The Race Has Changed

From the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation:

In this edition of Public Opinion Watch:

(covering polls and related articles from the weeks of Sept. 27-Oct. 10, 2004)

• State of the Race
• A Note on the Washington Post/ABC News Tracking Poll

State of the Race

On the eve of the third and final presidential debate, it's a good time to take a step back and assess how the race has changed since very late September – that is, since right before the first debate.

At that time, Bush was running a consistent lead over Kerry though, as I argued repeatedly, the magnitude of that lead was likely fairly modest, despite the gaudy results obtained by some public polls.

Not only that, Bush was continuing to display a number of underlying weaknesses that made even that small lead quite vulnerable. As Guy Molyneux pointed out in his excellent article, "The Big Five-Oh,"

in incumbent elections, the incumbent's percentage of the vote is a far better indicator of the state of the race than the spread. In fact, the percentage of the vote an incumbent president receives in surveys is an extraordinarily accurate predictor of the percentage he will receive on election day – even though the survey results also include a pool of undecided voters. Hence the 50-percent rule: An incumbent who fails to poll above 50 percent is in grave jeopardy of losing his job.

And, before the debates, Bush was consistently averaging under 50 percent of the vote in trial heats. Not only that, but

polls in [the battleground] states actually reveal an even more precarious position for the president. Taken together, Bush receives a bit less support in these critical states than in the nation overall. In the latest NBC/WSJ poll, Bush receives 49 percent support nationally but only 47 percent in the battleground states, a typical finding. (Bush and Al Gore split the vote in these states evenly, 48 percent to 48 percent.)

More importantly, if we take an average of recent published polls of registered voters in individual states, Bush falls short of the 49-percent benchmark in nearly every one, including Ohio (47 percent), Florida (47 percent), and Pennsylvania (46 percent). Wisconsin (51 percent) is the only crucial battleground state in which Bush appears to have a fairly solid lead. Bush even fails to clear the 49-percent bar in such 2000 Bush states as West Virginia (47 percent), Missouri (49 percent), and Arkansas (48 percent).

The root of Bush's weak support in these terms was pretty simple: people still thought he was doing a lousy job running the country, especially in key areas like the economy, Iraq, and health care. These indicators stubbornly refused to budge during the entire time Bush was maintaining a lead.

In sum, Bush was ahead before the first debate not because his campaign had succeeded in convincing voters that Bush was doing a great job, but rather because his campaign had managed to shift a significant amount of attention away from Bush's poor performance and onto Kerry's alleged character flaws. Therefore, Bush's lead was likely to dissipate as soon as voters' attention was drawn back to his actual performance in office and the concrete policy alternatives proposed by Kerry.

That is, in fact, what has happened. The debates have allowed Kerry-Edwards to refocus the campaign around Bush's record and Kerry's alternatives, thereby taking advantage of the weaknesses Bush never managed to fix in August-September. This was particularly true of the first debate where Kerry's strong performance put Bush on the defensive in what was supposed to be his area of strength: foreign policy.

The immediate post-debate polls all showed Kerry a clear winner: 43 percent to 28 percent among uncommitted voters (Knowledge Networks for CBS News); 45 percent to 36 percent (ABC News); 45 percent to 32 percent (Democracy Corps); and 53 percent to 37 percent (CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll). And, across the latter three polls, no matter Kerry's overall margin, he always won by more among undecided and independent voters. For example, in the ABC News poll, he won independents by 20 points, and in the Democracy Corps survey, he won undecided voters by 31 points.