Morning Report
Jim Geraghty at the Kerry Spot has some great inside GOP information on the election. His inside source tells him that in Ohio (which is becoming the Florida of 2004), Bush is still leading in GOP internal polls:
A second source with close ties to the White House says Bush was leading in the internal polls for Sunday night and showed no significant slippage.
Geraghty also posts Matthew Dowd's (chief strategist of the Bush campaign) final memo on the state of the race -- some highlights:
Heading into Election Day, President Bush is well-positioned to win re-election. The average of all national polls released in the past 48 hours shows the President leading John Kerry by 2 points, 48% to 46%.
President Bush's lead is built on the higher intensity of his support compared to Kerry's. As the Pew analysis noted, President Bush registers a higher percentage of strong supporters in the final weekend of the campaign than any candidate since former President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Furthermore, early and absentee voting has built up the President's lead even before the polling places open. The recent CBS News/New York Times survey reveals that 20% of voters have already cast their ballots, and President Bush leads among them by 8 points, 51% to 43%.
Dowd goes on to predict that undecideds will, at worst, evenly split among Bush and Kerry. This is significant in that, of the very few who are predicting a Kerry victory, they are basing this on the stale notion that undecideds break roughly 90% for the challenger. Such woeful prognosticators are relying on archaic data in reaching this conclusion without recognizing that the post 9/11 dynamic of this election is showing this to be false.
Athletes are also kicking in for Bush in the count-down to election day. Curt Schilling was on the stump with Bush in Ohio yesterday. Here's Curt:
These past couple of weeks, Sox fans all throughout New England trusted me when it was my turn on the mound. Now you can trust me on this: President Bush is the right leader for our country."
While this may assure W will fall to a crushing defeat in New York, I think it probably plays pretty well in Ohio. (And to think I hated Schilling when he was mowing down my Angels).
And as for Wisconsin, Jim Gegraghty is reporting that an athlete with quite a bit of pull in the cheese state is helping to get out the vote for Bush:
"My mom received a recorded message from Brett Favre supporting Bush. Reference was made to today's win vs. the Redskins. I would imagine this is playing all over Wisconsin."
With the combination of Favre supporting Bush and Kerry's embarrassing "Lambert Field" reference earlier in the campaign, I'm feeling pretty good about W's chances in Wisconsin.
Polipundit, after a well-reasoned poll analysis, makes this prediction:
In the end, it always comes down to getting the butts out and voting, but if you want a clear call, it's going to be Bush, and it's going to be big. Not saying this so we can relax, but so we can be optimistic while we work.
Also, via Realclearpolitics, here's a roundup of tv pundits predictions for the election. The one that stands out here is Bill Kristol's prediction of Bush winning a whopping 348 electoral votes. Of all of these pundits, Kristol is probably the best connected with GOP insiders.
Of course all of this predicting and hand-wringing about the polls is now meaningless and what really matters is that those who support the president get out and vote. The conventional word in political circles is that the GOP has the edge on the ground and voters are primed to rush to the polls tomorrow in support of Bush. After 2000, let's take nothing for granted and make sure we do our part in punching a chad for W and for America.
A second source with close ties to the White House says Bush was leading in the internal polls for Sunday night and showed no significant slippage.
Geraghty also posts Matthew Dowd's (chief strategist of the Bush campaign) final memo on the state of the race -- some highlights:
Heading into Election Day, President Bush is well-positioned to win re-election. The average of all national polls released in the past 48 hours shows the President leading John Kerry by 2 points, 48% to 46%.
President Bush's lead is built on the higher intensity of his support compared to Kerry's. As the Pew analysis noted, President Bush registers a higher percentage of strong supporters in the final weekend of the campaign than any candidate since former President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Furthermore, early and absentee voting has built up the President's lead even before the polling places open. The recent CBS News/New York Times survey reveals that 20% of voters have already cast their ballots, and President Bush leads among them by 8 points, 51% to 43%.
Dowd goes on to predict that undecideds will, at worst, evenly split among Bush and Kerry. This is significant in that, of the very few who are predicting a Kerry victory, they are basing this on the stale notion that undecideds break roughly 90% for the challenger. Such woeful prognosticators are relying on archaic data in reaching this conclusion without recognizing that the post 9/11 dynamic of this election is showing this to be false.
Athletes are also kicking in for Bush in the count-down to election day. Curt Schilling was on the stump with Bush in Ohio yesterday. Here's Curt:
These past couple of weeks, Sox fans all throughout New England trusted me when it was my turn on the mound. Now you can trust me on this: President Bush is the right leader for our country."
While this may assure W will fall to a crushing defeat in New York, I think it probably plays pretty well in Ohio. (And to think I hated Schilling when he was mowing down my Angels).
And as for Wisconsin, Jim Gegraghty is reporting that an athlete with quite a bit of pull in the cheese state is helping to get out the vote for Bush:
"My mom received a recorded message from Brett Favre supporting Bush. Reference was made to today's win vs. the Redskins. I would imagine this is playing all over Wisconsin."
With the combination of Favre supporting Bush and Kerry's embarrassing "Lambert Field" reference earlier in the campaign, I'm feeling pretty good about W's chances in Wisconsin.
Polipundit, after a well-reasoned poll analysis, makes this prediction:
In the end, it always comes down to getting the butts out and voting, but if you want a clear call, it's going to be Bush, and it's going to be big. Not saying this so we can relax, but so we can be optimistic while we work.
Also, via Realclearpolitics, here's a roundup of tv pundits predictions for the election. The one that stands out here is Bill Kristol's prediction of Bush winning a whopping 348 electoral votes. Of all of these pundits, Kristol is probably the best connected with GOP insiders.
Of course all of this predicting and hand-wringing about the polls is now meaningless and what really matters is that those who support the president get out and vote. The conventional word in political circles is that the GOP has the edge on the ground and voters are primed to rush to the polls tomorrow in support of Bush. After 2000, let's take nothing for granted and make sure we do our part in punching a chad for W and for America.
posted by Wonderdog | 10:06 AM | Permalink
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3 comments
3 Comments:
There's a great commentary in today's Wall Street Journal, "Setting the Record Straight on Tora Bora," by Michael DeLong. Alas, you need to be a subscriber ($$) to get to it, or I'd post the link. Here's the opening paragraph:
In recent days, John Kerry has repeatedly accused President Bush of having "outsourced the job" in Tora Bora to kill Osama bin Laden. Knight Ridder reporters concluded that in Tora Bora we "relied on three Afghan warlords" to catch bin Laden, "ignored" warnings from our own officers about incorrect methodology, and that we also relied on the Afghan warlords as our blocking forces, thus letting more than 1,000 al Qaeda fighters escape. As the No. 2 general at CentCom in charge of the Afghanistan War, I can say with certainty that all of these allegations are incorrect. And it is past time someone set the record straight on what really happened in Tora Bora.
(Lt. Gen. Michael "Rifle" DeLong, former deputy commander of CentCom, is the author, with Noah Lukeman, of "Inside Centcom: The Unvarnished Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," just published by Regnery.)
Another great piece in today's WSJ is "Right Leader, Right Time" by Tommy Franks. Opening paragraph:
The decision we make tomorrow will have a greater impact on the security of our country than any presidential election in my memory. America is at war on a scale unmatched in scope and importance since World War II. The threat today isn't monolithic like Hitler's Germany or Hirohito's Japan -- or bin Laden's al Qaeda of the '90s. But it's just as deadly, with diverse cells in 60 countries, linked by ideology and hatred. The war is global, complex and lethal, and the fundamental choice we must make is whether we fight that war offensively, by pursing the terrorists relentlessly around the world, or defensively, by waiting for them to strike again on American soil. There's no third choice. We cannot play for a tie. America did not create terrorism, terrorists did. And now we must wage war until we win -- no half measures, no equivocation, no "global test."
(Gen. Franks, until recently director of Central Command, is author of "American Soldier" (Regan, 2004) and a member of Veterans for Bush.)
And, final plug for today's WSJ: "How Many Gays Do You Know?" by Fred Barnes. Here are the opening paragraphs:
A Republican official met recently with the Washington staff of a national newspaper. The official quickly became frustrated with the inability of the 20 or so journalists to understand the world of politics beyond the East Coast. How many of them, he asked, actually knew a born-again Christian? Only a couple of hands went up. And how many knew a homosexual? Every member of the paper's staff raised a hand.
What makes this impromptu poll so revealing is that more than 40% of Americans consider themselves born-again or evangelical Christians. Gays are less than 5% of the population. Yet experienced journalists well acquainted with the gay community are scarcely familiar at all with conservative Christians.
So it's little wonder that the national media have overlooked the sleeper issue of the 2004 election, same-sex marriage, and social issues such as abortion. These issues are of paramount importance to born-agains, and the outcome of the presidential election may turn on them. Gay marriage is on the ballot tomorrow in 11 states and is a high visibility issue in many others.
(Mr. Barnes edits The Weekly Standard.)
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