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10/26/04

The Pull of the Polls

Ok, this article in the Akron Beacon Journal points out what I have been thinking for awhile now . . . polling this year is meaningless. The problem is all of these polling methods are based on 2000 concepts: back before 9-11, when peace and prosperity still reigned, both candidates seemed like middle of the line moderates . . . basically back when there was little reason to get involved. (Take a moment to remember 2000 again for a second, yes remember, that was back when you still had a job . . . in 2000 could we have believed then that just four years later a draft would seem imminent and we would be involved in a military quagmire very much like Vietnam?)

Lets look at key issues that are different about this election:

People who are Registered voters ARE Likely Voters - that is the whole reason they got registered this time

A huge amount of young people have cellphones as their primary phone and are not being polled at all

Polls, like the Gallup Poll, veers naturally to the right based on their odd assumption that more Republicans will vote than Democrats, and thereby more Republican respondents are "counted" than Democrats are. Even so, among registered voters in the Gallup Poll, Bush is only leading 49% to Kerry's 47%.

Everyone now knows what a difference a vote makes.

Oddly enough, what actually encourages me the most were the polls in the 2000 election. On this same date in 2000, Bush was running 49% to 43% Gore. Remember what actually happened? After running an extremely lackluster campaign, basically not even really trying, Gore got 500,000 votes more than Bush. Did he actually win Florida? That of course is up to debate . . . numerous independent studies came to mixed conclusions. The point is, by running a lackluster campaign with a lot of disenfranchised voters, we still won. Liberals are more unified and fired up than they've ever been this time around.

Personally, I believe that this country has more liberals than conservatives in it, and more people that want John Kerry to win than George Bush. I believe that the Republican party knows this too, which is why they playing the same tricks they did in the last election, trying to get an overachieving "felon" list again in Florida (they were stopped), trying to disqualify registrations that were printed on the wrong weight of paper (they were stopped), trying to scare black voters in Florida away from the polls (they are being watched), blatantly tearing up Democratic registrations (they have been found out) and trying to dissuade voters in line from casting their votes. These are not exactly the actions of a confident GOP. They are running scared, because they know Democrats ARE the party for the disenfranchised, and we're adding a lot of them to our "base" in this election.