, implying that they were too much of a mixed bag to be good news for either candidate. Ohio and Florida to Kerry? Ho-hum. Just another symptom of a dead-locked race, etc.
Reader Lawrence Becker shared my surprise and contributed this entry in what could be a new game: “How can CNN…….”

Again, I am amazed. But this time, it is the interpretation of the Gallup poll that amazes me, not the poll itself. As you know, Gallup just released a set of battleground state polls that (if accurate) are remarkably positive news for John Kerry and pretty devastating news for George Bush. And yet, CNN’s interpretation of these polls is, “President Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry were almost evenly split among likely voters in six major
battleground states the weekend before the election.” Well, that’s
techinically true. Among likely voters, Bush is ahead in 3 of these states and Kerry is ahead in 3. But CNN, perhaps knowing Gallup’s “likely voter” model is very suspect goes on to say, “the figures were mostly the same among registered voters, except in Pennsylvania, where Kerry had a 2-point lead.” Well that’s a pretty big “exception,” wouldn’t you say?
Let’s take a look at how “split” the race really is in these states among BOTH likely voters AND registered voters.
Florida (27)
(LV) Bush 46, Kerry 49
(RV) Bush 45, Kerry 49
Iowa (7)
(LV) Bush 48, Kerry 46
(RV) Bush 47, Kerry 46
Minnesota (10)
(LV) Bush 44, Kerry 52
(RV) Bush 43, Kerry 51
Ohio (20)
(LV) Bush 46, Kerry 50
(RV) Bush 44, Kerry 51
Pennsylvania (21)
(LV) Bush 50, Kerry 46
(RV) Bush 47, Kerry 49
Wisconsin (10)
(LV) Bush 52, Kerry 44
(RV) Bush 49, Kerry 46
In these six states, 95 electoral votes (as well as the presidency itself) are up for grabs. I distribute the all the other states to Kerry and Bush exactly as they voted in 2000 with one exception. I give New Hampshire to Kerry based on countless polls that show Kerry with a lead there. That leaves Bush with 227 electoral votes and Kerry with 216. If we just take Gallup’s likely voter results (a very risky proposition, indeed), we find that Kerry would win 57 of these 95 electoral votes (Florida, Minnesota, and Ohio). Kerry would end up with 273 electoral votes and the presidency. And that assumes Kerry really would lose Pennsylvania, a possibility I find very
hard to believe since Kerry has led EVERY ONE of the last 20 polls reported by NowChannel.com. But okay, we’ll settle for 273 electoral votes if we have to. It isn’t horseshoes and it isn’t hand grenades, right? So Kerry wins even with Gallup’s likely voter data -data we already know to be biased against the Democrats.
Now if we just take Gallup’s registered voter results, we find that Kerry would win 78 of 95 electoral votes (including the entire trifecta commonly known as “FLOHPA”). That would put Kerry at 294 electoral votes giving him some room for error in New Hampshire, New Mexico, etc. But wait, the news gets worse for Bush and better for Kerry. Bush is not at at 50% or above in any of these six states among registered voters. By now, we all know that Bush is highly unlikely to improve at all on his showing in poll numbers on the eve of Election Day. Gallup seems to acknowledge this fact by pointing out in their interpretation that while their national poll shows Bush at 49 and Kerry at 47 among likely voters nationwide, “Using voting behavior data from previous elections, the Gallup organization attempted to estimate how the undecideds would vote Tuesday. The result was a tie of 49 percent each for Bush and Kerry …”
Can Bush win if these registered voter numbers are accurate? Simply put …no. Can he even win among Gallup’s biased formulation of likely voters? Probably not. Are these poll numbers accurate? Who knows? But I ask the key question of our new game. How can CNN … read these numbers and come up with the headline, “Poll: Bush, Kerry split six key states?“? To use a favorite term of the President’s, that seems like a bit of an “exaggeration.”

By Alan Abramowitz
No Republican in the modern era has won a presidential election without carrying the independent vote. In the 2000 election, despite losing the national popular vote, George Bush led Al Gore by a narrow margin among independent voters. However, according to the final, supersized Gallup Poll, John Kerry now has an 8 point lead over George Bush among independent voters. In fact, Kerry led Bush among independents in all four Gallup polls this month–by an average of 6 points. This is one more piece of evidence that George Bush’s situation is extremely dire.

By Alan Abramowitz
The Pew Research Center has just released its final numbers on the 2004 presidential race and they show George Bush with a 3 point lead among “likely voters” but John Kerry with a 1 point lead among registered voters. Not to worry. There are good reasons for skepticism about those likely voter results.
First of all, here’s Andrew Kohut’s track record at Pew and, previously, at Gallup. In 2000, the final Pew Poll had George Bush leading by 3 points. We all know what actually happened. In 1996, Pew had Bill Clinton ahead of Bob Dole by 14 points–the actual margin was 9. In 1988, Kohut, then at Gallup, had George H.W. Bush ahead of Michael Dukakis by 12 points–the actual margin was 8. And in 1980, Gallup had Ronald Reagan ahead of Jimmy Carter by only 3 points in their final poll. Reagan won by 10. Notice that in all three of the elections involving incumbents, the final poll overestimated the incumbent’s support.
In addition, their equal allocation of undecided voters between the incumbent and challenger is contrary to the normal tendency of undecided voters to break in favor of the challenger by a wide margin.
And there’s more. The current Pew sample of likely voters consists of 37.3 percent Republicans and 33.6 percent Democrats. That’s right–a 3.7 percent Republican identification advantage. Of course we know that every national exit poll since 1988 has had a Democratic identification advantage of between 3 and 5 points. It is highly unlikely that in a very high turnout election in 2004, Republicans will outnumber Democrats.
Finally, here are a couple of numbers from the Pew Poll that are revealing. John Kerry is leading among independents by 48 percent to 44 percent and Kerry is also leading among those who have already voted by 48 percent to 47 percent.

Today’s tracking polls show more a mixed bag than yesterday in terms of movement favoring Bush or Kerry–which is the typical pattern, as Alan Abramowitz has noted. (You can find all the relevant data and links at NowChannel.com.)
Here are today’s results:
WaPo LV: 48-48 tie, from 49-48 Bush yesterday
WaPo RV: 48-47 Kerry, unchanged from 48-47 Kerry yesterday
Fox 3way LV: 46-46 tie, from 47-45 Bush yesterday
Fox 3way RV: 47-45 Kerry, from 46-46 tie yesterday
Zogby: 48-48 tie from 47-46 Kerry lead yesterday
Rasmussen: 48.1-47.1 Bush, from 47.9-47.1 Bush yesterday
TIPP 3way LV: 48-43 Bush, from 46-44 Bush yesterday
Note: over last two days, WaPo and Fox have moved steadily toward Kerry; TIPP steadily toward Bush.
Note: Today’s WaPo RV result makes 6 out of 7 days that Kerry has been ahead in their RV sample.
Note: At this stage of the election in 2000, Bush was ahead of Gore by 2 points in the Zogby tracking poll, by 4 points in the ABC/WP tracking poll and by 9 points in the TIPP tracking poll.
Note: All the polls, save TIPP, imply something very close to a dead heat. Chris Bowers of MyDD has a good analysis today of how such a result, if correct, fundamentally favors Kerry.

By Alan Abramowitz
In a previous posting, I pointed out that there was no consistency in the day-to-day movements of the (then) four national tracking polls, suggesting that these shifts were basically random and that the underlying division of the electorate between Bush and Kerry was not changing. Since then, political junkies like me have discovered yet another set of tracking polls to obsess about–the Zogby 10 state tracking poll.
Now I respect John Zogby, even though he is considered something of a pariah in the polling community for, among other things, his use of a rigid party identification weighting scheme in his national polls. But four years ago, Zogby also undertook a series of state tracking polls in the final days of the campaign and the results were decidedly mixed. Some of Zogby’s final state polls were very accurate but some were wildly inaccurate. The most notable example of the latter was Zogby’s final poll in California which showed Al Gore leading George Bush by a meager 1 percentage point. On Election Day, Gore swamped Bush in the Golden State by 12 percentage points.
So based on his track record, there are reasons to be skeptical about the results of Zogby’s 2004 state tracking polls. For example, Zogby’s current tracking poll shows George Bush leading John Kerry by 9 points in New Mexico. This is simply not plausible. Al Gore narrowly carried New Mexico in 2000 and since then the Hispanic proportion of the New Mexico electorate has increased. For some reason, perhaps a lack of Spanish-speaking interviewers, the Zogby tracking poll is clearly off the mark in New Mexico.
But the main point that I want to make here is not that some of Zogby’s state polls are probably inaccurate, but that the day-to-day movements of these polls across the ten states are totally inconsistent. There have been rather dramatic shifts in the relative standing of the candidates in some of these states, but these shifts show no consistent pattern. For example, since Zogby released his first tracking poll results on October 24, George Bush has gained 9 points of margin in Colorado and Michigan, but John Kerry has gained 11 points of margin in Wisconsin and 5 points in Florida. In just the past two nights, Bush has gained 8 points in Ohio and 6 points in Colorado. Pretty scary, right? But in the same two nights, John Kerry has gained 5 points in Wisconsin, 4 points in Minnesota, and 3 points in Florida and Michigan.
The average correlation in the day-to-day movements between each state and the other nine states ranges from -.16 for Michigan to .02 for Pennsylvania. The average correlation across all 10 states is -.08.
Since October 24 the mean shift in the margin between Kerry and Bush across the ten states has been exactly zero. In the past 2 days, the mean shift has been 0.2 points toward Kerry.
Conclusion–there is nothing going on here. The day-to-day shifts in the Zogby state tracking polls, like the day-to-day shifts in the national tracking polls are basically random. So stop obsessing. Do something useful. Go carve a pumpkin and make sure that everyone you know who hasn’t already voted gets to the polls on Tuesday.

John Kerry leads George Bush in Iowa 48-45 percent of LV/AV’s, according to a Des Moines Register Poll conducted 10/25-9.

Bush leads Kerry 51-47 percent of Virginia LV’s, according to a SurveyUSA Poll conducted 10/27-9.
John Kerry and George Bush are tied at 49 percent of Nevada LV’s, according to a SurveyUSA Poll conducted 10/28-9.
John Kerry leads George Bush 49-46 percent of New Hampshire LV’s, according to a Concord Monitor Poll conducted 10/26-28.
Kerry leads Bush 48-47 percent of Pennsylvania LV’s, according to a Temple/Inquirer Poll conducted 10/22-7.
Kerry leads Bush 49-41 percent of Minnesota LV’s, according to a Star-Tribune Poll conducted 10/26-9.

Yesterday, I mentioned two sites that do EV calculations based on polls–NowChannel.com and Electoral Vote Predictor 2004. And, of course, there are many, many others.
But, in the end, the estimates they provide cannot, by their very nature (they are driven by the latest polls and only the latest polls), incorporate the wide range of historical and campaign data that are relevant to thinking through a state’s probable electoral outcome this year. For that, we have to fall back on that old stand-by: the educated judgement of an actual person sifting through all available evidence.
Here’s a good example of what I have in mind. “mattb25” over the Daily Kos offers an assessment that, in his description:

1. Assigned Bush and Kerry their safe states
2. Briefly examine[d] five states that are pretty strongly leaning Bush but could conceivably go Kerry: Missouri, Nevada, Colorado, West Virginia & Arkansas
3. [Took] a closer look at the nine states that, in my view, are 99% certain to determine the election: Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, & New Hampshire. Please note that I DO NOT consider these states toss-ups, like much of the ignorant SCLM does–but they are the states that the campaigns are playing for right now.

I strongly recommend you read his piece in full. He does an excellent job of combining a critical analysis of available polling data with reasonable judgements about the state of the campaign and underlying political trends and history in a given state. The result is a solid assessment that takes you a lot farther than any purely-poll-driven EV analysis possibly can.

John Kerry leads George Bush 49-48 percent of nation-wide RV’s, according to an American Research Group Poll conducted 10/28-30. The poll also found Kerry leading among Independents 48-45 percent.

We’ve discussed how uncorrelated the movements of the tracking polls have tended to be–they rarely seemed to show coherent movement in one direction. But it’s interesting to note that, even with the addition of a new tracking poll (Fox), the movement today was generally all in one direction: Kerry’s. (You can find all the relevant data and links at NowChannel.com.)
Here are today’s results:
Zogby: 47-46 Kerry from a 46-46 tie yesterday
Rasmussen: 47.9-47.1 Bush, from 48.7-46.7 Bush yesterday
WaPo LV: 49-48 Bush, from 50-47 Bush yesterday
WaPo RV: 48-47 Kerry, from 48-46 Bush yesterday
Fox 3way LV: 47-45 Bush, from 50-45 Bush yesterday
Fox 3way RV: 46-46 tie, from 48-46 Bush yesterday
The once exception to that pro-Kerry movement: the TIPP poll which (3way) was 46-44 Bush today, compared to a 46-46 tie yesterday.
Note: Today’s WaPo RV result makes 5 out of 6 days that Kerry has been ahead in their RV sample.
Note: At this stage of the election in 2000, Bush was ahead of Gore by 4 points in the Zogby tracking poll, by 4 points in the ABC/WP tracking poll and by 7 points in the TIPP tracking poll.