AT THE BEGINNING of the presidential campaign last winter, President Bush and his strategists figured he’d wind up leading his Democratic opponent by 2 or 3 points on the eve of the November 2 election. Sure enough, he is. But he got here by a far more circuitous route than anyone in his camp expected. The Bush team thought the Democrat would take the lead after his convention, then fade in the debates. The opposite happened.
Unless you believe quite a few arguable things that Democrats insist are true, the president is in a position to win a second White House term. One Democratic belief is that massive voter registration will bring millions of new voters to the polls for Kerry, voters whom pollsters haven’t caught up with. That’s possible. Another is that between now and Election Day, Bush won’t pick up any ground at all, while Kerry will. That would make all the difference since Bush, though ahead, is stuck in the high 40s in poll matchups against Kerry. A president’s vote percentage is usually the same as the last Gallup poll. So if it’s under 50 percent, Bush loses. Maybe. Finally, Democrats claim the late undecideds go overwhelmingly for the challenger. They’re wrong about that.
Bush suffered through four turning points in the campaign. He entered the year in a strong position, but lost his lead after David Kay reported there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Kerry won the Democratic nomination. That was the first turn. But the conventions went badly for Kerry and swimmingly for Bush, so on Labor Day the president was back in the lead–turn number two.
Bush was cocky going into the first debate and his aides assumed he’d perform well, since the subject matter, national security, is his strong suit. He flopped and within a few days, Kerry had closed the gap. That was the third turning point, and the fourth came two weeks later after the final debate, which Bush won. The soundbite that emerged was Kerry’s mention of Mary Cheney, the vice president’s daughter, as a lesbian. That went over poorly, especially with women, and Bush regained the lead.
Could Bush still lose? Sure. My rule of thumb is that the future in politics is never a straight-line projection of the present. Even a few days is enough time for something damaging to Bush to occur. In 2000, Bush was 5 or 6 points ahead, or so he thought, with a week to go. Then Democrats leaked Bush’s drunk-driving arrest of years before and he sank like a stone, losing the popular vote. Bush’s advisers are worried. They fear a revelation of another bit of unfavorable personal information about Bush, true or not. Or a Bush mistake, a verbal gaffe perhaps. Or a terrorist attack.
As for being swamped by a record turnout of new Democratic voters–that’s not a major Bush concern. The Bush folks think many of the newly registered won’t actually vote. Besides, Republican voter registration drives in Ohio and Florida have produced more new voters than Democratic efforts have. And, the Bush camp feels, these voters in Republican areas are more likely to go to the polls or vote early.
The undecideds who make up their minds at the last minute? For good reason, Republicans don’t buy the idea that these voters go strongly to the challenger. In 1976 and even in 1992, they tilted toward incumbent presidents running for reelection. In 1968 and 2000, vice presidents were virtual incumbents and the late deciding vote went to them. Also, Bush strategist Matthew Dowd says, these 4 or 5 percent of voters who are undecided are not liberals or folks otherwise hostile to Bush but are middle-class moderates or conservatives, many of them regular churchgoers. And Dowd cites the University of Michigan’s tracking of presidential races over many decades that has found undecideds split evenly between the candidates. Of course, some of them won’t vote.
The most worrisome factor for Bush is the job approval number, probably the most predictive single indicator of voter preference. In the Fox News poll, for example, Bush leads Kerry by 4 points, but he’s only at 49 percent in job approval. Okay, that’s hardly evidence for predicting a Bush defeat. But it is disturbing. Then, closer to Election Day, there’s the final Gallup number (52 percent now) and the average of Bush’s level of support in all major polls (48.4 percent now, according to RealClear Politics). Democratic experts assume the president can’t get a higher percentage than either on Election Day. Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times points out that of eight incumbents who’ve sought reelection since 1952, five got less than the Gallup percentage and two matched it. Only the first President Bush finished ahead of the Gallup number and only by .7 percent. He lost the election to Bill Clinton.
At the very least, the Gallup number and the average of other polls should be worth a glance on the eve of the election. So should the voter-turnout efforts of the two parties. The Republican 72-hour plan was in operation in 2000 and did so-so. In the 2002 midterm election, however, that plan worked marvelously well, and Republican turnout was far better than Democratic. Democrats were smart enough to learn a lesson that year and have improved their own turnout plan.
It’s possible, though, that all this won’t matter much and what happened earlier was decisive. The 9/11 attacks made national security the paramount issue and not the Democratic staples–economy, education, health care. This would favor Bush. But the Iraq war inflamed his opponents, who seemed to have all the political energy. This favors Kerry. In the larger scheme of things, 9/11 trumps Iraq, and so my guess is Bush wins. But it’s only a guess.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
