November 01, 2004
momentum
For the last two days, electoral-vote.com has tracked a shift in all the most recent state polls, with Kerry suddenly leading Bush in electoral vote predictions, 298 to 231. There are ample reasons: Kerry seems to have finally built some serious momentum in his slow, consistent, deliberate way, and how can anyone ignore the constant bad news for Bush: in the last couple days alone, we had over 300 tons of high exploives unaccounted for, Osama looking healthy and fit and trying to tell us how to vote, and Eminem calling him a liar on Saturday Night Live (in what looked to me, BTW, like a lip synched performance — what’s the deal with that?). Anyway, here is the newly unmasked Andrew Tanenbaum’s summary from today:We have another bumper crop of polls today, 50 in all. Since Sept. 1, the total number of polls in the Polling data file is 937. Toss in another 252 polls from May 24 to Aug. 31 and we have the most studied election in the history of the world. And what’s the conclusion? Nobody knows. If we just look at the most recent poll in every state, John Kerry will be elected the 44th President of the United States tomorrow with 298 votes in the electoral college vs. 231 for George Bush, with New Mexico and New Hampshire exact ties. However, even if Bush carries both of these states, Kerry still wins 298 to 240. But again, a caution is in order, Kerry’s margin is razor thin in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio. Pennsylvania will probably go to Kerry. Ohio is more iffy. Bush won it in 2000 and stands a decent chance of winning it in 2004 although he trails by 2% using the average of the Zogby and Gallup polls taken Oct. 28-31. Thus after 4 years of campaigning, more money spent on attack ads than the gross national product of small countries, and an exhausted electorate, what do we have? In the immortal words of Yogi Berra: “It’s deja vu all over again.” The whole thing comes down to Florida. where Kerry currently holds a tenuous 48% to 47% lead according to the most recent poll, from Zogby. The reality is that everything depends on turnout, how many voting machines fail, and how much monkey business happens. Oh, yeah. And there are those 10,000 lawyers ready to do what lawyers are trained to do—file lawsuits.
