Browse through an archive of columns by Michael Barone.
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is over. John Kerry is going to be the Democratic nominee. It’s a good time to look at the polls, to see where the race between Kerry and George W. Bush stands now. And when you look at the polls, what you see is eerily similar to the results of the 2000 presidential election.
Start with the national polls, looking at those taken since February 17–handily compiled by the invaluable realclearpolitics.com. American Research Group has the race at 48 percent Kerry, 46 percent Bush. Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: 45 percent each. Newsweek (in this cycle and the last usually the most Democratic poll): 48 percent Kerry, 45 percent Bush. CBS News: 47 percent Kerry, 46 percent Bush. Rasmussen Reports: 48 percent Bush, 45 percent Kerry. Average them, and you have 47 percent Kerry and 46 percent Bush. It looks very much like the outcome in 2000: 48 percent Gore, 48 percent Bush.
advertisement
You see much the same when you look at the statewide polls. Take those 19 polls in 14 states reported by realclearpolitics.com taken since January 31. Some are uncannily similar. One Michigan poll has the race 51 percent Kerry, 46 percent Bush–the exact same percentage by which Gore beat Bush in that heavily contested state in 2000. The other Michigan poll has it 49 percent Kerry, 44 percent Bush–the same 5-point margin. Or Pennsylvania. One poll there has it 50 percent Kerry, 45 percent Bush–one point less for each party’s candidate than in 2000. The other has 47 percent Kerry, 46 percent Bush. And Nevada, even closer in 2000, is 49 percent Bush, 48 percent Kerry. Bush’s endorsement of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository doesn’t seem to have changed the balance much in this closely divided state.
Bush has 16 and 17 percent leads in two polls in Kentucky; he carried the state by 16 points in 2000. In North Carolina, Bush leads 53 percent to 42 percent, very similar to his margin in 2000. There has been a lot of moaning in North Carolina about job losses in the furniture and textile industries, but nothing seems to have changed politically. The relatively low turnout in southern primaries and the fact that John Edwards led Kerry in the most southern-accented parts of southern states suggests that Kerry has no chance to carry any state in the South except Florida. These polls tend to confirm that conclusion.
Nor do the polls show a shift in the big states Gore carried by wide margins. Kerry leads Bush in California 53 to 40 percent and in Illinois by 53 to 41 percent in one poll and 52 to 38 percent in another–all very similar to Gore’s margin in those states in 2000.
There are some polls that are not carbon copies (antique term!) of the 2000 election results. Bush leads by 47 to 42 percent in Florida, a 5 percent lead compared with his 0.01 percent lead in the finally adjudicated Florida count in 2000. That is a margin 500 times as large. But a 5- point lead in a poll is nothing like a guarantee that you’ll carry the state in an election. A Maryland poll shows Kerry with only a 9 percent lead, as compared with Gore’s 16 percent lead in 2000. But Bush is unlikely to carry Maryland, which with its large black population was one of six Jimmy Carter states in 1980 and one of 10 Michael Dukakis states in 1988.
There are other states where Bush may have lost ground. He carried New Hampshire narrowly in 2000, but a recent poll has Kerry with 53 percent and Bush with 38 percent. On the other hand, Bush led Kerry and Howard Dean by similar margins in New Hampshire polls in November 2003 and January 2004 when Kerry and Dean were in that state, unlike the rest of the country, familiar figures. Worrying to Bush are polls showing him with only a 6 percent lead in Indiana and 8 percent in Kansas–states he carried by margins more than twice as big in 2000. Neither is likely to go Democratic (although Indiana may be in doubt if Evan Bayh is John Kerry’s vice presidential pick). The problem here is that the bulk of Indiana is very similar to non-northeast Ohio: parts of America with large numbers of manufacturing jobs that vote heavily Republican. If Bush’s margin in non-northeast Ohio is reduced as much as it is in this poll of Indiana, Bush would be behind in a state he carried by 4 percent in 2000. And no Republican has ever been elected president without carrying Ohio. Finally there is Washington State. Bush lost here by 6 percent in 2000. An early February poll showed him behind Kerry 55 to 43 percent.
The Bush/Cheney 2004 people point out, rightly, that people don’t know John Kerry as well as they will in November. A couple of weeks ago, I put it to Democratic pollster Mark Penn (Clinton 1996, Lieberman 2004) that of the 100 bits of information people will have about Kerry in November, they have only about seven bits now. "You’re wrong," Penn said. "They have only three bits now." As Kerry becomes identified as a more partisan and a more liberal figure, as he certainly will be, his high favorable/unfavorable ratings are bound to fall. The information people have about Kerry now is largely favorable. To the extent they have been following the race for the Democratic nomination, the things they have been hearing about the candidate who has won 27 of the 30 contests have been favorable. The story has been about Kerry winning, and the reasons for that are guaranteed to be favorable. Particularly since none of his Democratic rivals has run a negative ad about him, and all of them have said only a very few unfavorable things about him.
The more worrying thing for Republicans is that Bush is only even, at the most favorable interpretation, with Kerry at this point. After three years as president, and after some indisputable triumphs, he is only back to where he was in November 2000, when he was the candidate of the out party at a time of apparent peace and apparent prosperity. A stronger positive case needs to be made for Bush; and a stronger negative case against Kerry. Bush’s speech to the Republican Governors Association indicates that he knows how to make both the positive and negative cases. But now he must deliver his message, and much of it must be delivered via an old media, which, while not reliably pro-Democratic, is always reliably anti-Republican.
A good index of basic partisan feeling since the 1996 election has been the popular vote for the House of Representatives. In 1996, it was 49 percent Republican and 48.5 percent Democratic. In 1998 and 2000, it was 49 percent Republican and 48 percent Democratic–eerily similar to the 48 percent Republican and 48 percent Democratic in the 2000 presidential race. In 2002, it was a little different: 51 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic. Looking at the national and state polling figures, it looks like we are back to 1998 and 2000 again, at least temporarily. What are George W. Bush and his campaign going to do about it?
