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Nbadan
09-10-2004, 03:16 AM
The Republican National Convention is over and score it a huge success for President George W. Bush. For one solid week he was on message and got Americans who watched to listen to the message he intends to carry in the fall campaign: leadership, decisiveness and success battling the war on terrorism. The convention actually followed another big week for Mr. Bush and equally dismal one for his opponent, Democratic Senator John Kerry.

Now the first polls are out. I have Mr. Bush leading by 2 points in the simple head-to-head match up - 46% to 44%. Add in the other minor candidates and it becomes a 3 point advantage for the President - 46% to 43%. This is no small achievement. The President was behind 50% to 43% in my mid-August poll and he essentially turned the race around by jumping 3 points as Mr. Kerry lost 7 points. Impressive by any standards.

For the first time in my polling this year, Mr. Bush lined up his Republican ducks in a row by receiving 90% support of his own party, went ahead among Independents, and now leads by double-digits among key groups like investors. Also for the first time the President now leads among Catholics. Mr. Kerry is on the ropes.

Two new polls came out immediately after mine (as of this writing) by the nation's leading weekly news magazines. Both Time's 52% to 41% lead among likely voters and Newsweek's 54% to 43% lead among registered voters give the President a healthy 11 point lead. I have not yet been able to get the details of Time's methodology but I have checked out Newsweek's poll. Their sample of registered voters includes 38% Republican, 31% Democrat and 31% Independent voters. If we look at the three last Presidential elections, the spread was 34% Democrats, 34% Republicans and 33% Independents (in 1992 with Ross Perot in the race); 39% Democrats, 34% Republicans, and 27% Independents in 1996; and 39% Democrats, 35% Republicans and 26% Independents in 2000. While party identification can indeed change within the electorate, there is no evidence anywhere to suggest that Democrats will only represent 31% of the total vote this year. In fact, other competitors have gone in the opposite direction. The Los Angeles Times released a poll in June of this year with 38% Democrats and only 25% Republicans. And Gallup's party identification figures have been all over the place.

This is no small consideration. Given the fact that each candidate receives anywhere between eight in ten and nine in ten support from voters in his own party, any change in party identification trades point for point in the candidate's total support. My polls use a party weight of 39% Democrat, 35% Republican and 26% Independent. Thus in examining the Newsweek poll, add three points for Mr. Bush because of the percentage of Republicans in their poll, then add another 8% for Mr. Bush for the reduction in Democrats. It is not hard to see how we move from my two-point lead to their eleven-point lead for the President.

I will save the detailed methodological discussion for another time. But I will remind readers that my polling has come closest to the final results in both 1996 and 2000.

None of this takes away from the President's achievement. He got out of his party's convention everything he needed to launch his campaign in earnest in the closing two months. But my poll still reveals lurking shadows for him. He still has a net negative job performance rating, a negative re-elect (i.e. more voters think it is time for someone new than feel he deserves re-election) and a net negative wrong direction for the country.

The poll also suggests that Mr. Kerry is behind and has a lot of work to do to refocus the campaign on the issues that must work for him: the economy, health care, and the execution of the war in Iraq. We also see now that at least in the short run, the advertising campaign against the Senator about his military service in Vietnam has raised questions about his integrity and has caused his personal unfavorable numbers to jump.

But with all that said, it simply is not an 11 point race. It just isn't.

Zogby (http://zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=859)

Most polls had Gore behind W. by 4-5 points going into the 2000 Presidential election and we all saw how close that election turn out. My opinion is that W's convention bounce wasn't more than a 5 points. Apparently, fear still works on the general populous and thanks to a compliant mass media, who have everything to gain by promoting public paranoia, are quite happy to be tools for the GOP fear machine to feed.

Tommy Duncan
09-10-2004, 03:19 AM
My opinion is that you will cite anything that makes Kerry's campaign not look like the weak pile of shit it is. Zogby has his own personal issues about Bush in this election, to say the least.

Nbadan
09-10-2004, 03:36 AM
In the last 30 days we have seen the momentum swing from W. to Kerry back to Kerry to Bush. What makes you think the next 50 days will be any different? Zogby predicted a W. win in 2000, so where you are getting that Zogby 'has issues' with W. is baffling.

Tommy Duncan
09-10-2004, 03:40 AM
Kerry had his convention and there was very little movement. Bush had the superior convention and apparently the terrorism issue was a tad bit more significant than the myriad handouts issues which Democrats love to use to buy their way into power.

You don't know why I might think that Zogby would have some problems with Bush?

exstatic
09-10-2004, 12:26 PM
Zogby has his own personal issues about Bush in this election, to say the least.

Does he hover over your house in a black helicopter, MB? :wacko

Tommy Duncan
09-10-2004, 12:39 PM
www.prospect.org/print/V1...ney-c.html (http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/1/mooney-c.html)


Zogby does have has his detractors among the polling fraternity. "The pollsters have a view of Zogby that doesn't seem to be shared by the news organizations," observes Warren Mitofsky, who sits on the polling review board of the NCPP. Zogby's performance deteriorated somewhat in the 2002 elections (which he says prompted an internal audit). According to an NCPP postmortem, Zogby got five races wrong out of 17 polled on a nonpartisan basis. His final Colorado Senate poll, for instance, put Democratic challenger Tom Strickland ahead of Republican incumbent Wayne Allard by a margin of 49 percent to 44 percent. (Allard actually won with 51 percent to Strickland's 45 percent.) Following the election, Zogby put out a mea culpa comparing his firm to the New York Yankees, which despite failing to win the 2002 World Series was still "the best team in baseball."



It wasn't always clear that John Zogby would end up a pollster: For a while he was a consumer activist in his hometown of Utica, N.Y., and at one point even ran for mayor. In the early 1980s, he was heavily involved, along with his brother James Zogby, in Arab-American political activism. But since the founding of his company in 1984, Zogby, a second generation Lebanese American, has become a dominant figure in the polling industry. Today no one doubts Zogby's political insightfulness, and the fact that he still works from Utica allows him to inject a helpful outside perspective into the cliquish world of Beltway politics.

Nbadan
09-10-2004, 05:46 PM
...and yet you haven't questioned the methodology or possible motivations behind the Times and Newsweek polls.


One week after accepting the Republican party nomination and delivering a stump speech focused on the “war on terrorism”, President George W. Bush moves ahead of Senator John Kerry by four points (46%-42%), according to a new Zogby America poll. The telephone poll of 1018 likely voters was conducted Wednesday through Thursday (September 8-9, 2004). Overall results have a margin of sampling error of +/-3.1%.

President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney hold a two-point lead over Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the head-to-head presidential ticket match-up (47%-45%). * No change since last month’s polling.

President Bush’s overall job performance rating has virtually remained the same as last month at 48%, with more than half of respondents continuing to express their disapproval.

Nearly half of respondents say that the country is headed on the wrong track (48%), while 46% feel the U.S. is on the right track.

snip

Zogby (http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=863)

Yonivore
09-10-2004, 05:48 PM
Okay, Nbadan, I'll be the one to break it to you.

We only bring up polls in this forum to mock you and to ridicule your obsession on them.

Sorry to be the one to have to tell you that.

Nbadan
09-10-2004, 05:51 PM
Oh, who cares. It's not like I'm not gonna report it anyway. If you want to lean on your biased polls you are free to do so, but on Nov. 2nd everyone will know the truth. (that's assuming that W. and the Supremes don't pull another coup)

Yonivore
09-10-2004, 06:10 PM
Another coup?

You still don't understand the U.S. Constitution?