John Kerry leads George Bush 59-30 percent of Latino RV’s in 11 states, according to a Univision/Washington Post/Thomas Rivera Policy Institute Poll conducted 10/4-16.
Note that Matthew Dowd, chief Bush campaign strategist, has said that Bush needs 38-40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004 to win. Looks like Bush isn’t going to make that target–or even come close.

New LA Times Polls, conducted 10/22-26 provide the following results for RV’s in 3 key states:
Florida – Bush leads 49-41 percent, 3 percent for Nader.
Ohio – Kerry ahead 49-45 percent in 2-way matchup.
Pennsylvania – Kerry up 48-45 percent head-to-head.
Kerry leads Bush among PA RV’s 49-46 percent in a Gallup Poll conducted 10/23-6.
Kerry leads Bush 48-47 percent of Iowa RV’s in a Gallup Poll conducted 10/22-25.

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.

John Kerry leads George Bush 48-47 percent of nation-wide LV’s, with 1 percent for Nader, 1 percent other and 2 percent not sure, according to a Harris Poll conducted 10/21-25.
Note that, since Harris is using their more restrictive definition of likely voters in this poll (registered, absolutely certain to vote, voted in 2000 if old enough to vote), this result actually represents an 9 point swing in Kerry’s favor since their mid-October poll, when Kerry was behind 51-43 among this particular flavor of likely voters.

In a poll released October 25 the LA Times has Kerry/Edwards leading Bush/Cheney 48% to 47% in a 2-way RV matchup.

The latest Democracy Corps survey, conducted Oct 23-25 Shows John Kerry leading George Bush 49-47 in their national sample and 52-45 in the battleground states. The poll also found that Kerry is ahead by 22 pts among new voters and includes substantial additional information on the latest trends among population subgroups and target voters.

The latest poll of Pennsylvania voters, conducted by Philadelphia Daily News/Keystone Oct 19-23 shows John Kerry leading 49 to 44 percent among registered voters and 51 to 46 percent among likely voters. The survey also shows Bush’s approval rating at an anemic 42%.

The latest polls from the American Research Group, conducted October 23-25, show John Kerry ahead in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Earlier ARG surveys also showed Kerry ahead in New Mexico and Oregon and tied in Wisconsin and Iowa. The complete ARG results are shown below.