Political Prognostications

Moving...

2006-06-21T21:05:00.000-05:00

At the invitation of its founder, I've been invited to join the brand-new political blog, Race 4 2008! This is an exciting opportunity, and I'm looking forward to working with the great team over there as we dissect the coming presidential race. I encourage you to check back here for updates, but most of my work will now appear over there, so be sure to bookmark it and visit often.

So much Bull...

2006-06-20T20:38:00.000-05:00

The Bull Moose posts a piece today on the politics of realignment, contrasting today's GOP POTUS and his political wizard with the Republican president of a century ago, William McKinley, and his key advisor, Mark Hanna. According to the Moose, Rove's long-held belief that GWB is McKinley-incarnate has been proven incorrect, with Bush/Rove failing to replicate the long-term GOP realignment McKinley and Hanna produced at the turn of the last century. I couldn't disagree more, and I find the Moose's post to be, quite frankly, a lot of bull.

The Moose begins with the following premise:

"Rove has fashioned himself as a modern Mark Hanna. Hanna created the McKinley candidacy by...manufacturing a..."different kind of Republican" who was compassionate and reached out to new immigrant groups."

Fair enough. You did your research, Moose. Tell us more.

"Alas, it was not to be for W."

Wait. So GWB isn't a compassionate Republican who reaches out to new immigrant groups? Um, weren't these very themes, you know, at the core of Bush's presidential runs? I'm just saying... Well, let's give the Moose a chance to explain himself.

"While McKinley rode a Republican ascendancy and steered a centrist course, Bush has governed from the right and may be presiding over the end of GOP dominance."

McKinley was a centrist? And that explains why he won two close elections that were mirror images of Bush's 2000 and 2004 victories? At this point, the Moose turns to James Traub of the NYT, focusing on Traub's description of the McKinley era in an effort to illustrate all the ways in which that era differs from today's political climate. Let's examine some of Traub's statements:

"First of all, McKinley was facing a particularly hapless generation of Democrats."

Um. And that's different from Pelosi/Reid/Gore/Kerry/Hillary how?

Traub next addresses McKinley's first election in 1896.

"...the (Democratic) party took a decisive turn to the left in 1896 by choosing the populist Bryan..."

Just replace "1896" with "2000" and "Bryan" with "Gore" and you still have a true statement.

"...(Bryan) ran again in 1900 and 1908."

Well, Gore didn't run again in 2004, but a Gore clone by the name of John Kerry did. Those two basically won all the same states. And the leftist base of the Democratic Party is now touting a Gore run for 2008. Once again, I'm not seeing the vast differences in these periods that apparently both Traub and Moose are cognizant of. What gives? Okay, maybe the differences are on the GOP side. Let's see what Traub has to say about McKinley's GOP.

"Second, while McKinley had the good fortune to arrive at the dawn of a new era, Bush came along three decades after Republicans broke into the Democrats' solid South to establish a new majority."

Hmm. McKinley didn't really arrive at the dawn of anything. The Republican coalition was 36 years into a majority status that had been ushered in by Lincoln. By the time McKinley came to power, the country was divided almost perfectly along regional lines, with the south and west voting Democratic and the north and east voting Republican. This is how McKinley won both of his elections --- with his second victory being slightly bigger than his first. If anything, it looked as if McKinley was presiding over the end of GOP rule until Teddy Roosevelt changed the map in 1904 by turning the broad west red. It was the equivalent of, say, Rudy Giuliani winning the GOP nod in 2008 and bringing in the vast, purple northern midwest over to the Republican column.

The problem with both Moose and Traub is that each is viewing history retrospectively instead of attempting to imagine what history would've looked like at this point during McKinley's reign. Prior to TR's 1904 victory, Taft's rout in 1908, and GOP dominance of government for the next couple of decades, many political observers of the time probably questioned McKinley's effectiveness as a party-builder and at least a few likely opined that the twilight of the Lincoln coalition was upon the nation. It had been nearly four decades since Lincoln, Democrats had won the White House twice in recent years with the very successful Grover Cleveland, McKinley couldn't quite figure out how to play to the west or south, and America appeared to be a nation with an ever-so-slight Republican edge. Despite what Moose and Traub think, this is exactly the political environment we're currently dealing with. All Republicans need is another Teddy Roosevelt to break the modern-day red/blue divide wide open and bring the Reagan Democrats from the industrial north back to the GOP with a promise of leaner, smarter government, fiscal responsibility, and a government that responds to their very real concerns in a conservative way.

Half of America won't vote for Hillary; Gore

2006-06-20T00:02:00.000-05:00

At least that's what CNN found in its latest poll on the subject of 2008. The poll presents dire news for both the former First Lady and the ex-veep; 47 percent of Americans won't vote for Hillary in 2008, while 48 percent refuse to cast a vote for Al. Compare that to only 30 percent of Americans who will refrain from voting Giuliani in '08.

It's bad news for the Democrats when both their establishment candidate and their base's fantasy candidate have nearly half of the country united against them. Polls like this demonstrate something I've long believed: the Democrats can't win in 2008, but the Republicans can lose if they nominate the wrong candidate. Example: in the same poll, a 63 percent supermajority of Americans refuse to entertain the thought of President Jeb Bush. Now, Jeb's not running in '08 and even if he did, Republicans probably wouldn't nominate him. But this number shows exactly how Republicans can lose the next election --- by selecting a candidate who is too Bush-like and attempting to play the red/blue game yet another time despite a clear indication that Americans want something a bit different this time around.

As such, my newest motto for 2008: save democracy, beat Hillary, nominate Rudy.

Al snubs Joe

2006-06-19T19:23:00.000-05:00

Gore avoids endorsing his former running mate in a not-so-subtle way when asked about this year's CT Senate race. This shouldn't be surprising. We learned in 2000 that Al Gore is a spoiled child; the resurgence in public support for the former veep is likely the result of a leadership vacuum on the Left coupled with buyers' remorse from many Bush voters. I was surprised to hear my grandparents --- prototypical Reagan Democrats --- express a desire for a Gore run in 2008 awhile back, especially considering he was too liberal for them to stomach in 2000 and has since moved to the Kossite Left.

I suppose it's human nature to associate the bad news of the last six years with the current White House occupant, and to assume that, had the election turned out differently, history would have as well. Emotive responses aside though, events like 9-11, the economic downturn, and Katrina would've occurred regardless of who won the presidency in 2000. A closet liberal turned brazen leftist is not the future of our country. If the Democrats are stupid enough to think otherwise, Gore will suffer the same fate as William Jennings Bryan, another Democrat who, a century ago, was nominated multiple times and was responsible for a string of Republican presidencies.

The "Hottest" Woman in Politics?

2006-06-17T14:25:00.000-05:00

The website Politics1 decided to take a reader survey to determine the answer to the pressing question of just exactly who is the hottest woman in American politics today. Readers chose Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee as the political world's most sought-after vixen, closely followed by Rep. Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota.

I have to part with the general public on this one. I find Herseth far more alluring than Blackburn --- and I think the most attractive woman on this site by far is Michigan state senator Whitmer, who only placed third. Perhaps it's my Rust Belt roots that cause me to prefer ladies from the fine stock of the northern midwest over the southern and western political beauties that dominate the poll. But what do I know.

Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments section.

Allen leads Webb, but barely

2006-06-17T14:14:00.000-05:00

Word on the street is that VA Sen. George Allen currently leads Democratic challenger James Webb by only ten percentage points, 51 percent to 41 percent.

Told ya this would be a sleeper.

Fiscally fisking the '08 field

2006-06-16T14:06:00.000-05:00

I suppose I should back up my assertions regarding the fiscal liberalism of Allen, Huckabee, and McCain. A mere glance at the records of each of these individuals on taxes and spending reveals that none can be trusted on both. And all fail the fiscal test that I've set forth for our nominee in '08 --- that the Republican presidential nominee must be to the right of our most recent Democratic president. Once again, I'm hopeful this meme will catch fire in the fiscal conservative community soon, as our country literally can not afford to have another fiscal liberal as president.

McCain, of course, has long been a critic of the profligate spending that our GOP government has wrought, and remains a strong opponent of pork and waste. His history, however, suggests he's probably about where Bill Clinton is on fiscal issues: an advocate of lower spending and higher taxes. He voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001. Presumably, he would've preferred both taxes and spending remain at Clinton levels. I suppose "tax-and-don't-spend" is marginally better for the country than the current policy of "don't-tax-and-spend," but is it really too much to ask that the Republican presidential candidate oppose both high taxes and reckless spending?
Then there's Allen. The former Virginia governor received a "C" on his fiscal report card from Cato in 1996. Cato's criticism: Allen had completely capitulated to the legislature on the growth of government. Hey, at least he didn't raise taxes. Fiscally, Allen's first term would probably be a lot like Bush's second. We can do better than that.

And then of course there's Huckabee. As I've already fisked his record quite nicely thanks to the good folks at the Club for Growth, there's no need for further comment. Huckabee is McCain on taxes and Allen on spending. The worst of all fiscal worlds.

Only Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have demonstrated a commitment to both low taxes and discipline on spending. I detail Rudy's fiscal record below and Romney's can be found here. Either would be a breath of fresh air after the last six years. And both are more fiscally conservative than the last three presidents, two of whom were Republicans named Bush. Go figure.

Rudy: Fiscal Conservative

2006-06-15T20:37:00.000-05:00

Another reason that I support a Giuliani '08 bid: Rudy, along with Romney, is probably the most fiscally conservative candidate in the GOP field. As I said before, fiscal conservatives should take the following pledge regarding 2008: no candidate to the left of Bill Clinton on fiscal issues will be allowed to claim the GOP nomination. McCain, Allen, and Huckabee all fail that test. Rudy, Romney, and Newt pass. It is a sad state of affairs when half of the most likely GOP presidential candidates are no more conservative on fiscal issues than the most recent Democratic president. But that's what the current Beltway crowd has wrought.

Since I don't think Gingrich is a serious candidate, and since I doubt he'd be viable in the general, that makes '08 a choice between Rudy and Mitt for me. Right now I'm leaning Rudy. His impressive fiscal record can be found on what is basically his presidential campaign site. Some notables include the following:

* Giuliani cut taxes in NYC by 22 percent, or $8 billion.
* Rudy's economy produced over 400,000 jobs, the strongest 7-year gain on record.
* Rudy turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a surplus.
* Giuliani reduced the size of government by cutting the city payroll by 19 percent (when was the last time a president of either party actually sent lazy civil servants packing?).
* Rudy slowed the growth of government to below the rate of inflation.
* Rudy did all of this while maintaining services that benefit most people, like law enforcement and education.

Rudy did for NYC what the Republicans should be doing at the federal level: cutting unnecessary parts of government, making the state work more efficiently, enhancing necessary public services, and doing it all while keeping taxes low and the budget balanced. This puts Rudy to the right of our last three presidents on fiscal matters. Fiscal conservatives have a candidate in Rudy.

Noonan musings

2006-06-15T20:01:00.000-05:00

The always impenetrable Peggy Noonan weighs in on Webb and Rudy and the current state of the Democratic Party. Money quote:

"One can argue about why the Democratic Party no longer seems to have a reason for being. I believe the reason is this: They have achieved what they set out to achieve in 1932, when the modern Democratic Party began. They got what they asked for, achieved what they fought for. They got a big government that offers a wide array of benefits and assistance; they got a powerful federal establishment that collects and dispenses treasure, that assumes societal guidance. They got Social Security and Medicare. They got civil rights... They got what they stood for."

Peggy's right on the money. Majoritarian political coalitions live and die based on common goals. That is, after all, what a coalition is: a litany of individuals and groups and voting blocs that come together to advance common interests. When those common interests cease to exist --- either because the coalition accomplishes its goals or because history makes the goals moot --- then the coalition quite naturally explodes and the seeds for realignment, and the development of a new majority coalition, are planted.

Of course, the same fate will eventually befall the current political majority --- the Reagan coalition --- which came together in 1980 to save the American economy from excessive taxation and regulation, to put a stop to the gutting of freedom and tradition via hyper-secularism and the PC-police, to destroy Communism, to restore fiscal sanity, and to reduce the size and scope of the federal leviathan. The first three of these goals are basically accomplished. The top tax rate is half what it was when Reagan took office; Communism is dead and buried; the federal courts are packed with conservatives who respect Americans' right to freedom of thought and religion. The remaining goals of the Reaganite center-right majority in this country will require tough actions from a far tougher leader than the current Beltway establishment can produce. The restoration of fiscal sanity in this country and the reduction of state control over citizens' lives can only be accomplished by a combination of serious entitlement reform, continued privatization of government services, the gutting of pork and waste, and busting up the remaining government monopolies like the public school system. It will take a political giant to accomplish these tasks. And yet these shared goals are all that hold together a motley crew of neocons and paleocons, libertarians and social conservatives, tax cutters and deficit hawks, and main-street business types and working-class farmer/labor types that are the national Republican majority.

Rudy on Energy and Education

2006-06-14T19:17:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, I was convinced that Rudy Giuliani wouldn't run for president in 2008. I'm now convinced that he will. The latest glimpse into a Giuliani Administration's domestic policy was revealed just days ago in NYC. Ryan Sager has the scoop. Sager's conclusion is not dissimilar to mine: Rudy Giuliani is running as a center-right Republican with the reformism of a Perot, the conservatism of a Gingrich, and the leadership of a Reagan.

Rudy covered only two issues during the event --- education and energy --- but his stances on those issues speak volumes regarding his political temperment. On energy, Giuliani correctly identified the bulk of America's problems as the result of neither supply nor demand; instead, the problem lies in the inability of our country to efficiently translate our energy supply into something usable and thus meet the needs of the nation. Rudy's solution? More refineries; more nuclear plants; more ethanol. Okay, okay, that last one was clearly a ploy to win votes in Iowa. But, as the mayor will have to win over Iowa before he can face the nation, I think that this minor transgression can be forgiven.

On education, Rudy made clear his belief in a system that benefits everyone, not just those who can afford to attend the priciest private schools or who are lucky enough to live in the best suburban school districts. Our public school system is a monopoly, says the mayor, and, as with all monopolies, the consumer ends up getting screwed. Giuliani strongly advocated the introduction of market principles into public education in order to make sure that working class rural and urban kids have the same opportunities as their wealthier counterparts. Rudy was sure to stress, though, that education is primarily the states' responsibility, and while Washington can lead, it should be mindful of the principles of federalism.

Giuliani's statements are significant for a host of reasons, but one is tantamount. The Rudy Giuliani we're seeing on the stump is the same Rudy Giuliani New Yorkers elected twice. His positions haven't changed. He was a conservative reformer then, and he's a conservative reformer now. As such, I can predict that conservatives will be elated when they learn of Rudy's conservative stances on taxes and spending, positions that he put into practice while governing the Big Apple. Given the shape of the 2008 field, Giuliani may end up running to the right of almost everyone on fiscal issues, and that will be significant given the fiscal shortcomings of our current GOP leadership. But that's a topic for another time.

Webb v. Allen

2006-06-13T20:43:00.000-05:00

Today's Democratic primary in Virginia has resulted in a win for ex-Reaganite James Webb, earning the former Navy Secretary the right to challenge GOP incumbent Sen. George Allen in the fall.

I have long postulated that this may be a sleeper race, not unlike the 2002 Senate race in Georgia, where Democrat Max Cleland looked safe up until sometime in October, only to lose his seat to Republican Saxby Chambliss. All the conditions for a Webb upset are in place: it's a bad year for the incumbent party; Virginia's red hue has been weakening due to migration to Northern Virginia from other parts of the country; the challenger is an ideological fit for his state; and, perhaps most importantly, the incumbent is universally-known to be considering abandoning his state for a presidential run in just two years.

Voters can be quite unforgiving when a politician appears to be using their state as a stepping stone for higher office. George Allen's 2008 aspirations are well known, which means that the Virginia senator is seeking a second six-year term to represent Virginia in the Senate but ideally plans to serve only two years of that term. As I've said before, this fact alone generally isn't a campaign death knell. Just look at how the junior senator from New York is coasting to reelection. But this dynamic combined with a bad GOP year and an interesting Democratic challenger could spell trouble for Allen.

The reason Webb is such a strong challenger is not solely encompassed in his military history or Republican past. More broadly, Webb represents a very specific demographic group --- the Reagan Democrats --- that have made or broken every election for the past 26 years. Consisting of ethnic Catholics from the industrial midwest and Scots-Irish border state voters (like Webb), Reagan Democrats were instrumental in the GOP presidential victories of the 1980s as well as in Clinton's victories in the 1990s, either through supporting Clinton directly or indirectly through Perot. The close elections of 2000 and 2004 demonstrate that Bush was not entirely effective at winning these voting blocs back for the GOP. The anti-GOP, anti-incumbent mood in the country right now means that swing voters will probably tilt towards the Dems in the fall, and a candidate like Webb, who can culturally connect with the most important sub-group of swing voters, is an especially potent adversary for the GOP. And for George Allen.

The Shrinking Deficit

2006-06-13T17:58:00.000-05:00

The numbers for FY 2006 are basically in, and the picture they paint is a rosy one. The deficit clocks in at $227 billion --- down over $40 billion from this time last year --- and the final number will likely constitute about 2 percent of GDP, fairly reasonable by historical standards. The deficit reduction is due entirely to increased revenues resulting from economic growth. More proof that the Bush tax policy is good for America; it's one of the few things I believe POTUS has actually been right about all these years, despite the constant finger-wagging of the MSM.

Entirely unacceptable is the 7.9 percent growth in the size of the federal government over the past fiscal year. This is not what a GOP president and Republican Congress should be producing. Memo to the Beltway establishment: reform yourselves or suffer the consequences. Of course, they won't reform themselves. It will take a strong, fiscally conservative leader to make the big structural changes in government --- including the wholly necessary but politically unpopular modifications to the entitlements --- that will be necessary to avert fiscal Armageddon down the road. Fiscal conservatives need to stand their ground in 2008. No one to the left of Bill Clinton on spending should be allowed to claim the Republican nomination. That should be a no-brainer. The fact that it even has to be articulated is cause for alarm amongst all conservatives.

Edwards leads Hillary in Iowa

2006-06-12T09:25:00.000-05:00

Here's something mildly interesting. Possibly for the first time in a scientific poll, Hillary Clinton is being beaten by a fellow Democratic contender. Throwing a monkey wrench into Ms. Rodham's coronation plans is none other than John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator known best for his inability in the 2004 elections to win a single southern state for the Democratic ticket. Edwards is beating Clinton 30 percent to 26 percent among likely Iowa caucus goers.

I am fairly surprised by this development. I always thought the Democratic race for the 2008 nomination would take one of two turns. The most likely scenario, thought I, would be a three-person race, with Hillary challenged on her left by a Kossite candidate --- most likely Feingold --- and on her right by an electable red-state candidate like Mark Warner. The other possibility, in my view, was a two-person race between Hillary and Gore, a grudge match from Hades that would suck all the air out of the race and fail to leave room for any other candidates. What I didn't expect, though, was any sort of Edwards comeback, especially after his 2004 performance.

This is consistent with the anecdotal evidence I've observed regarding the sentiments of grassroots Democrats and liberals towards a Clinton run. Most think she's unelectable nationally. Yet every scientific poll seems to indicate that there's a stealth 40 percent of Democrats ready to nominate her despite the seeming unwillingness of anyone to admit to being a part of this group.

The result of an Edwards/Clinton race, with Edwards running to Clinton's populist left, is anyone's guess at this point. I suspect the Clintons would carpet bomb Edwards' campaign with everything in their arsenal. And that arsenal should not be underestimated. Further, Edwards has never struck me as an especially impressive candidate. He won a single election to the Senate in a good Democratic year. He was beaten fairly easily by Kerry for the nomination in '04, and he couldn't flip any of the red states south of Mason-Dixon despite his southern persona. I suppose his populist message would play well in the purple midwest, which the Democratic ticket can't afford to lose in '08, but it seems that any Edwards general election victory would primarily consist of all the Kerry states plus Ohio, and that's not exactly a bold new strategy for the Democrats.

Newt in '08?

2006-06-10T13:18:00.000-05:00

Personally, I think it's too late for him. Newt's a dog who's had his day. The good Professor Bainbridge disagrees. Where I agree with Bainbridge is that Newt was one of the modern conservative movement's great leaders. The current political coalition that inhabits the Republican Party has been led by four individuals since 1980: Reagan, Gingrich, and two presidents named Bush. The two former leaders built our political majority; the two latter leaders have mixed records at best and saw their later years in office as times of trial for a strained center-right coalition. But, if history is any guide, this Bush too will be followed by a Reagan or a Newt, just not the Newt. Politically, it's just not doable, groundbreaker that he was.

A Reagan Democrat (Literally)

2006-06-10T11:18:00.000-05:00

The American Conservative sees VA Democratic Senate candidate James Webb as a harbinger for the imminent defection of the political sub-group known as Reagan Democrats away from the GOP and back to their partisan roots.

While Am-Con's long term assessment is probably true --- there's no doubt that at some point the GOP will cease to be the majority party, and that will only happen when the coalition explodes and voters start defecting --- I don't see any immediate threat to GOP dominance exemplified by Webb Republicans, if I may coin the term. A similar dynamic appeared to be occurring back in the early '90s, when another president named Bush had pissed away Reaganism to such an extent that Bill Clinton and Ross Perot divided up the disenchanted Reagan Democrats who had voted Republican in three straight presidential elections. But all it took was two years of Democratic rule and a new GOP leader with a revived Reaganism to bring the Reagan Dems home in 1994.

Now that another Bush has driven the Reagan Dems away, it will take a third strong Republican national leader in the mold of Reagan and Gingrich to rebuild the coalition once again, hopefully starting in 2008. I see shades of Newt in both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney; hopefully, one of those two will be the nominee. I don't doubt that the ethnic Catholic midwesterners and Scots-Irish border-state voters that comprise the voting bloc known as Reagan Democrats will cast their ballots for actual Democrats in the fall. But unlike Am-Con, I fail to see a permanent exodus. Yet.

Huckabee's Fiscal Record

2006-06-08T22:26:00.000-05:00

Blue State Republican is running what appears to be the primary unofficial site advocating the candidacy of Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas for the presidency in 2008. I've been hearing a lot about Huckabee lately, so I decided to do some research on the fellow. Based on what I've discovered so far, I don't see myself supporting him.

Club for Growth has some pretty damning evidence regarding Huckabee's fiscal record. According to the Club, Huckabee is an outright fiscal liberal who appears to have presided over a massive increase in the size of Arkansas' government and in the level of control the state is able to exercise over the economic lives of Arkansas citizens. The Club's facts seem to speak for themselves:

Huckabee signed a gas tax hike in 1999
He called for a state sales tax hike in 2002
He signed a 25-cent cigarette tax hike in 2003
He publicly opposed the repeal of a sales tax on groceries and medicine in 2002
He increased state spending 65.3% from 1996 to 2004
He allowed a major tax hike package to pass in 2004
He received a "D" grade on fiscal issues from the Cato Institute in 2004
He raised the minimum wage this year
He called No Child Left Behind the greatest education reform effort by the federal government "in my lifetime."
He has actively gone after so-called "price gougers"

That's my emphasis on the spending charge. Look, I'm no fundamentalist libertarian on taxation or spending. I realize that governing requires tough decisions, and the occasional tax increase is often inevitable, especially if the alternative is more debt or fewer necessary services. But Huckabee's fiscal record in the aggregate is the worst of both of our presidents named Bush. Like Bush 41, he raised taxes. Like Bush 43, he allowed spending to skyrocket. Bill Clinton looks fiscally conservative compared to all of these guys.

Huckabee appears to be attracting the support of the fiscally populist, socially conservative wing of the GOP. But after eight years of the same type of governance from our current president, I suspect that the nation will want something a bit different. And I doubt fiscal conservatives will stand for another apostate after eight years of drunken-sailor spending by the Beltway establishment. If the concern is finding a social conservative, there are other social conservatives who are fiscally conservative as well. I realize that a lot of people have probably already invested a lot in a Huckabee run, which is fine, but I won't be joining them, and I doubt the majority of Republicans will either. Just my 2 cents (1.33 cents after taxes).

Senate Outlook '06

2006-06-08T09:58:00.000-05:00

This year's Senate landscape is interesting. There are few contested open seats on either side, and yet both sides have a number of pickup opportunities due to vulnerable incumbents. With the anti-incumbent mood in the country, this year could be one in which voters clean house in the upper chamber, sending scores of sitting senators packing.

The two Senate seats most likely to change hands are those currently held by Sen. Rick Santorum of PA and Sen. Conrad Burns of MT. Santorum, far too "red" for Pennsylvania, has a centrist challenger in a centrist state that doesn't exactly subscribe to Santorum's issue priorities. The upper midwest has always considered economic issues more important than cultural ones; Santorum won his first two elections by "getting local" and paying lots of attention to Keystone State voters, but in recent years, the senator has deviated from that strategy and has instead used his Senate seat to launch a national social agenda. Pennsylvanians have little interest in this sort of thing, and with every poll showing Casey solidly beating Santorum, expect the senator to be retired very soon.

Burns' greatest transgression has been his association with the K Street corruption that has colored the Beltway GOP in the eyes of Middle America. Burns has also been running behind his opponent in almost every poll and will likely be defeated in the fall as well.

Both OH Sen. Mike DeWine and MO Sen. Jim Talent have been polling even with their Democratic challengers. DeWine is pretty much despised by conservatives, but his opponent is far too liberal for purple Ohio, and, as such, the senator will likely hold on despite himself. Talent seems to win or lose each of his races by the slimmest of margins. His seat could go either way at this point.

RI Sen. Lincoln Chafee and VA Sen. George Allen are both in "could-be" races. Chafee is being challenged on his right by the more conservative Laffey, a candidate who could win the primary but would almost certainly lose the general. If Laffey beats Chafee in the primary, the seat goes Democratic in the fall. And even if Chafee wins the primary, recent polling shows the Democrat gaining on him. As the most liberal Republican in the country, Chafee's seat is far from safe.

Allen's race is a potential sleeper for two reasons. First, like Santorum, Allen is using his seat to go national and propel himself into the top tier of presidential candidates for 2008. Voters generally don't like it when an officeholder asks for their vote and then plans to desert them before the ink is even dry on the election results. Ordinarily, this isn't enough to sink a candidacy (see Clinton, Hillary). But Allen will have a tough opponent in James Webb, an old Reagan guy who is running as a moderate Democrat. No one expected Allen to unseat Chuck Robb six years ago; it's possible the Virginia senator could have the same fate.

And finally, as if that weren't enough, there is one vulnerable Republican-held open seat. Bill Frist is retiring in TN, and centrist Democrat Harold Ford is polling well against the GOP replacement, Ed Bryant. The Republican is still winning, but Ford will keep it close.

The Democrats have far fewer vulnerable seats, but still enough to ensure that November will probably not give us a Democratic Senate. In MN and MD, the GOP has fielded A+ candidates in Mark Kennedy and Michael Steele to capture two open Democratic seats. Kennedy will benefit from the continued rightward movement of Minnesota, a state that went for Mondale in 1984 while all the others went for Reagan, but that has been distinctly purple in recent years, going only three points for Kerry in 2004. In Maryland, the large African-American population could help Steele, a black Republican, defeat his opponent in a Democratic state. Even though current polling shows Steele behind, a silent Steele majority could develop if scores of black citizens who usually stay home --- and who aren't being caught by the pollsters as likely voters --- go out to the polls for Steele.

In NJ, GOP candidate Kean is either leading or tied with Sen. Menendez, a Democrat appointed to the seat by Gov. Corzine, and one who hasn't actually been elected yet. Kean is popular in NJ due to his father's service there. This is the GOP's best pickup opportunity for 2006.

In WA, Republican McGavick is finally starting to worry Sen. Cantwell; the latest poll shows McGavick within 5 points of the senator. Cantwell is a first-termer who basically purchased her Senate seat in 2000 and could easily be hoisted by her own petard in the wealthy McGavick.

And finally, conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman is being challenged on his left in the primary election in CT. If Lieberman loses the primary --- and polls suggest the race is tightening --- he will most likely run as an independent to keep the seat, which polling shows would be successful. Would a scorned but reelected Sen. Lieberman (I) pull a Jeffords and caucus with the Republicans?

There are far too many races within the margin of error to make any sound predictions right now. It appears that the Dems' best bet is a net gain of 7 seats and the GOP's best outcome is a net pickup of 5 seats. I doubt either party will run the table, though, and I imagine that, all else being equal, the fact that the GOP just has more territory to defend gives the Democrats the edge. I'll say that the Dems win a couple of OH, MO, VA, TN, and RI and the GOP wins a couple of MN, MD, NJ, WA, and CT. That, combined with the likely Democratic wins in PA and MT, results in a Democratic net gain of 2 seats, for a 53-46-1 Republican Senate, with the 1 independent, Bernie Sanders of VT, caucusing with the Democrats.

House GOP Watch

2006-06-07T20:27:00.000-05:00

The very astute John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics comes to the same conclusion that I did upon studying the results of the CA-50 runoff. The 8 point difference between the standard Republican/Democrat margin in the district and the result of the Bilbray/Busby race does not portend a 15-seat Democratic pickup this fall. McIntyre sees a 6-10 seat net gain for the Dems, which is similar to my prediction earlier today of a Democratic pickup in the high single digits. I'll split the difference with McIntyre and predict an 8-seat net loss for the GOP this November, resulting in a 224-211 Republican-controlled House.

Bilbray's Narrow Victory

2006-06-07T07:50:00.000-05:00

In CA-50, Republican Bilbray has defeated Democrat Busby by 4 points. That represents an 8 point swing from the Bush/Kerry 2004 numbers in the district. In other words, CA-50 is presently structured to facilitate a generic conservative/liberal or Republican/Democrat margin of about 12 percentage points. Yesterday's vote suggests that the current anti-GOP sentiment in the country is depressing the GOP vote to the extent that Republican House candidates who won in 2004 by 8 points or less have something to worry about.

Realistically, I doubt that in this gerrymandered country there are enough districts close enough for this sort of swing, if extrapolated nationally, to tilt the House in favor of the Dems this fall. If Busby had beaten Bilbray by 4 instead of the other way around, I would be suggesting that you prepare for a Democratic House. As of now, it looks like a modest Democratic victory is on the way, with the Dems picking up House seats in the upper single digits. That would put the Republicans in the lower to mid 220s, which is still enough to maintain control of the House and perhaps just enough to send the GOP establishment a wake up call before 2008.

Giuliani/Romney? Or is it Romney/Giuliani?

2006-06-06T19:12:00.000-05:00

Rudy Blogger has an interesting scoop regarding a secretive dinner involving Republican presidential hopefuls Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Reportedly, the waitstaff was kept at bay several times throughout the night. Was the possibility of a presidential ticket being discussed? If so, Republicans would enter 2008 not only with a ticket that would unify the country, but with one comprised of two of the most competent executives of our time.

There are good reasons for either of these guys to be at the top of the ticket. Rudy's got the gravitas and probably did the harder job at reforming NYC, but as we found out with the current VP, gravitas can work well at the bottom of the ticket too. Romney's been doing more of the heavy lifting on social issues over the past couple of years and social conservatives might feel more comfortable with Mitt appointing judges, but Romney's also young enough to serve as veep for a term or two before running on his own. Either way, Republicans, and the country, wins.

Giuliani Triangulation Strategy Spreads

2006-06-06T18:24:00.000-05:00

Yet another conservative embraces my strategy for a Giuliani triangulation on social issues that would remove the mayor's biggest issue-oriented roadblock to the Republican nomination. Richard Baehr of the American Thinker sees Rudy as a natural choice to unify economic conservatives, national security conservatives, moderate Democrats, and independents, but admits that the elephant in the room is Rudy's long history of cultural liberalism that would threaten to drive a wedge between a Rudy-led GOP and social conservatives. Baehr describes the current CW of how Rudy can get around this --- either with a flip-flop or a "hands-off social issues" strategy --- and counters that CW with his own idea, one that sounds interestingly like that which has been put forth on this blog. Money quote:

"My own view is that there is a third strategy for Giuliani to become an acceptable candidate to religious conservatives. That would be to state publicly that he believed that President Bush had made two very good appointments to the Supreme Court in John Roberts and Sam Alito...The reality is that "progressive" social legislation generally does not pass the Congress to become law. Law changes to implement the "progressive" social agenda have been more often judicially mandated. If Giuliani promises to appoint Supreme Court and lower court justices who will be perceived as strict constructionists (even if he does not use those exact words), then he will do no worse in this area than a candidate who has professed a pro-life policy for his or her entire political career."

Exactly. As I stated earlier, when social policy is left to the states, cultural conservatives win. In that sense, Giuliani's personal views on social issues are irrelevant as far as the presidency is concerned. If Rudy comes forth as a social federalist who believes that it's not the job of the federal government to sign off on social policy one way or the other --- promising to veto socially liberal legislation and appoint federalist judges to the courts as a consequence --- the impact of a Giuliani presidency on the issues that social conservatives care about would be at least as good as any other Republican and would be eons better than Hillary.

Polling Marriage

2006-06-05T21:09:00.000-05:00

About the only thing worse than a Potemkin policy is a Potemkin policy that the majority of Americans oppose. At least that's what the latest poll on the definition of marriage suggests. While 58 percent of Americans support the traditional definition of marriage, only 42 percent want that definition enshrined in the Constitution. The Republicans have a choice: be the center-right majority party encompassing nearly 60 percent of the nation or be a 40 percent minority party. The current GOP leadership in Washington is choosing the latter. They must be removed. Quickly. Otherwise, Hillary Clinton will be president and, along with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, she will make Attlee's transformation of the UK seem like a libertarian revolution.

The Marriage Amendment

2006-06-05T19:12:00.000-05:00

It appears Congress is once again attempting to federalize marriage policy via the United States Constitution. The FMA, or whatever it's called these days, would remove the ability of states to make their own laws regarding the definition of marriage. This extremely stupid act of surplusage that hasn't a chance in Hades of passing seems to come up every election year. Go figure.

I am quite opposed to the proposed amendment, first and foremost because it is highly offensive to my federalist sensibilities. As a certain kind of conservative, I believe that most decisions in a society should be kept as close to the individual as possible. Individuals should have the most authority over their lives, then localities, then states, and every now and then, we may need a federal law or two. The political reality of the contemporary conservative movement, though, is that there are many other sorts of conservatives who are far more comfy with federal power than we American Tories. The marriage amendment is the product of an alliance between Hamiltonian strong-government conservatives who fear the imposition of gay marriage on the nation by judicial fiat --- similar to the way the Supreme Court unilaterally legalized abortion-on-demand throughout the country in the 1970s --- and social conservatives who fear that the cultural and metaphysical impact of gay marriage anywhere in this nation would be catastrophic, and who thus want a national ban on this arrangement by whatever means necessary.

Now, no one has made me judge and jury of anyone's personal beliefs; as such, I'm not here to preach. Many Americans have come to the conclusion that gay marriage is something that shouldn't be legally recognized in this country. Whether this conclusion is based on learned study of historical and societal data regarding the impact of gay marriage on a society or a personal religious belief based on sectarian dogma is irrelevant to the policy debate; this is, after all, a democracy, where all sorts of policy decisions are made every day based on collective public values. The point is, for whatever assortment of reasons, a majority of Americans have decided that legal recognition of gay marriage is not something they want, and that's that.

To me, the issue ends there. Most Americans don't want gay marriage, most states have defined marriage under their law as a union between one man and one woman, and the issue is settled. On to the war on terror. Others, however, don't see it that way; they would prefer to insert their definition of marriage in the Constitution in order to a) prevent the people of any states that disagree with them from defining marriage any other way and b) preempt any judicial decision that imposes another state's definition of marriage onto their own state.

Of those two goals, only the latter is one I can join. I see no reason to impose a national policy on each of the states in this issue area. I say let federalism reign. Let democracy work. If the people of Massachusetts want to have gay marriage, they can have gay marriage. If the people of Ohio want traditional marriage, so be it. That's ultimately the way this country is supposed to work.

Now, there are some legitimate concerns regarding the federal courts' ability to insist that, in the interest of national unity, any marriages performed in one state, including same-sex marriages, must be recognized in every other state. In so doing, the courts would invoke the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution. It seems to me, though, that the best way to prevent this result is simply the confirmation of more conservative judges. Does anyone really think that the Catholic Conservative Five on SCOTUS --- Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy --- are going to nationalize gay marriage? Of course not. This is a non-issue.

And not surprisingly, nowhere in this debate is an amendment that would protect each state's right to define marriage as it sees fit and enhance federalism with the following language:

"The definition of marriage is to be determined by the people of each state and their elected representatives. In no case will the Full Faith and Credit Clause or any other provision of this Constitution be construed as to require any state to recognize the marriages of any other state."

There. Now the people of each state can decide the issue and the courts remain powerless to act on it. Why do we hear nothing about this sort of amendment? Is it because something like this might actually pass?

The marriage amendment is ultimately a cynical attempt at giving the GOP base a Potemkin reason to vote Republican this year while few substantive reasons to do so actually seem to exist. The notion that three-fourths of the states will approve an amendment to take away their power to write their own marriage laws is nonsense, and Beltway Republicans know it. This is how they make up for falling asleep at the legislative wheel for the past year and a half. Pathetic.

Rudy and Abortion

2006-06-04T21:54:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Rudy Blogger for linking to my Giuliani post on his site. I think he makes some good points with regard to the reasons for Rudy's popularity in Middle America, including amongst conservatives, and how those sentiments may have more to do with a national gut-check of sorts than with the details of position papers.

One of things we Beltway types often forget is that, in the real world, most people aren't policy wonks. Most Americans aren't attempting to quantify the abortion positions --- or any other position --- of the entire 2008 field. Instead, they're reacting to the way a candidate makes them feel based on his language, his manner, and his friends. As Rudy Blogger points out, that's one of the primary reasons McCain has been so popular among Democrats and so distrusted among Republicans. McCain's got the position papers of a center-right Republican, but he's picked fights with so many on the Right for the past six years that those to whom his policies are anathema swoon over him. Rudy, on the other hand, feels like a Republican, like a conservative, and like a leader.

All of that said, Rudy's still going to have to run as something other than pro-choice if he's to win the nomination of the pro-life party. I agree with Rudy Blogger and disagree with J-Pod regarding a total flip-flop. It would seem crass given Giuliani's long history in support of legalized abortion. A better strategy would be to embrace social federalism: the "if I were a state legislator" model.

Rudy should begin by admitting to everyone that he is personally pro-choice; that if he were a state legislator or governor of New York, he'd keep abortion legal as a representative and a leader of the people of New York. But as president, Rudy can say, his role is to first and foremost follow the Constitution, and the Constitution says nothing about the federal government's ability to micromanage social policy from Washington. Rudy can assure voters that he sees no role for the federal government in the lawmaking process on abortion or marriage or any other cultural issues; these are issues that should be decided at the lowest, most personal level possible --- by individuals, then communities, then states.

Taking this approach would do two things. First, it would give social conservatives some hope that a Giuliani presidency would actually advance their agenda, as it has generally been true that when federalism is followed on any given issue, social conservatives win. Take abortion. If Roe were overturned tomorrow, a number of states would immediately begin the process of banning some or all abortions. Some states, of course, would keep abortion just as legal as it currently is, but the net impact on the legal status of the issue would be that, in the aggregate, far fewer abortions would be legal in this nation than is currently the status quo.

Secondly, as a social federalist, Rudy would be able to promise to appoint the types of judges most Republicans are comfortable with, such as Roberts and Alito, without flip-flopping on a single issue. By promising champions of judicial restraint who would keep these cultural decisions out of Washington, Giuliani would be giving social conservatives a real choice: elect him and get another Roberts, or elect Hillary and get another Ginsberg.

This strategy is sort of the mirror image of what red-state Democrats like Bill Clinton have to do in order to run for national office. Clinton was personally pro-life but politically pro-choice; abortion offended his personal morality, so he claimed, but he didn't favor changing the law on the matter. Giuliani would be running as a candidate who is personally pro-choice but politically pro-life. He would favor legalized abortion as a citizen and as an elected representative charged with that decision, but as president, he would realize that making decisions regarding abortion policy is not part of his job description, that this is an issue for the states, and that he will govern accordingly regarding both legislation and judicial nominees. Given the number of Republicans who want to vote for Giuliani already, that could be all the assurance they need to stick with him.

Speaker Pelosi Watch

2006-06-04T09:10:00.000-05:00

The special election to fill California's 50th congressional district takes place this Tuesday. Presently, Republican Bilbray and Democrat Busby are statistically tied in a district that went for Bush by about 12 points over Kerry. If the election turns out as the polls suggest, regardless of who wins, I would expect the Democrats at a minimum to pick up House seats in the upper single digits this fall, with a more likely scenario being a 10-12 seat pickup. The numbers are still there for Democrats to get to 218 and elect Nancy Pelosi Speaker. If they do, it may be the best thing for the Republicans since Senate Majority Leader Daschle. Losing the House by a seat or two in 2006 would placate the Democratic urge for victory, allow the country to once again see what Democrats do when actually in power, wash out the corrupt House leadership, and convince stubborn conservatives to nominate an electable candidate in 2008, even if that candidate makes them a little uncomfortable.

Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!

2006-06-03T22:18:00.000-05:00

Maybe a Giuliani candidacy makes sense after all. Kelsey Grammer supports him. So does National Review's J-Pod. As I detailed in an earlier post, both McCain and Romney send Republican voters in the double-digits over to Hillary. Each hovers around 80 percent Republican support, far from GWB's whopping 93 percent of the GOP vote. Giuliani, on the other hand, garners between 85 and 90 percent Republican support in a matchup against Hillary. The good mayor also takes nearly 20 percent of Democrats and beats the New York senator by some ridiculous margin among independents. Yes, Rudy would lose a few dark-red voters in the deep south and west, but those states are going to go Republican anyway. The net gain Giuliani would experience nationally due to increasing the GOP margin from 2004 among Democrats and independents would yield an electoral sweep. All of the electoral-rich light-blue states filled with ethnic Catholics and Reagan Democrats --- Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota --- would go for Rudy, as would New Hampshire. And Rudy would have a real shot at winning Oregon, Washington, New Jersey, and Delaware, states that showed signs of a weakened blue hue in 2004. Giuliani's just the kind of Republican that could turn those states red, if only for one election. I suspect a Rudy/Hillary contest would have a result similar to the Bush/Dukakis matchup of 1988: a 7-10 point win for the Republican coinciding with a 40-state landslide in the electoral college.

The question of why nearly 90 percent of Republicans are sticking by the mayor despite his views on cultural matters is one that needs to be answered. Do these Republicans know about Rudy's views on issues like abortion? I have a hard time believing they don't; it's one of the things the MSM loves to remind us about Rudy. Perhaps Rudy just gets along so well with the GOP base that conservatives assume that any attempt to lead them would result in a conversion on the big social issues, like abortion, gay marriage, the Second Amendment, and immigration. The big question now is whether Rudy is willing to do the heavy lifting on these issues in order to appease a base that wants to vote for him. And the even bigger question is whether Rudy will run; he's been doing very little with regards to a presidential campaign, while McCain's been doing a lot.

Why do Republicans oppose Romney?

2006-06-02T09:38:00.000-05:00

As someone who believes it would be a disservice to our country if Mitt Romney isn't somewhere on the GOP ticket in 2008, this new Quinnipiac poll is disheartening. In the poll, Florida voters are presented with four presidential matchups. On one side in each of the matchups is the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. On the GOP side are the Big Four: Allen, Romney, Rudy, and McCain. The results: Rudy and McCain both best Hillary; Allen and Romney both lose. But Romney loses big.

I'll analyze the full poll later. For now, let's look at the Romney numbers. In a state that's just a notch to the right of the nation, and that POTUS won by 5 points in 2004, Hillary Clinton beats Mitt Romney by 11 points, 50 percent to 39 percent. Is name recognition a factor? Of course. But even if all 11 percent who are undecided go to Romney upon learning more about him, that would give Romney, at best, a 50/50 race with Hillary in purple Florida. Not encouraging.

The internals paint an even more interesting picture. Romney is winning only 11 percent of Democrats. That's the same portion that Bush won nationally in 2004. He loses independents by 7 points, but that's to be expected with all the anti-GOP sentiments in the country right now. A full 17 percent of independents are undecided in the poll. I suspect name recognition truly is a factor here; these indies clearly don't want to vote Hillary, who has near-perfect name recognition, and I suspect that a good Romney campaign could get a lot of the undecided indies on board. Still, even if Mitt won the undecided indies by 2-1, he'd still be exactly where Bush was among them in 2004, tied with the Democrat among independents.

So Romney's faring no better than Bush among Dems and indies, but still underperforming the president by 16 points in Florida. How can this be? The answer lies in the Republican portion of the electorate. In the poll, Romney wins only 78 percent of Republicans. That's less than McCain's 82 percent and Rudy's 87 percent. Sen. Allen also wins a similar portion of GOP voters, coming in at 79 percent. So this is simply a function of name recognition for both Allen and Romney, right? I'm not so sure. In Allen's case, I suspect name recognition is holding down his GOP support. But with Mitt, these Republicans not committed to Romney aren't simply undecided. Instead, they're voting for Hillary!

That's right; a Romney candidacy allows Hillary to garner 16 percent of the Republican vote. Contrast that with the 8 percent that Giuliani sends over to Hillary or with the 12 percent that results from a Hillary/McCain race.

The McCain numbers aren't surprising. Many Republicans have a visceral contempt for the Arizona senator and would stop at nothing to prevent his presidency, even if it means doing the unthinkable: pulling the lever for Mrs. Clinton. But even McCain doesn't result in a 16 percent share of GOP voters ending up in Hillary's column. Why then do so many Republicans oppose Romney under the radar?

I think the answer is probably simpler than we all think, and it would explain both the quiet opposition to Mitt and the erratic behavior of conservatives in this poll. Romney's a Mormon. Most Americans aren't. Many Americans think that Mormonism is a cult. This is especially prevalent among conservative Christians. Many Republicans are conservative Christians. Do the math.

If there truly is a stealth opposition to Mitt among conservatives who won't verbalize their sentiments for fear of being ostracized as bigots, but who intend to march into the voting booth during the primaries and pull the lever for anyone who's NOT a Mormon, future polling will continue to pick up on it. For now, suffice it to say that a candidate who sends 16 percent of Republican voters over to a Democrat who is univerally despised among the GOP electorate does not look like a winner. And that's a real shame.

State-sanctioned Death

2006-06-02T09:17:00.000-05:00

As a Roman Catholic, I am generally pretty uneasy about both abortion and the death penalty, and would prefer a society without either of them. As a realist, though, I fully expect that we will always have some form of state-sanctioned killing in addition to exceptions to the general rule against taking a human life like self-defense. Take as evidence this new poll, which shows that 60 percent of Americans favor the death penalty, and that 76 percent think it's applied either about right or not enough. In a representative democracy, numbers like that in support of a policy usually indicate that the policy's not going anywhere anytime soon. Absent a finding of some broad right to life in the Constitution by SCOTUS, both the death penalty and at least some form of legalized abortion are here to stay. And I would oppose any such move by SCOTUS, as I think that representative democracy and federalism are better for this country than rule from Olympus by the black-robed nine, even when the former produces policies that offend my personal morality. That's democracy; messy, imperfect, still the best form of government we've been able to create.

Our Worst President

2006-06-01T20:55:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush has broken new ground. He is now considered our nation's worst post-war president by a plurality of Americans. Worse than Jimmy Carter. And just to diffuse the kneejerk charge that this is a liberal poll, the same Americans voted Ronald Reagan our best post-war president.

Incidentally, the latest poll on Bush's job approval shows POTUS with a third of Americans still in his corner. So a third of America supports Bush, a third thinks he's our worst modern president, and a third is somewhere in between. A "uniter, not a divider," eh?

I'll say it again: if my party doesn't find a presidential candidate who can bring this nation together and win more than half of it in 2008, it will have failed this country. Period.

Peggy Nails It

2006-06-01T19:07:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan is possibly one of the most eloquent political writers out there, and today she has penned a prophetic gem regarding the seeds of a seismic political realignment that are being planted in this country as we speak. The dynamic that Peggy describes is something that I've been feeling in my gut for awhile now and is likely similar to that which occurred in the 1960s that led to the end of the Democratic institutional majority of the mid-20th Century, as well as the complete transformation of the Democrat-lite, Rockefeller Republican Party into something entirely different, something that involved the revival of an ideology believed long-dead.

Says Noonan:

"Something's happening. I have a feeling we're at some new beginning, that a big breakup's coming, and that though it isn't and will not be immediately apparent, we'll someday look back on this era as the time when a shift began."

A Peggy predecessor could've just as easily written this statement in the early to mid 1960s and been right. That was the decade during which the Democratic majoritarian coalition of northern ethnic Catholics, southern populists, coastal intellectuals, and labor and minorities began to crack. The coalition eventually exploded, sending at least the first two of those groups into political exile for most of the 1970s. These midwestern Catholics and southern conservatives couldn't fathom joining a Republican Party run by Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon, a party whose primary function was to make sure the Democrats didn't go too far. It took a California governor named Ronald Reagan, standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants like Kristol and Buckley, to redesign the GOP in a manner that would create a new majority, one that addressed the common concerns of the current Republicans of the day, as well as those former Democrats wandering in the wilderness. The result has been the transformation of America from a majority Democratic nation into a majority Republican one.

Now, a similar dynamic is tearing at the seams of the GOP coalition of business interests, deficit-hawks, civil libertarians, social conservatives, and neocons. This motley crew has always been supposedly on the verge of exploding, but each time seems to disappoint its liberal onlookers. The coalition will dealign at some point, though, just as the Dems did in 1968, once their shared goals became fewer and fewer and their disparate goals became greater and greater. Just as the Democratic Party of 1968 would never have agreed on civil rights, today's GOP will never agree on immigration or gay rights. The current Republican coalition was not designed to facilitate those issues; the issues it was designed around --- taxes, Communism, activist courts --- are becoming irrelevant due to history. Like all political coalitions, the current Republican one is in many ways a victim of its own successes on its few, broad shared goals. And once a majority no longer has any shared goals other than power for power's sake, that majority falls. And fall this majority will.

The thing that will delay any sort of seismic GOP losses in the near future, though, and that will make Peggy's prediction of realignment as slow as she anticipates, is the lack of a viable Democratic alternative. Just as working class and middle class midwesterners and southerners couldn't support the GOP of the 1960s, today's disenchanted groups --- libertarians, fiscal conservatives, old Tories, purple voters in the upper midwest and southwest --- find little solace in the party of Pelosi. What's needed is seemingly a third way. But third ways never seem to work in American politics, and despite what Peggy and Sully think, neither a modern-day Ross Perot nor a John McCain (I) is going to save this country from its Beltway establishment. Instead, what will likely occur is the continued deterioration of the Democratic Party --- that once great leviathan of Jefferson now existing solely as a clearinghouse of interest groups and a collection of aging socialists and their collegiate counterparts --- until, like the GOP of the 1970s, only a shell is left. At that point, the Democratic Party will either go the way of the Whigs to make way for a new party or the infrastructure will be used by the next great political visionaries --- the new Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley, and Irving Kristol --- to build the next majority party for America, one that once again turns the Beltway on its head, just as FDR's Democratic majority did in 1932 and Reagan's GOP majority did in 1980.

And there will be morning in America again.

Reaching Beyond the Blue

2006-05-30T22:26:00.000-05:00

Bob Burnett over at Huff-Po, in an effort to once again prove the age-old maxim regarding great minds, is giving his fellow liberals the very same advice I have given my conservative colleagues. Just as I am pleading with conservatives to reject the siren's song of the "red-state strategy," Burnett is calling on Democrats to look past Hillary and her bluish contemporaries and find a candidate who can actually win some red states. Money quote:

"Many Democrats believe that neither Clinton nor Kerry is electable in 2008; that neither could beat John McCain, for example. Hiding behind this is the belief that to win the presidency, Democrats have to reach beyond blue states and capture traditionally red states like Montana. Many rank-and-file Dems don't think that Clinton or Kerry can do this. Many believe that Bayh, Edwards, and Warner can."

Precisely! Just as George Allen's appeal will end at his side of Mason-Dixon, so will Hillary's appeal end at her side. Ditto for Brownback and Tancredo on the right and Kerry and Gore on the left. As I said in a recent post, whichever party figures out that America wants out of the red/blue game wins in '08.

With regard to the Dems, Burnett is correct that Mark Warner and Evan Bayh are the best candidates to pierce the red/blue divide. He includes Edwards, but I am hesitant for the same reason that many observers are unsure about McCain. Edwards and McCain have both been tainted by their 2004 predecessors, with McCain being viewed as too liberal by many Republicans due to his negative history with Bush and Edwards being viewed as too liberal by independents based on his positive association with Kerry. In both cases, the taint is probably unfair. But so is life.

Bayh probably plays opposite Giuliani in this theater we call presidential politics. Like Rudy, Bayh has governed the far end of the other team's base territory and is probably aligned more with the other team on some issues than with his own. Rudy is a conservative on fiscal issues and foreign policy, but no one can doubt he's a liberal on social issues. Similarly, Bayh has his own set of issues on which he would be deemed apostate, and if either is to win their party's nod, it will require some heavy lifting over the next two years.

Warner is the Romney of the Democratic pack. A one-term governor with a business background from a state with few social problems, Warner governed opposition territory effectively without becoming a de facto Republican. Like Romney, Warner was able to accomplish his own party's goals via the other party's means. The last president to effectively make this work, as Dick Morris often reminds us, was Bill Clinton. Both Romney and Warner would probably govern much more efficiently than the current POTUS, streamlining government, tightening the fiscal belt, running the state more like a business.

I have more faith that my party will do the smart thing and nominate one of their bluish conservatives than I have in the opposition party to nominate a reddish liberal. The Democrats' big problem is Hillary, and it's one that should not be ignored. Still, the thought of a Romney v. Warner race, a national election that involves the better of two goods and that would unite this country again, is something that part of me privately hopes for but doesn't expect to get.

Blue State Hillary

2006-05-30T14:29:00.000-05:00

Once again I link to Sully's site in order to demonstrate the sorry state of the Democratic frontrunners for the '08 nomination. Hillary is ultimately a polarizer --- a blue-state Democrat who would have a difficult time winning territory that neither Gore nor Kerry picked up in the last two elections. Her unfavorables, at 42 percent, are particularly high, and she splits independents 48-46, the mark of a divider, not a uniter. For what it's worth, the current president has impacted the electorate in about the same manner, and he did win two elections that way, but I suspect the country's ready to move beyond the red/blue game the next time around, and whichever party is the first to figure that out wins.

Hillary's only hope is that the Republicans are too stubborn to nominate a candidate who makes grassroots conservatives the least bit uncomfortable. Those in the GOP field who can win blue states --- McCain, Rudy, and Romney --- seem foreign to a party that is increasingly southern, rural, and evangelical. If the Republicans insist on nominating a George Allen or a Mike Huckabee, '08 basically starts where '04 left off, with the battle lines drawn along Mason-Dixon and a few hundred thousand voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania charged with selecting the next president. Considering the state of the Ohio GOP, this would be a very, very foolish move by a party that once excelled at finding candidates that could appeal to the nation, not just half of it. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won 49 states. Interestingly, both were from what is now a blue state. Similarly, Democrats have only succeeded at winning the presidency thrice in the past ten elections, each time with a red state Democrat. Perhaps conservatives should keep that lesson in mind when tempted to select a candidate based on cultural cues over substantive political and policy considerations.

Gore Nonsense

2006-05-29T17:56:00.000-05:00

The intra-Beltway groundswell that is Gore '08 seems to be building amongst the chattering political classes. From the right, Rich Lowry weighs in on the possibility of yet another Gore run. Sully's been doing the same from the, er, immoderate center. Or something. The point is, talk of a Gore comeback is everywhere, provided that you live within the Boston-NY-DC corridor, of course.

I don't see another Gore run playing in Peoria for a number of reasons, chief among them being that Gore, as a sitting vice president during a time of peace and unprecedented economic growth, wasn't able to win more than 48 percent of the vote against a communicatively-challenged governor from the Republican equivalent of Massachusetts. If there was ever a set of conditions designed to propel Gore into the White House, 2000 was it. The fact that Gore's loss is being spun into a precursor for a win two years from now shows just how sorry the current pack of potential presidential candidates actually is.

Gore is being called the new Nixon. In some ways that's true. Like Gore, Nixon lost a close election as a sitting veep to a popular POTUS, only to return eight years later to claim the mantle of national leadership as the last man standing after a chaotic eight years. Unlike Nixon, though, Gore has not been actively retaking control of the party establishment, building goodwill among elected officials or courting money men. Hillary's been doing most of that heavy lifting on the Democratic side, and it's hard to see how Gore beats her in the primaries. And even if by some miracle Gore managed to win the nod, does anyone really think he'd beat McCain? Or Rudy? Or even Romney?

Gore is quite similar to another former repeat presidential contender: William Jennings Bryan. WJB was defeated by McKinley in 1896 in a close election that mirrored the red/blue divide of the current era. Bryan sought the nomination again and again, won it twice more, and lost the general both times. While Nixon's comeback is much more sexy to remember, the lessons of WJB's multiple nominations --- and multiple failures --- shouldn't be forgotten by those itching for yet another iteration of the former vice president to lead the nation in 2008.

"McCain's got it"

2006-05-28T13:17:00.000-05:00

Just one more thought on McCain before I move on to another topic. I was talking with a Rust Belt Republican type the other day --- the sort of fellow who would go to the polls in the Iowa caucuses --- and asked him who he thought would win the GOP nod in '08. His answer, without hesitation, was that "McCain's got it."

This response says more about McCain's success at creating an aura of inevitably with regards to his chances than it does about his actual chances. By going full speed ahead with his presidential campaign so early in the season, McCain is attempting to emulate GWB's successful moves in the late '90s that led the bulk of casual observers of politics outside the Beltway to presume that he was the frontrunner and likely nominee. By May of 1998, GWB led the Republican field in the scientific polling of Republican primary voters for 2000. As the conventional wisdom developed that Bush was the likely nominee, the Republican establishment began to fall into place behind him, as money men and influence-seekers want to back a winner. By 2000, the GOP establishment was solidly behind Bush, and that dynamic knocked out all comers, including McCain himself.

Today, it's McCain who is positioning himself as the establishment candidate. McCain knows that the more he creates the illusion that his nomination is inevitable, the more Falwells and Barbours will get behind him, which in turn makes his nomination more likely, which in turn gets more of the establishment behind him, and so forth. It's a good strategy, and the only thing that could really prevent it from working are those pesky conservative voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. McCain will be competing with Romney and Allen for Iowa and with Romney and possibly Giuliani for New Hampshire. If McCain wins both, he'll have the establishment waiting for him on the other side with the nomination. If he loses both, he's finished. If he wins one and not the other, he lives to fight another day in South Carolina and Michigan.

But why not Rudy?

2006-05-25T17:11:00.000-05:00

That seems to be the obvious question from all of these polls I've referenced in the posts below. If Rudy and McCain are performing equally well among independents and Democrats, but Rudy's getting 86 percent of Republicans and McCain, only 79 percent, doesn't a Giuliani candidacy square the circle? I think it would if Rudy's support holds up. I was a big Giuliani backer last year, but have since began to wonder whether it's Rudy Republicans are supporting or if it's the idea of Rudy. Once Republicans actually get to experience a Giuliani campaign, with his New York life and his east coast demeanor, his comfort with executive power and his outspoken social liberalism, it will be interesting whether they continue to support the good mayor. Perhaps what's needed is a candidate who has the same pluses as Rudy and McCain (a great communicator, the ability to win blue territory, executive prowess, leadership temperment) but who's conservative on all the issues and who's liked and trusted by Republicans and conservatives. Maybe Mitt Romney is the answer.

More McCain polling

2006-05-25T17:04:00.000-05:00

Another poll, this one showing McCain besting Hillary by 11 in a general election matchup. That's down from a 13 point win last year. Once again, we see the impact of a McCain nomination. His strength among independents and conservative Dems remains strong despite his moves towards the GOP base. The lefties are leaving him, but they would've done so anyway. My guess is that he's winning all those culturally conservative Reagan Democrats in the industrial north and upper midwest. Bush lost that group twice. McCain would win them, as would Rudy and Romney. The only time McCain starts to look endangered in this type of polling is when Republicans threaten to stay home. The senator's challenge will be to convince his fellow partisans that he can be trusted.

McCain the Conservative

2006-05-25T12:29:00.000-05:00

Journalist Froma Harrop insists that McCain is a "thoroughbred no longer," and that his presidential chances have been gutted by his recent embrace of the socially conservative wing of the GOP, including his visit to Falwell's university, and that moderates and swing voters will flee from the Arizona senator, leaving him only with his always-tepid support from Republicans and conservatives.

Harrop's argument seems plausible upon examining the most recent FOX News poll that shows McCain beating Hillary by a mere four points, a dramatic fall from his once Herculean lead over the senator from New York. Has McCain been tainted by his embrace of all things conservative? The answer is a resounding no, and the reasoning of Froma and others has much to do with their insulated position on the midnight-blue coasts of America, where positions like the refusal to raise taxes and the support of cultural conservatism are actually net liabilities for a politician.

In order to debunk the Harrop theory once and for all --- as we are sure to hear much, much more of it over the months to come --- let's take a closer look at that FOX poll. The internals of a McCain/Hillary contest show the Arizona senator besting Ms. Clinton by 8 points among independents, winning nearly 20 percent of Democrats, and 79 percent of Republicans. Now compare this to Giuliani/Clinton numbers in the same poll. The good mayor takes almost the same number of Democrats, beats Hillary among independents by almost the same ratio, and takes 86 percent of Republicans. The result? Giuliani beats Hillary by 9, while McCain bests her by 4, solely because Rudy is able to win more Republican votes.

That last part is essential to understanding the flaw in the Harrop argument. Here we have Giuliani, a socially liberal Republican, and McCain, a social conservative, attaining the same amount of Democrat and independent votes in a general election matchup against the likely Democratic nominee. In other words, moving left on social issues is not essential or even helpful for a Republican in the general. The country is so polarized that, as long as the Republican nominee is actually a Republican, regardless of how spectacular that nominee may be, the best he or she will be able to do is win 20 percent of Democrats and beat the Democratic nominee by 8-10 percentage points. That's far better than Bush did among either group, and it's more than enough to win nationally, and to win big.

So what accounts for the fact that McCain once beat Hillary by double-digits in these very polls but now leads by only a few points? The Harrop theory is correct to this extent: McCain embracing Falwell, promising not to repeal the tax cuts, etc, did cause McCain to lose some support. But that support was from voters who were only backing the senator due to his status as the anti-Bush Republican. Largely liberal and Democratic, these voters were bound to leave McCain at some point as long as he planned on keeping the "R" next to his name. Note that these voters who have left McCain were never with Mr. Giuliani, which also indicates that their former support for McCain stemmed not from positions, but from their mutual opposition to Bush. It was an "the enemy of my enemy..." sort of dynamic that could only last as long as McCain was the enemy of the GOP establishment. Once he becomes their standard-bearer, that alliance ceases to exist.

And so McCain's biggest dilemma, at this point, is to increase the number of Republicans willing to support him in a matchup with Ms. Clinton. He doesn't have to take the 93 percent hyper-majority that Bush did; all McCain needs is a healthy 86 percent, like his friend, Mayor Giuliani. McCain has shown that he can run as a low-tax, fiscally responsible, socially conservative, defense hawk, good-government conservative and collect 20 percent of Democrats and best Hillary by 8 points among independents, a group that Bush lost by 1 point. McCain doesn't have much morphing left to do on positions, he just needs to convince a few more Republicans to bury the hatchet of the last few years and hop on board. At that point, McCain's election over Hillary would be inevitable, with Norquist and Falwell along for the ride.

State of the GOP

2006-05-23T20:08:00.000-05:00

Well, I am happy to report that, after a long hiatus away from the blogosphere --- much of it spent commenting on other blogs and sending lengthy emails to the Nat'l Review crew and Andrew Sullivan regarding my many political thoughts --- I have decided to commence blogging on the coming midterm elections.

When I last rode off into the cyber-sunset, President Bush had just been sworn in for a second term. Republicans had secured solid control of both houses of Congress, and the new GOP majority was prepared to enact conservative governance upon the nation at last. Everything was going according to plan.

How things change in only 16 months. The events of the last year and a half, for better or worse, have seriously endangered continuing Republican governance to the point of putting the House of Representatives in play for the first time in 12 years (the MSM will have you think it's always in play, and that Democrats are always just on the verge of retaking it; don't believe them). President Bush is now officially a lame duck and has plummeted to Nixonian levels of public approval. And Hillary Rodham views the White House from Capitol Hill with all the charm of Narnia's White Witch.

Here, as I see it, is the state of today's GOP:

1) POTUS is finished. His approval rating is hovering in the 30s. The president has amassed a mixed record that makes him sort of the conservative version of LBJ. GWB has governed both as a conservative (taxes, Afghanistan) and as a liberal (Medicare, spending). He's been both a neocon (immigration, Iraq) and a paleocon (steel tariffs). He's made some brilliant political and policy moves (Chief Justice Roberts) but has carefully balanced them out with inept nuttiness (Harriet Miers). His goals have more often than not been right for the country, but his execution of those goals has been so inept that he's either failed in their marketing (Social Security reform), in their implementation (Iraq), or both. He probably lost the public trust with his mishandling of Katrina, and his impact on conservatism has not been unlike that of his father. Like Bush the Elder, the president has confused conservatism to the point that not even conservatives agree on what it means. It will take a strong new leader to clarify it once again.

2) SCOTUS is enhanced! Conservatives should be pleased at the two newest additions to the Court. Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alito promise to be mainstream conservative jurists in the mold of Rehnquist, each of whom brings a top-notch intellect to the Court.

3) Republicans will either lose the House this fall or come very, very close. This is due to several converging dynamics, including the continued conversion of northeastern RINOs into full-blown Democrats (similar to what happened during the '90s in the South, when the DINOs finally converted into Republicans) as well as GOP retirements and a strong anti-GOP sentiment in the country. Most ominous is the generic congressional ballot, which shows the Democratic candidate beating the Republican in the low double-digits in almost every poll. The Democrats need 16 Republican seats in order to elect Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House. This time, they might just get it.

4) The U.S. Senate is probably safe...for now. Republicans have strong pickup opportunities in Maryland, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Washington. Democrats have similar opportunities in Ohio, Missouri, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. The only sure switches this fall are Pennsylvania and Montana, which are almost certain to go Democrat. In order to capture the Senate, Democrats would have to run the table on competitive seats. They'd have to win all of the vulnerable GOP seats and hold each of theirs as well. That's a tall order, even for this year. Republicans will likely lose a couple of seats, but maintain control of the body.

5) Something important is happening in the states this year that may be the GOP's silver lining come November. It appears that the electoral-rich upper midwest --- the most important swing region of the current political climate --- is about to elect a plethora of conservative GOP governors. Moreover, many will be booting Democrat incumbents in order to do so. Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota may all either elect or reelect Republicans to their respective state houses this fall. Doing so would be hugely important. First, it would prove to everyone that these states do elect conservatives, and that the GOP should scrap this silly red/blue game (which they're probably going to lose in 2008) and go for as much of the country as possible. Secondly, it will ensure that the majority of governorships, and a bulk of big-state governorships, stay in GOP hands, even as Democrats take New York and Massachusetts this November. Third, it will develop a strong slate of potential GOP senators and presidential candidates from this all-important region to future GOP dominance.

6) 2008. It's on every political junkie's mind. Hillary Clinton is the near-certain Democratic nominee. Her control over the machinery of the Democratic Party combined with her massive support among grassroots Dems --- she generally leads her closest Democratic rivals by 20 points or more --- make her nomination inevitable. She will be challenged by Feingold on her left and Warner on her right, among others, but Hillary's combo of money, machinery, and mass-support will win the day. On the GOP side, things are harder to predict. McCain and Rudy still lead in the scientific polls, but that's largely due to a lack of name recognition among the other candidates. Online polls and straw polls of activists show that Allen and Romney are the two dark horses that have a shot. Each of these candidates has various positives and negatives that will be dissected on this blog in the weeks and months to come. Suffice it to say that there is no perfect GOP candidate, and that, out of the Big Four, Rudy, McCain, and Romney each would have a pretty good shot at holding the White House for Republicans, while Allen would probably lose. More on this later.

There's no question that things aren't looking up for the GOP right now, but all is not lost for the dream of a long-term Republican majority. I invite you to return to this blog regularly and help me dissect just exactly where the GOP should go from here and how to make this dream a reality.

I'm back!

2006-05-22T19:14:00.000-05:00

In just a matter of days, I will re-launch Political Prognostications for the 2006 midterm season. If you're one of my '04 fans who's been anxiously awaiting my return, or if you're a newbie who just happened to come upon my site, I encourage you to visit again soon, as I'll be up and running with scores of thoughts and analysis concerning the coming miderm elections. Will the Democrats take the House? What about the Senate? Who will lead either party in 2008? All these questions and more will be answered in the weeks ahead.

I hope to be back online by Memorial Day weekend. Check back soon!

Moving Forward Into History

2005-01-08T16:53:00.000-05:00

Six months ago, I launched this blog with the intent of providing a greater historical perspective on the current national political climate than I could find anywhere else. Neither seasoned political scientists nor armchair pundits throughout the blogosphere seemed to be picking up on the broad historical parallels between this period in our political history and so many others, and I felt the need and the desire to fill that void. And while only a few thousand people likely got a glance at my theory, the election results serve at least as a partial validation, and the rest will come as we move forward into history.

Unfortunately, my hectic life will not permit me to transform this blog into a news-analysis site, which is the only way that it could survive with two years to go until the next election. Therefore, I am making the tough but reasonable decision to close down this blog indefinitely, possibly to return when future elections are upon us. I will leave the site up for all to access, but I won't be actively blogging again until a more opportune time for electoral politics is upon us, as that is what I'm good at. If I do return, I will announce it on all the usual forums, such as PoliPundit.

But before I go, I'd like to leave you with some long-term prognostications on the next few election cycles.

The 2006 midterms will likely be a wash for both Republicans and Democrats. First, 2006 will be President Bush's second midterm. This is almost always a horrible election for sitting Republican presidents. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan experienced the "six year itch" with the voters --- the concept that, after six years, voters tire of their GOP leaders and give the Democrats a victory. And if even Ronald Reagan, one of the most popular GOP presidents of all time, couldn't prevent the loss of the Senate in 1986, how can Republicans expect GWB to once again gain seats in Congress in 2006?

The saving grace of the GOP, of course, is the brewing civil war in the Democratic Party, which is set to erupt at any time now, between the Lieberman wing and the Dean wing of the party. This, plus an increasingly inept leadership, will likely lead to modest Democrat gains in the House, possibly only a couple of seats. The GOP can take comfort in the Senate, where the cycle of seats that are up for election were last up in 2000, a year in which Democrats gained four net seats. Even in a great Democrat midterm, the net change in the Senate would likely be no change at all. The most likely scenario, then, is that the GOP gains a couple of Senate seats, the Democrats pick up a couple of House seats, and both sides declare victory.

In 2008, the Democratic nominee will be Hillary. There is no alternative. Hillary will have two major opponents. One will be either John Kerry or John Edwards. The other will be either Evan Bayh or Mark Warner, representing the centrist, red state wing of the Democratic Party. Hillary has the fundraising power to demolish her opponents, and she also controls the superdelegates, who comprise about a major portion of the vote needed to win the Democratic nomination. The left wing of the Democratic Party will never allow the Bayh/Warner model to take the nomination, and most will be angry at Kerry and Edwards for losing to Bush. The result is a perfect storm that will hand Hillary the nomination.

The Republican fight will be a bit more complex, but is almost as predictable. The Republican field is the most lopsided as I've ever seen, with two national candidates who appeal entirely to the moderate half of the GOP, McCain and Rudy, and five or six regional candidates who appeal to the conservatives, like Frist, Owens, and Allen. The result is that the conservative vote will split into irrelevance. This is because the first few primaries basically narrow the race down to at most three candidates. Once McCain and Rudy come in first or second in Iowa, New Hampshire, and maybe a couple other states, the media will basically frame the race as a McCain/Rudy contest. The other candidates will fade into obscurity, and conservatives on Super Tuesday will realize they have a choice between a Western conservative they don't trust and a Northern liberal they respect. I believe that the winner could end up being either one of these guys, but if I had to take a shot in the dark, I think that at the end of the day, conservatives will go with their heads over their hearts and pick the candidate who is at least nominally pro-life: McCain. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and it's not hard to imagine Ralph Reed forming an alliance with McCain to prevent a pro-choice nominee from becoming reality. Some assurances from McCain that his judicial picks would be no farther to the left than O'Connor would probably get the last-minute endorsement of the Christian Coalition and give McCain the nomination on the Southern-heavy Super Tuesday.

Either way, the general election will be a blowout. If Rudy is the nominee, he takes the entirety of the northern midwest, such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, while stealing Jersey and making a run for it in California and New York. And all of this while holding all of the red states. McCain's victory is more of a red state/purple state consolidation. He holds the solid red West, easily takes the Southwest, sweeps the purple states in the northern midwest, and takes every Southern state against Hillary. Much as Teddy Roosevelt, the moderate maverick, won in a landslide following McKinley's two close elections, so will McCain or Rudy decimate Hillary following Bush's two nailbiters.

I fully expect President McCain or Giuliani to be a TR/JFK type, meaning that their accomplishments may or may not be great in the policy sense, but they will give Americans a president to believe in again and will bring at least some sense of national unity back, if only for a short time. Whichever one it is will be remembered fondly for years to come. And Hillary Rodham Clinton will take her place in history. Apparently, this former Goldwater Girl will play the role of her 1964 candidate, joining the pantheon of failed presidential prospects from the U.S. Senate.

How certain am I that all of this will come to pass? About as sure as I was in 1997 that Texas Gov. George W. Bush would become president after a close election with Al Gore. History repeats itself because most people do not know history, and we're about to go around the bend once again. Until then, this is Dave, signing off.

The Best Movies of 2004 Were Conservative

2004-12-29T23:43:00.000-05:00

I'm possibly the most frequent moviegoer in Washington. In a city of ardent workaholics, I find that a good movie is just what it takes for me to unwind after a long and grueling week. And so for my last post of 2004, I'd like to share with you all a realization I experienced while watching a rented copy of the latest version of "King Arthur" --- the best movies of 2004 were conservative.

As a lover of movies, there were at least a few that made an impression on me throughout the year. With each of them, I was baffled by the critics' responses, most of whom are intelligent people and who I usually agree with. All of these movies received mixed reviews at best from the critics and many of them were absolutely ripped apart by Ebert and his ilk. Up until now, I couldn't figure out why. But now, the reason is clear: some of 2004's biggest hits carried with them an underlying conservative message that seems foreign and frightening to the midnight-blue cities of New York and Los Angeles. Just what are these GOP-friendly hits? Read on.

The first, and most obvious, is "The Passion of the Christ." Naturally, the debate over this film was transparent and even I understood the politically and culturally charged conflict when the movie came out last spring. But at the time, I was shocked that the act of making a mainstream film about the last stages of Christ's life, a life that has been depicted over and over again in American cinema for decades, would be the cause of controversy. "The Passion" became a proxy for the latent anger that exists on the part of many secularists and non-Christians towards their religious counterparts. Scores of cultural elites, shocked that so many millions still adhere to what they consider an antequated Old World religion, used Gibson's film as an opportunity to shout their true beliefs about Christianity at the top of their collective lungs: that it is bigoted, backwards, and broken. The notion that Gibson would have the audacity to fail to deviate from Scripture in his storyline was also anathema to the Hollywood establishment. Once again, just 40 years ago, this would have been a no-brainer. But the blue-state elites, still reeling from the fact that their parents forced them to attend Sunday School while growing up, attempted to put up every roadblock imaginable to stop Gibson from producing his film. Naturally, the joke was on them, as Mel laughed all the way to the bank due to those silly red-staters who actually have been waiting for a modern movie about Jesus. Lesson: the traditions that this country was founded on, religious or otherwise, are still very much alive in most of America. And blue-staters better get used to it.

The next of 2004's conservative blockbusters was the new "King Arthur," an interesting twist on an age-old tale. In this version, Arthur is portrayed as a historical figure, not a mystical legend nor fairy tale prince. Arthur finds himself at the call of history as he leads his people on an ongoing struggle to achieve and maintain freedom for themselves and as much of the world as possible, all the while juggling alliances with and opposition from powerful groups such as the Romans and the Saxons. Arthur is portrayed as a man of faith who both defends his belief in God while refusing to force it on others. He is a rugged warrior who will always do the right thing, even when it's the more difficult path to take. And the value that he holds in the highest regard, that freedom is a gift from God and not from man, means that he will turn to the sword rather than negotiate with those who would demand some sort of compromise on that most basic human right. The acting was stellar, the characters were developed, the effects were superb. Yet the critics hated it. Why? Could it be that the historical Arthur reminded them a bit too much of a certain president who was up for reelection this year? It wouldn't surprise me in the least if hearing Bill Kristol's foreign policy or GWB's faith-based notions of freedom coming out of the mouth of the Once and Future King drove the critics mad. Perhaps our good Manhattan crowd would have liked the film better had Arthur signed a peace treaty with the genocidal Saxons instead of sending them to meet their Maker.

And then there was "Alexander." Intentionally or otherwise, the always-unpredictable Oliver Stone ended up crafting a portrait of Alexander that could have easily been neocon-champion Andrew Sullivan in a past life (sorry, Andrew). Stone's Alexander believed in imperializing to liberate, in conquering the surrounding savages in order to set them free. With each conquest, Alexander insisted on providing his new imperial citizens with Greek-level educations and all of the latest skills and technologies. His constant proclamations that all men and women of the world were equal left his fellow Greeks grumbling and plotting against him. And his desire to push on was met with opposition from nationalistic and isolationist forces within his ranks, who just wanted to go back to Greece and get rich instead of working for the greater good of the world. Once again, the critics put the movie through the proverbial cheese grater and, once again, had no real reason to do so. True, "Alexander" was no "Braveheart," but it was at least a bit better than, "Troy," which did not enjoy such shabby treatment. But then again, Brad Pitt's version of Achilles didn't turn critics' stomachs by forcing them to once again be reminded that George Bush is President --- and will be for another four years.

At the end of the day, whether any of these movies was truly the "best" of 2004 is open to interpretation. What is clear, though, is that all were very good films with great actors, well-developed characters, and all of the other assets that make a blockbuster. Is it just cooincidence, then, that three solid movies sporting a contemporary message out of the playbook of American conservatism received such shabby treatment from the Hollywood crowd? My guess is no, but I urge you to be the judge of that at the box office or the video store.

As for me, I'll be back in 2005!

Final Pre-Holiday Thoughts

2004-12-21T10:16:00.000-05:00

And with the blogosphere emptying of only the most ardent crowd as Christmas and other assorted holidays approach, I too will be taking my leave for awhile. Hey, if Andrew Sullivan can gleefully jump "into the hammock" for a month whenever he feels like taking a vacation, I can surely take a couple weeks off over Christmas. I will probably post at least once more before the New Year, after which I will assess my schedule and decide how often I will be able to post and, more importantly, how to increase my traffic, which has fallen to abysmal levels following a pre-election spike where I was seeing 200 hits per day.

Just a few final thoughts before I travel to my native hinterlands for the holiday. First, the latest popular vote totals have been released, which appear to be fairly close to the final tally that we're going to see from Election 2004. The result is about a 3 million vote win for the president, a margin basically unchanged from Nov. 3rd. But what's more interesting is this little tidbit: in 1980, Ronald Reagan ushered in a new, center-right majority garnering 50.8% of the popular vote. And what was GWB's final popular vote share in 2004? You guessed it: 50.8%. And everything comes full-circle.

Secondly, I've been totally neglecting many of the recent polls that have come out in the last few weeks showing the state of the next presidential race, which is just under a short four years away. The most recent was a poll released yesterday showing that either Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Kerry would easily defeat three of the potential GOP contenders for '08: Jeb Bush, Bill Frist, and George Pataki. The good news for Republicans is that both Hillary and Kerry seem to be bumping their heads around 45%. The bad news is that the three Republicans mentioned, all of whom are in the traditional 7-prong GOP line of succession that I have detailed in a recent post, are hovering in the 30s. Contrast this poll with other recent studies showing both Rudy and McCain nearly breaking 50% and destroying all Democratic comers. What does this mean for the GOP? Well, for one thing, we should forget about nominating any of the three aforementioned contenders. But the implications may be greater, as the sum of all of these polls suggests a desire for a GOP nominee who is removed from the traditional, red-state, WASP mold of candidates like Jeb and Frist. There are many such candidates out there, as I have detailed with great precision in earlier posts. Time will tell just who will bear the mantle.

And with that, I'm off! Feel free to peruse the archives of my blog if you find yourself going through political withdrawal during this holiday season. Or check out the other sites that I've linked to. PoliPundit, as most of you probably know, is an excellent political site that is constantly updated. I'll be back in reasonable force after the holidays.

And then there's Mitt

2004-12-17T23:03:00.000-05:00

Speaking of presidential dark horse nominees, my first choice for the GOP nod in 2008, who I had long since abandoned for logistical reasons, appears to be making a comeback on the conservative radar screen. Yesterday, George Will, the conservative's conservative, hypothesized on the possibility of a run for the White House by the most unlikely of fellows: the Republican governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.

First elected to the Bay State's governorship in 2002, Mitt Romney is not your average New England Republican. This is largely because Mitt's ties to New England run no deeper than his connections with much of the rest of the country. Mitt is the son of former Michigan governor George Romney, a man who, along with NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, attempted to prevent the conservative juggernaut that eventually took over the GOP back in the 1960s and 1970s. George may have been on the wrong side of history, but Mitt certainly is not. With a midwestern heritage, a youth spent in the Western state of Utah, and an adult life that centers around New England, Mitt Romney is truly a national candidate. And the man's governance would fit in quite nicely in my native Michigan, where he could pursue the same policies with much greater success than in the one-party state of Massachusetts. Since elected, Mitt has governed like a center-right midwestern Republican --- he has tried to balance budgets without raising taxes, kept social issues in the background except when he is forced to act on them (e.g., gay marriage), and he attempts to reform domestic programs without gutting nor bloating them. Compared to his blue state counterparts, like George Pataki, Mitt Romney stands out as possibly the most conservative governor east of Pennsylvania. And yet he's still moderate and pragmatic enough to win in a midnight blue state.

Mitt has always been my first choice for 2008. He is classy, articulate, telegenic, and brilliant (MBA/JD from Harvard --- graduated at the top of his class). Plus, speaking as someone who is sick and tired of running WASPs for president, Mitt is one more WASP that even I can warm up to. His pedigree is as impressive, if that's the word for it, as the Bushes, and Mitt just seems to have the aura of a benevolent aristocrat. But like other wealthy families who have dedicated themselves to public service, you find yourself warming up to Mitt due to his pleasant demeanor and his solid values. Mitt is a family man, a man of faith, and exudes character.

But I think the best reason for a Mitt candidacy is not that he'd beat Hillary, which he would, as denying the Democrats Michigan means the election is over before it even starts, but that Mitt Romney would actually make a good president. I have the same feeling about Mitt that I had about GWB back in the late 1990s. When I first heard Bush speak of "compassionate conservatism," of reforming the education system, and of fixing Social Security and Medicare, I knew that he was the man who would bring the Republicans into the 21st Century. Unlike Bob Dole, GWB represented a new generation of Republicans, those that refused to cede domestic issues to Democrats and recognized the serious problems that our country faced a few years down the road if we didn't act to reform the ancient New Deal programs now. Also, unlike Bill Clinton, GWB was willing to use his presidency to enact major reforms in the tax code and our largest entitlements. Hearing those ideas convinced me that Bush would be president: because he was thinking two steps ahead.

Similarly, hearing Mitt's policy goals is equally enlightening. Mitt talks about the need to prepare ourselves for the inevitability of the global economy. He recognizes that education in our country must be improved, not because we're bleeding heart liberals and it makes us feel good to do so, but because America is now part of the global marketplace and we're competing with literally billions of highly educated, highly skilled workers across the planet. It's this kind of thinking that seems eons beyond anything the Democrats or most Republicans can come up with these days. If Bush thinks two steps ahead, Mitt thinks five steps ahead. And wouldn't it be nice to have a president like that?

Now, of course, the liabilities. First, Mitt is all over the place on social issues. On gay marriage, he's conservative. On gun control, he's moderate, as he signed an assault weapons ban in MA. On abortion, he has the Tom Ridge position --- early term abortions are never going to go away, and so there's no point in pretending they will, but the state should work to place reasonable limitations on abortion like parental consent, waiting periods, and bans on partial birth abortion. Interestingly, this is probably where most Americans are on these issues. But the ever present fear of the single-issue voters who decide Republican primaries looms over Mitt.

But Mitt may be ahead of the curve here too. Will is reporting that Mitt is flirting with an idea called "moral federalism," which may be another way of articulating the notion that social issues belong with the states and localities, not at the federal level. This is actually a very clever way for a social moderate to win a Republican primary, as the single most important thing the president does regarding cultural issues is appoint judges. And a federalist who appoints states' rights judges is one whose views on social issues becomes irrelevant. Once again, Mitt may have outsmarted the rest. Could "moral federalism" be the new "compassionate conservatism?"

Mitt's only other liability is his Mormonism. It's unfortunate that in 2004 we're still talking about whether one's religion will affect his chances at the polls. But realities are what they are, and it remains to be seen whether this turns out to be a problem for Romney. Whatever the case, Mitt is a blue state Republican who governs like a purple state executive and is still probably conservative enough to hold the red states when faced with the thought of four years of Hillary. He's a bright guy with good ideas and would probably make a good president. And four years from now, he just may get there.

The GOP Line of Succession

2004-12-13T21:27:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I formulated a sort of rudimentary criteria that, based on the presidential elections of the last 100 years or so, has proved an able predictor of the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Unlike the Democratic Party, which seems to possess little rhyme or reason when it comes to selecting its presidential nominee (or doing anything else, for that matter), the GOP has long boasted a line of succession that respects the ancient notion of hierarchy. Due to the level of feedback I've received about this revolutionary idea (read: I haven't received any feedback --- I just think it's really cool), today's post will contain a more detailed description of the GOP line of succession from which the presidential nominee has come for more than a century.

For those of you who have already forgotten my last post, let me sum up. Since at least 1900, and probably earlier, the Grand Old Party has selected its presidential nominee from one of 7 categories. In my previous post, I mentioned that there were 6 categories; I am amending my framework a bit though to include a 7th group that will be discussed later. These categories basically contain all of the "crown princes" of the Republican Party, one of whom will be anointed as the presidential nominee in any given election year. The categories?

1) The sitting president
2) The sitting or fmr vice president
3) A current or fmr Cabinet Member
4) The leader of the House or Senate
5) The governor of one of our largest states
6) A significant figure on the opposition wing of the GOP
7) A national hero

And there you have it. Now, to prove that I am not pulling the wool over my readers' eyes, let's see whether or not each of the elections of the past century fit into one of these categories.

1) The sitting Republican president, even when facing a strong challenger such as the Ford/Reagan match of 1976, will always win the nomination of his party. This is set in stone. The sitting president has run for reelection and won the GOP nomination this past century in the following years: 1904, 1912, 1924, 1932, 1956, 1972, 1976, 1984, 1992, and 2004.

2) The sitting or former VP in today's GOP, should he want the nomination, is also pretty much a sure thing. Years in which the veep was nominated: 1960, 1968, 1988.

3) The prevalence of the veep is a relatively new phenomenon though. Before VP meant anything more than a placeholder, Cabinet Secretaries often stood as heirs apparent. Years in which the GOP went this route: 1908, 1928.

4) Congressional leaders almost never run for office, and when they do, they seldom win, but that doesn't prevent Bob Dole from being the only Senate Majority Leader in the last century to put this category in the line of succession. The year: 1996.

5) While Democrats nominate small state governors like Carter and Clinton, the GOP will only consider big state governors. What qualifies as a big state is open to interpretation, and today probably would include the four biggest (CA, TX, NY, FL) as well as OH, IL, and PA, which are basically tied for the fifth. Years this century: 1916, 1944, 1948, 2000.

6) When the GOP loses the WH, the next election usually sees the nod going to a leader or significant figure on the opposition wing of the Party. This is often someone who had run against the losing candidate in the primaries the last time around, but not always. Examples are Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Barry Goldwater in 1964. Years: 1936, 1964, 1980.

7) Finally, when a national hero, particularly one associated with a war, runs for the nod, he gets it. Years: 1952.

The most thorough among you will notice that there are two elections missing from this roster. Yes, you are correct, my framework did not hold true all of two occasions during the 26 presidential elections that took place between 1904 and 2004. In 1940, the GOP nominated Wendell Wilkie, a man who had never held elective office, to challenge FDR. In 1920, Republicans selected OH Sen. Warren Harding, a true dark horse candidate, and the only GOP dark horse in the last 100 years to ever win the nomination.

All of this begs the obvious question, is the GOP bound to follow the tried and true line of succession in 2008, limiting Republicans to a choice between Bill Frist, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani? Or will this be a year in which the GOP tosses out the old framework and goes with another dark horse candidate like Gov. Tim Pawlenty? Only time will tell of course, but the odds are certainly stacked in favor of any candidate who can manage to manipulate his way into the more traditional line of succession.

The Next TR?

2004-12-09T21:39:00.000-05:00

As my longtime readers well know, I am one of the prime pushers of the theory that American politics is of a highly cyclical nature and that George W. Bush is both the William McKinley and Lyndon Baines Johnson of our generation. And, as my readers also know by now, in order for history to once again repeat itself, as it always does, GWB must govern consecutively with a president of the same party who will accomplish the rare task of winning the heart of the nation, just as JFK preceded LBJ and McKinley was followed by Teddy Roosevelt. So just who is the heir to the TR mantle? Popular conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt may have shined some light on this very question just today with a must read column. His finding: the likely GOP nominee for 2008 is none other than America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani.

Nothing gets a Republican blog garnering more comments than putting the words "Rudy" and "president" in the same sentence. The reason is simple: Rudy is probably the first likely GOP nominee in decades to be openly pro-choice and pro-gay rights. Not since Gerald Ford in 1976 have the Republicans nominated a candidate for president who would admit to being socially liberal, with simple moderation on abortion usually a death knell for even the veep spot on the ticket. Just ask Tom Ridge about that one. Anyway, the prospect of a Giuliani candidacy is becoming especially salient given the way Republicans select their nominees.

It's at times like this that being a political history buff comes in handy. Unlike the Democrats, a party that has often nominated the dark horse governor from the small state in the heartland, the Republicans have forever been a party structured like the monarchies of the Old World. The hierarchy of the GOP is undeniable, complete with Dukes, Viscounts, and Crown Princes, each of whom knows their place and each of whom accepts that the Republican nominee will come from the 2 or 3 individuals who are next in the line of succession. The GOP has selected it's nominee in this manner for over a century. To believe it will do things differenty in just over three years is to believe that a fundamental change has taken place in the Republican electorate, a change which I for one see little evidence.

With that in mind, let's look at just exactly what the GOP line of succession consists of. Since 1900, the winner of the Republican nomination has always, without exception, been one of the following: 1) the sitting president, 2) the sitting vice president, 3) a Cabinet Secretary, 4) the leader of the opposition wing of the party (this is only when the party is out of power; think Bob Dole in 1996, Barry Goldwater in 1964), 5) a big-state governor, and finally, 6) a national hero associated with a military conflict.

Any questions? Good. Now let's go through each category to see if the GOP has any prospective candidates for 2008. The first two categories can be eliminated entirely --- Bush is term limited and Cheney is too old with too many health problems. The president's Cabinet has basically emptied out, with pretty much every new member being part of the White House staff, hardly a group that has the gravitas to jump right into a presidential run. The fourth category, the leader of the opposition wing of the party, is clearly filled by John McCain. But this candidate only wins the nomination when the GOP has lost the WH, such as when Bob Dole, who had opposed both Reagan in 1980 and Bush in 1988, finally got his shot at the presidency once that dynasty had ended. A McCain run this year will look more like Bob Dole's run in 1988 --- Republicans will be looking to continue Bush's presidency, not nominate the candidate who wants to take the country in a fundamentally different direction. As for the big states, none save Florida boast a nationally-recognized GOP governor ready for prime time. And Jeb Bush has taken himself out of the race. That leaves only one alternative: a national hero. Rudy Giuliani, the nomination awaits.

The thing that makes many Republicans so nervous about a Giuliani run is the notion that I hear from so many social conservatives. To paraphrase: "Well, I'd vote for Rudy, but it's all those other conservatives I'm worried about." In an almost self-reinforcing away, the GOP base seems terrified of a mythical bloc of Republican voters who will stay at home on Election Day in the event of a Rudy nomination --- a bloc that, according to Hewitt's nonscientific poll, may not exist. Still, this fear may be enough to deny Rudy the nomination, though I still maintain that it will take more than an intangible worry to alter 100 years of history.

As I've said before, the dynamics of all of this would be altered should President Bush name an heir apparent. Otherwise, Rudy may be on his way to the nomination --- and the presidency. There's no doubt in my mind that Rudy would destroy Hillary in a general election contest, winning myriads of working class and middle class voters in the north who haven't voted Republican since 1988 and who are just looking for a reason not to vote for Hillary. If Rudy were to become president, he would truly be the TR to Bush's McKinley, moderate, populist, reformist, and charismatic. Like TR and JFK, President Giuliani would likely join the roster of semi-great presidents who, while not quite achieving the greatness of a Lincoln or an FDR or a Reagan in policy accomplishments, is at least able to unite a large majority of Americans behind common goals again. And that, as recent presidents have found out, is no easy task.

Pawlenty Rising?

2004-12-07T22:35:00.000-05:00

As someone who had the foresight to predict that Texas Gov. George W. Bush would be the 2000 GOP nominee shortly after Bob Dole's loss in 1996, I must admit I have a growing suspicion that the Republican nominee in 2008 will come either in the form of Rudy Giuliani or John McCain. But that doesn't mean that a dark horse candidate isn't lurking in the heartland, quietly readying his arsenal to take the 2008 primaries by storm. The most likely dark horse: a little-known governor from the northern midwest named Tim Pawlenty.

Over the last few years, the GOP has seen what kind of candidate it takes to win nationally in the 21st Century. Unlike the old Republicanism of George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, our current President Bush created a winning formula for Republicans by combining fiscal conservatism, domestic pragmatism, social traditionalism, and embracing America's role as world hegemon. The next GOP nominee, many would then reason, should be a fellow Bush Republican, but one who has an easier time communicating with Americans in the big northern swing states that were all so close this time around.

The prospective nominee must be able to communicate with voters in the new battleground, the northern midwest, without losing support amongst the dark-red states of the South and West. The states of OH, IA, PA, MN, MI, and WI were all decided by 3 points or less this time around. If the GOP were able to field a regional candidate to close the deal in the Great Lakes region, it'd sweep the entire middle of the country, leaving Hillary with only the coasts and maybe the Democratic island of Illinois.

Enter Tim Pawlenty. First elected to the governorship of MN in 2002, Pawlenty is a young, articulate Bush Republican who connects well with the purple state voters of the northern midwest while still encompassing the values of the red states in the South and the West. Pawlenty has both executive and legislative experience --- he spent some time in the leadership of the MN legislature before running for governor. Bright and well-spoken, Pawlenty is a deficit hawk who doesn't raise taxes, a domestic pragmatist who will attract moderates with his concern for health care and transportation, and a cultural conservative who is not "in your face" with his social views.

Like most Republicans from his region, Pawlenty gets along well with both the Specter and Santorum wings of the GOP. This is typical of midwestern Republicans, who are generally positioned right in the center of the GOP spectrum. In fact, Pawlenty's governance and positions on the issues are very similar to those of other past midwestern Republican governors like Tommy Thompson of WI or John Engler of MI, both of whom also played well with both Bush and McCain types. Unlike his predecessors, however, Pawlenty is not mired with a provincial demeanor and is young, articulate, and telegenic enough to run on a national stage.

Interestingly, Pawlenty's fortune may lie more than anything in the 2006 elections in Minnesota. The state that once made a name for itself by being the only 1 of 50 to pledge its electors to Walter Mondale in 1984 finds itself the most moderate state in the country just 2 decades later. This once solid blue state couldn't be any more purple, with a congressional delegation split right down the middle (4 Democrats and 4 Republicans), one U.S. Senator from either party, and both houses of the legislature divided almost in a 50/50 split, with each party narrowly controlling one chamber. As President Bush's dreaded second midterm of 2006 will probably be at least a halfway decent year for Democrats nationally, a strong GOP showing in MN would definitely arm Pawlenty with political capital going into the presidential election season. If Pawlenty can prove his worth by being reelected in 2006, and maybe by bringing the MN state senate along with him, he will be looking very good for 2008.

A Primer for 2008

2004-12-01T13:20:00.000-05:00

So what do the dynamics for the 2008 presidential race look like at this point? Basically, each party is already seeing internal jockeying that, along with a multitude of other factors, is creating near opposite problems for the Republicans and the Democrats. And with the absence of an heir apparent on either side, anything can truly happen at this point. This post will analyze the battle for the Republican nod.

The GOP has finally attained majority-party status in the nation, which puts it in the unenviable position of trying to satisfy both ends of the 60-million voter coalition that put President Bush back into power. Early polling can provide some insight as to the major divide that exists in this voting bloc. According to exit polls from the 2004 election, about a quarter of all voters listed "moral values" as their number one issue. Contrast that with early 2008 polling which shows about half of Republicans dividing evenly between the socially liberal Giuliani and the secular McCain. While a rough inference at best, it appears that about half of Republican voters are now cultural conservatives like the president and the other half, social moderates or libertarians similar to the McCain/Rudy wing of the party. And with the GOP largely united on the war on terror and general principles of domestic reform, the 2008 Republican primary may end up being a fight over emotionally-charged social issues like abortion, guns, and gay rights.

The other issue that is almost certain to divide GOP primary voters in 2008 is the increasing feeling that balancing the budget and paying down the 7-trillion dollar national debt cannot be accomplished simply by waiting for the next economic boom. Something is going to have to be done regarding the tax code and/or the way government spends in order to bring back fiscal sanity, and based on its opposition to much of the Bush tax cut, it is likely that the McCain wing of the party will push for a tax increase on some.

With the intraparty chasm to likely be one regarding fiscal and social issues, political junkies cannot help but feel that the GOP has "been there, done that." This feeling is not surprising, considering that the 1988 fight for the GOP nod was almost entirely a battle over the same types of issues. In that contest to succeed Reagan, Bob Dole was the candidate of the deficit-hawks and social moderates, Jack Kemp of the tax cutters, and Pat Robertson of the social conservatives. Had it not been for George Bush's position of VP, giving him the nod as heir apparent, it is quite likely that Dole would have won the nomination as the conservatives split between two or three other candidates.

The lack of an heir apparent to the current President Bush, then, is certainly a cause for concern amongst the GOP establishment, which is petrified at the thought of a major split in the GOP causing voters to stay home or embrace a Perot-like third party candidate and giving Hillary Clinton the presidency with 45% of the vote. Without an heir at the helm, the Bush wing of the party will almost certainly split between the many Bush-like young governors that are itching to run for the nation's highest office. And without one household name among them, it's not hard to imagine up to 5 or 6 conservatives, including Sen. Frist of TN, Gov. Pawlenty of MN, Gov. Sanford of SC, and so forth, dividing the conservative vote so many times over as to give either Rudy or McCain --- the only two candidates in the race with national recognition --- a plurality victory.

The only way for the GOP establishment to avoid a more "maverick" Republican at the helm in 2008 is basically to decide on one candidate early on who will be deemed heir apparent to the president. Bush can do this himself in a variety of ways following the 2006 midterms, which is usually when the frontrunners from each party become known. Without a call from the top, the half of GOP voters who want a candidate similar to Bush in policy positions will almost certainly divide based on region and personal preference between the conservative candidates, resulting in a loss for them all. If an establishment candidate is not chosen, conservatives can only hope that McCain and Rudy do enough damage to one another as both try to claim the moderate mantle to basically knock each other out of the race.

Whatever the case, the irony in all of this is that as much as many Republicans complain about McCain's loose cannon nature and Rudy's deviation from party principles, most privately admit that these two candidates would almost certainly destroy whoever the Democrats choose to nominate in 2008. A national win for either candidate would be far easier to achieve than cultivating one of the young center-right governors with only a few years experience under his belt and no name-recognition nationwide. And the wild card in all of this is the current occupant of the WH, who has yet to select an heir to the proverbial throne.

Blogger Problems?

2004-12-01T13:16:00.000-05:00

An administrative note. Today marks the second time in the last few days that my blog has failed to load properly. I'm assuming that Blogger is having some technical problems, but please do not assume that I am no longer maintaining this blog should you visit to read my latest thoughts only to find my site in disarray. In that event, just try back later.

Owens Falling

2004-11-29T22:13:00.000-05:00

One of the most significant political casualties of 2004 is also one that is largely under the radar. Known primarily to political junkies and residents of the Southwest, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a once-rising star in the GOP establishment, has apparently fallen from the GOP firmament due to a combination of poor decision-making and bad luck. The man who was once touted as heir apparent to the Bush Dynasty appears to be closer to political retirement than the White House, leaving the line of succession open for yet another day.

After the GOP successes in the 2002 midterms convinced Republicans that W's reelection was virtually a done-deal, the conservative establishment immediately began looking for an heir to carry on the Bush legacy after the president's second term expired. Without a sitting vice president capable of filling the role, many looked to the states in order to find a governor who emulated the Bush formula that has been so successful in Texas and Florida. This formula gained national recognition after the 1998 midterms, in which the nat'l GOP lost an election they couldn't lose after framing the election in terms of what the American people regarded as impeachment over sex. In that election, the Bush Bros. shone brightly from their respective states as they successfully continued to build strong GOP majorities in two of the Republic's largest states by rejecting the Dole and Gingrich formulas of the national GOP and combining fiscal conservatism, domestic pragmatism, and social traditionalism to form majority coalitions. The result, six years later, is a the solidification of a Republican majority in Texas, the near-solidification of Republican Florida, and the first GOP majority president in over a decade.

It is no surprise, then, that many began touting Bill Owens as the logical heir to the Bush legacy. A young governor from the Southwest, Owens appeared to be doing to the swing state of Colorado what the Bushes had done to their respective states: building a solid Republican majority. In 2002, Owens won a double-digit victory in his reelection bid for governor. Sen. Allard, a first-term U.S. Senator who was on the top of the Democrats' hit list, comfortably won reelection despite his lack of personablity or campaign skills. And Republicans managed to capture both houses of the state legislature as well as the majority of seats in the U.S. House delegation. Moreover, a redistricting plan proposed by the new GOP legislature would have gerrymandered the Republicans into near-impenentrable majorities in the state.

Additionally, Owens' positions on the issues, which were right in line with center-right Colorado, seemed to be akin to those that play well nationally both with the base and with swing voters. Like most governors in the late-90s, Owens had been able to use the final years of the economic boom to claim the mantle of a deficit hawk who doesn't raise taxes. Like the Bushes, Owens was domestically pragmatic, showing a lot of interest in education policy. And on social issues, Owens was an ardent conservative, joining James Dobson, who is based in Colorado and is one of the leading voices of the new Moral Majority. Things couldn't have looked better for Bill Owens.

But as the adage goes, what goes up truly does come down, and Owens' political capital is no exception. First came the separation. Owens, a practicing Catholic and a very outspoken social conservative, announced he was separating from his longtime spouse. Then, the rumors began --- rumors of Clintonian personal problems that would almost certainly surface during any hardball GOP primary season. His appearances in the media, limited to such low-key events as a debate with Howard Dean and an occasional cameo on cable news, did not convey the warmth or charisma of a Reagan nor the folksy demeanor of a Bush.

And if these misgivings weren't enough, all of this took place against the backdrop of a Democratic revival in the state of Colorado. The redistricting plan was struck down by the courts, leaving the legislature and congressional seats competitive in the state. Longtime GOP Sen. Ben Nighthorse-Campbell retired, leaving the seat to Senator-elect Salazar --- a seat that could have been saved had Owens jumped into the race. Moreover, not only did the GOP lose one seat in the U.S. House this November, but BOTH houses of the state legislature along with it. And as if to add insult to injury, President Bush was only able to carry the state by five points, the same margin as Battleground Florida, which means that 2008 will see mountains of cash poured into Denver by Hillary and friends.

Like so many presidential contenders before him, Owens appears to be left with not even an offer to come to DC and join his longtime friend's new Cabinet. Should the Democrats pick up the Colorado governorship in 2006, Gov. Owens is almost certainly headed to the political graveyard. Neocons looking for a Bush-like candidate are already setting their sights on other young governors, such as Minnesota's Pawlenty or Massachusetts' Romney, or even Jeb Bush himself. It would take a mighty comeback at this point to salvage the presidential aspirations of Colorado's governor.

Morning in America

2004-11-22T21:50:00.000-05:00

Hmm, I probably should have announced that I was taking a two week vacation from blogging. Ah well. Live and learn, right? Anyway, after a post-election hiatus from the blogosphere, I have returned to post on a semi-regular basis. I should be updating my blog 2-3 times a week henceforth, so be sure to check in every other day or so to catch up on my latest prognostications.

Now for today's thoughts. As most of you well know, today marks the 41st anniversary of the assassination of one of our nation's most popular presidents. While JFK didn't live long enough to govern with a political or electoral mandate that would have allowed his policy vision to become reality, the special place that he has in the hearts of Americans has propelled him to the top of the list of our greatest presidents as far as public opinion is concerned. And while the debate will never be settled as to the cause of Kennedy's death, the effects are far more clear. Almost as if it were a morbid portent of things to come, the assassination of JFK was the first of a series of events that threw America into chaos over the course of two decades --- and that culminated in a nation on the brink of collapsing into the same semi-socialist, internationally-irrelevant position as many of our Western neighbors.

Prior to Kennedy's fate, America had become an optimistic place once again. The post-WWII atmosphere of the 1950s had led to the growth of the middle class, the baby boom, and the prominence of America as one of two world powers. Ike made Americans feel secure, despite the looming Soviet threat, and the 1960 election gave Americans a choice between two qualified candidates for the presidency. JFK seemed prepared to modify the domestically-New Deal, internationally-hawkish policies of the FDR-Truman Democratic Party, and to modernize these policies for a new era. Americans were hopeful and optimistic.

The years after Kennedy's death, however, were akin to a downward spiral for America. LBJ took the reins of state, leaving America feeling cheated out of Camelot. The Texan VP who would be FDR retreated to 1930s economics and and WWII-style foreign policy. Escalation in Vietnam was the only solution to the spread of Communism. Busting the federal budget for a generation was a small price to pay for completion of the New Deal.

Then came the culture wars. Race, sex, drugs, and war were the issues of the day. The baby boomers, rejecting the old ways, wanted a new type of society and took to the streets to get it. These social issues divided America and, politically, exploded the governing coalition that had run the Democratic Party and dominated the state for 35 years. The 1968 DNC will always be remembered for riots in the streets and not Hubert Humphrey.

Then, more assassinations and political fallout. MLK and RFK were killed, leaving the country with Richard Nixon as its standard bearer. Then came Watergate. The faith in the Republic was shaken. An unsuspecting Michigan congressman, Gerald Ford, was thrown into the Oval Office. He saw his own defeat just two years later to Jimmy Carter, a depressing and inept leader who couldn't even command Congress let alone the nation. The Republicans remained in the minority and the Democrats intent on driving the nation into the ground.

The result: a nation respected neither at home nor abroad. Stagflation and gas lines characterized the once-vibrant economy. Taxes and interest rates crippled America. The social war had become an all-out attack on anything traditional, with the ERA set to become the next amendment to the Constitution, an example of the power of the PC police bent on enforcing their values on the nation. Moreover, Carter's America was mocked around the world, with the ghosts of Vietnam preventing anything from being done about an Iranian hostage crisis that threatened US credibility abroad. America seemed set to join the nanny-state, socialist nations of Western Europe and vanish into irrelevancy.

Then came 1980. Then came Ronald Reagan, riding in from the West on a proverbial white horse, prepared to rescue the nation from a demise of its own making. Reagan revived a dying GOP that was about to go the way of the Whigs, bringing the Republicans to power in the Senate for the first time in decades. He was able to unite free market types, libertarians, pragmatists, and traditionalists with the common goal of regaining America's role as a world power, crushing Communism, and making America freer at home both economically and socially. In so doing, Ronald Reagan initiated a 180 degree turn in American public policy --- as well as in the way Americans felt about their country. The result: the 1980s marked the beginning of an economic and cultural revival in the US that had not been seen since before that fatal year in November when America lost its president. Thanks to Reagan, America regained its spirit. And it was Morning Again in America.

Some have compared GWB to JFK, a man who is trying to make Reaganism fit for the 21st Century the way Kennedy tried to make FDRism work for the 1960s. I tend to see Bush more as an LBJ type --- a practical, low-key leader who is highly effective and accomplishes big things through a business-style administration. America is likely still waiting for its next JFK; another president who, policy accomplishments or otherwise, will give Americans a uniting force to feel good about and a motivator to work for a cause greater than themselves. Who knows --- four years down the road, we just might get it.

The New Battleground

2004-11-07T21:02:00.001-05:00

Well, the dust is starting to settle from this election year and my traffic has gone down to a few faithful readers, so it's time to start looking to future elections. One of the first things I observed in the wake of Tuesday night was the contiguous nature of the states that voted for each presidential candidate and how the electoral battleground has shifted tremendously over the past decade, if not the past four years. The result: about 40 of 50 states are officially out of play absent a traditional landslide victory (i.e., 5 points or more) on a national level by a future presidential candidate.

The adage that the red states have gotten redder and the blue states have gotten bluer is not without merit. Out of the 31 new "red" states, those that voted Bush in 2004, 27 went for the president by 5 points or more. This solid red territory is more regional than anything, and includes the entirety of the South, complete with Florida, and the interior West, Colorado intact. Only 4 of the red states, comprising 37 of the president's 286 electoral votes, are currently battlegrounds. Two of them are from the northern midwest (Iowa, Ohio) and the other two are in the Southwest (Nevada, New Mexico).

As far as the 29 states won by Kerry go, 23 elected the Senator from Massachusetts by 5 points or more. The six that didn't include one from each coast (Oregon, New Hampshire) and 4 from the northern midwest (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota). Of Kerry's 252 EVs, the swing states comprise a hearty 69 of them.

Notice a trend? You should. Of the 10 states that were less than 5 points this election, 6 of them were from the northern midwest. Also, as far as electoral totals go, out of the 106 EVs that will be up for grabs in the next WH run, 85 are in the northern midwest. The conclusion is clear. The new battleground is the northern midwest, the moderate states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. Should either side field a candidate who can sweep all of these states, the election is basically over.

As someone who grew up in this region, it does not surprise me that the next president will probably be the candidate who can win this region. Demographic and generational changes have made these states the most moderate in the country. With young people leaving this part of the nation and flocking to urban centers on the coasts and in the West, and with immigration impacting this part of the country far less than many other regions, these states reflect a politics somewhere in between those of Bush and Kerry. These are the remnants of the Reagan Democrats: culturally traditionalist, economically populist, with a provincial dislike for Imperial Adventurism or excessive trade. They're the Pat Buchananites, pitchforks in hand, who loathe taxes but will also revolt at cuts in education or Social Security. Their ideal president is a moderate Republican like Sen. John McCain or a centrist Democrat like Sen. Evan Bayh, neither of which they are likely to get. Unlike Southerners, who have evolved from Reagan Democrats into Republicans, these midwesterners are still fiercely independent of either political party. These states send 12 Senators to Washington, with exactly half being Democrats and the other half, Republicans.

How does either party sweep this region? One of two methods will work. The first: actually pick a candidate significantly closer to the center than in the past few elections. A national hero like McCain or Rudy would destroy Hillary in this region. To the contrary, it's hard to imagine the Democrats losing any of these states with former Indiana governor Evan Bayh at the top of the ticket, who exemplifies the economic and social values of the midwest and who would be anathema to Hollywood Democrats.

The second option, and the more likely one, is to select a regional candidate who is acceptable to the party base but can still speak the language of midwesterners. This method has worked quite well for the Dems with candidates like Carter and Clinton, men who spoke with a twang but believed in liberal goals. Now that the battleground has shifted, though, from the border states in the South to the northern midwest, Democrats need to find their next Bill Clinton among the governors of this region. Bayh would probably be strongest, but his somewhat pro-life views would probably doom him. Iowa governor Tom Vilsack is the next best bet for Dems, though he generated little excitement when mentioned as a Kerry running mate this time around.

As far as the GOP slate goes, most of the old midwestern governors are just that: old, in retirement, and lacking national stature. Former Michigan governor Engler was wildly popular in a state that Republicans haven't won since 1988. Still, he lacks the persona to make a national run. Same goes for Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson or Ohio's Bob Taft.

The diamond in the rough for the GOP may turn out to be Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, a young, vibrant governor who won his first election in 2002 and appears to be headed for reelection in 2006. A fiscal hawk who doesn't raise taxes, a domestic moderate who doesn't bust budgets, a social conservative who's not in your face about cultural issues, Pawlenty is a typical purple state Republican whose youth and charisma may make him the right man at the right time for the GOP in 2008. Possibly the only GOP presidential prospect who elicits smiles from both the Specter and Santorum wings of the Republican Party, Tim Pawlenty just may hold the keys to the remaining Democratic holdouts in the American heartland.

The Winners and The Losers

2004-11-05T18:33:00.000-05:00

Okay, so on a broad level, it was pretty clear who won and lost the election last Tuesday night. But to the trained political eye, things are a bit more complex than simply saying that one candidate won and the other lost. As with any election, the results come with a myriad of implications that affect the political players down the line. And while I'm sure the punditry will be releasing a bevy of these lists in the near future, here's my take on the winners and losers of the 2004 election.

Winner: Karl Rove
Loser: Teddy Kennedy

In what may prove to the final blow to the attempted revival of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, this election showed liberals once and for all that they must embrace Clintonian centrism if they ever hope to influence national politics in any meaningful way. The candidacy of John Kerry, a Dukakis-style liberal disguised as a centrist, was the last effort by the Eastern Establishment to return a genuine liberal to the White House.

Karl Rove, on the other hand, is vindicated. His often-ridiculed theory that the keys to victory lie in the mobilization of politically apathetic conservatives proved to be starkly accurate. Democrats have always felt that if the apolitical masses who don't normally exercise their right to vote would just come to the polls, we'd see a popular revolution throughout the heartland. Well, on Tuesday, we did see such a revolution, only it resulted in nearly 60 million votes for a conservative president. Yes, young people did come out --- but these young people aren't the quasi-socialists of the 60's. Instead, they're the product of Reaganism --- with a strong belief in free markets and government reform. Rove's victory is deserved.

Winner: Hillary Clinton
Loser: John Edwards

With Kerry out of the way, the line of succession is once again open in the Democratic Party. And Hillary Clinton, as a high-profile Senator, can attempt to pick up the pieces with a promise to do what no Democrat has done other than her husband for forty years: win the White House in a landslide. The similarities between Hill and Bill, however, end with their surname. Most feel that Hillary is a doctrinaire liberal who would remake Clintonism to fit her northeastern ideology. The fact that she only won by 10 points in NY against a nameless opponent in 2000 makes one wonder just how effective she'd be in a national election. Yet a Hillary bubble is inevitable on the left, and she is certain to be the front runner for the nod.

Edwards, on the other hand, is finished. His decision to cede his Senate seat to the Republicans along with his inability to move the South towards the Democratic ticket rebukes his argument that he can be the next Bill Clinton and puts him out of the national spotlight. Additionally, his pathetic attempt to mount legal challenges to a 100,000 vote victory for the president in Ohio, claiming that "every vote must be counted," stands in stark contrast to the classy and dignified Kerry concession. Edwards' own statement was a death knell. He's through.

Winner: New Media
Loser: Old Media

Too many bloggers have written on this already, so I'll keep it short. Since January, the Old Media made it clear that its purpose was to join the effort to beat George Bush. Journalists like Dan Rather, apparently nostalgic about the days when, as young reporters, they brought down presidents like Nixon and Ford, were foaming at the mouth over every possible incident that could politically harm the president. Yet after 10 months of onslaught, their efforts got them nothing. Why? Because of the New Media, the blogs, the Net, and the first right-wing cable news network. The monopoly of Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw over political thought is over. Say hello to opinion-makers like Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge.

Winner: The Two Party System
Loser: Third Parties

As I've said before, this election marks the first time since 1988 that minor party candidates have gotten less than 4 percent of the national vote. Americans this year viewed third party candidates as a wasted vote and went back to the two parties. Perot's Reform Party is dead.

Winner: Rudy Giuliani
Loser: John McCain

The reelection of George Bush also means the likely end of the aspirations of John McCain. He'll be 72 in 2008, which is awfully old to run for president, and he seemed tired and listless at the RNC this year. Had Bush been defeated, McCain could have made the argument Reagan made in '80 after Ford lost in '76 --- that had the GOP gone with Reagan instead of Ford, Carter would have never been president. McCain in many ways represents the "other" wing of the GOP, though the truth is much more complex of course, and he remains unlikely to receive any WH endorsement in 2008 based on his troubled past with the president.

Conversely, Rudy wowed the crowds at the RNC. With his health problems truly behind him, Rudy made the same case as McCain for continuing GOP governance but complete with humor, vibrance, and energy. As a prime candidate for Attorney General or the governorship of New York, Rudy could easily lay the claim to be the perennial maverick GOP candidate who surfaces in every open GOP primary.

Winner: New Europe
Loser: Old Europe

George Soros and the Jet Set in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels have little to celebrate about these election results. The most powerful country in the world and the closest thing we have to a world hegemon has rejected their worldview of moral equivalence, appeasement, and isolation. The elites of Old Europe are far from noble in their goals, and they seem much more interested in shutting their doors to the problems of the Middle East and the developing world than getting involved. New Europe, however, understands the challenges that face the billions of people who do not live within the socialist utopias of Scandinavia and are prepared to help face them. By embracing the Bush Doctrine, Americans have signalled their rebuke to the Soros crowd and have embraced Blair and Howard in our joint effort to deal with a complex geopolitical situation.

Winner: Zell Miller
Loser: Tom Daschle

In a decapitation strike similar to the defeat of the sitting Democratic Speaker in 1994, Senator-Elect John Thune took down Sen. Minority Leader Tom Daschle. This is very important symbolically as well as practically. Daschle had come out of the tradition of the Senate Democrats of the late '80s, who, in frustration at continuing losses of the WH, ran a scorched earth campaign against Robert Bork, George H.W. Bush, and every other Republican initiative they could get their hands on. Daschle's obstructionism --- his attempt at preventing a conservative juggernaut in the Senate --- has been rejected by South Dakota voters, as well as those throughout the Red States. In the past two elections, Republicans have gained six net Senators, mostly due to the decision by Red America to back GOP candidates who will help further the president's agenda. Since each state has 2 Senators, and since there are more small rural states than those with urban centers, the results have been disastrous for the Democrats. Republicans have regained their 55-45 majority from the late '90s, the Senate is more conservative, and the likely new Democratic leader is pragmatic centrist Harry Reid of Nevada, who is likely to compromise on judicial appointments and legislative efforts. This was the icing on the cake for Republicans on Tuesday.

Democrats, on the other hand, must feel Zell Miller's words ringing in their ears. Miller has been proven correct that the Dems are a national party no more. Like the Republicans in states like California, the national Democratic Party has been electorally eviscerated due to its hijacking by the far left, that refuses to give ground on issues or compromise with the center or the right. And while the Dems are certainly very successful in many states throughout the country, electing popular governors in states as disparate as Michigan and Arizona, the Dems nationally are forced to pass the litmus test of every left-wing interest group in Boston, New York, and LA. Will heartland Democrats rise up and take the soul of their party back from the Pelosi crowd? The time for them to have that discussion is now. 2006 is but two years away.

Why I Was Right (And Sometimes Wrong)

2004-11-04T13:39:00.000-05:00

As I perused the cable news channels last night for insightful analysis of the now-completed 2004 presidential election, I came across one pundit who, knowingly or not, noted the following historical fact: George W. Bush is the first Republican president since William McKinley to be reelected along with a Republican House and Senate. Naturally, this analogy brought a grin to my face (not that I wasn't grinning ear to ear all day) due to the continuing validation of my theory regarding the similarities surrounding the presidencies of George W. Bush and his predecessor in history, William McKinley.

So was I right? On substance, yes. On details, I was a little off. First, the substance. If you're too lazy to read my complete theory, linked above, here's a synopsis: American politics has a cyclical nature to it. Coalitions form, take over a political party, rise to ascendancy, reach critical mass, and explode, resulting in realignment. This has happened several times since the dawn of the Republic. It is my opinion that we are currently reaching the apex of the current political alignment and that President Bush is playing the role of President McKinley, who a century ago ushered in an era of Republican rule in Washington while governing over times of economic recovery and America's new role as a world power. McKinley's first election in 1896 was close --- and was one that resulted in a country that was regionally divided, with the north and east voting Republican and the South and West voting Democrat. Sound familiar? It should. It was the mirror image of the 2000 election. It had been my opinion, then, that this year's election would mirror the election of 1900, where McKinley won reelection with about 51% of the vote and seeped into 5-6 of the blue states of the time to add to his electoral total. Using this analogy, I had projected President Bush to win by about 5 points nationally and to sweep the moderate midwest, capturing Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and so forth.

So yes, in substance I have been proven correct. Like McKinley, President Bush has won reelection with a majority mandate. He garnered 51% of the vote. He brought with him a Republican Congress and is the first president since FDR in 1936 to win reelection while increasing his margins in both houses. And, like the election of 1900, the American people did not respond to Democrats' call for isolationism nor negativism about a steadily recovering economy.

So why was my electoral projection so off? After three consecutive elections in which minor party candidates captured between 4 and 20 percent of the national vote, I had come to believe that the American people had developed a penchant for protest candidates like Perot and Nader. Because of that belief, and also the view that a Dukakis-style Democrat like Kerry could never break the 46% ceiling set in 1988, I apportioned about 3% to these third party types. In fact, my year long prediction almost always had Bush's number head-on, with the president projected to garner 51% of the national vote. It was my underestimation of Kerry and my overestimation of Nader that led me to believe that the final results would include a 5 point win for the president.

The actual result, of course, was a return to two-party politics for most Americans. Nader and others got a mere 1% of the votes cast. The president received his 51% majority and Sen. Kerry took a respectable 48%. This 3 point victory, of course, changed the state-by-state picture from where I had projected it would finish as well. I was correct in predicting that the president would keep all of his 2000 states (though he lost New Hampshire) and that he would pick up the blue states of Iowa and New Mexico. I was wrong when I predicted that the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota would go to Bush.

The fact that I called these states wrong once again had to do with my Kerry underestimation/third party overestimation. Just look at the final tallies in each of the states that I called incorrectly. Kerry won New Hampshire and Wisconsin by 1%, Pennsylvania by 2%, and took Michigan and Minnesota by 3% each. A marginal shift in each of these states would have given nearly 350 electoral votes to the president. The one state that I was totally wrong about was Oregon. Kerry captured it by nearly 5 points while losing nationally by 3. Apparently, the West Coast has moved farther to the left over the last four years, a trend that I didn't catch.

Interestingly, the actual results of this election match the McKinley picture with greater precision than did my predictions. McKinley won his first election by 4 points and his second by 6 points. That's a 2 point increase. Bush tied his first election and won his second by 3 points: a 3 point increase. McKinley increased his electoral totals during his second election by seeping into the soft blue states on the borderline between the red/blue national electoral divide. At the same time, he lost Kentucky to his opponent, a state he had won during his first election, allowing the Democrats to solidify their base region, the South. Bush increased his electoral totals during his second election by seeping into the soft blue states, taking Iowa and New Mexico, losing Wisconsin narrowly, and cutting his 2000 margin in half in Michigan and Pennsylvania. At the same time, he lost New Hampshire, a state he had won in 2000, allowing the Democrats to solidify their base region, the Northeast.

So what does the future hold? Well, the establishmentarian McKinley was succeeded by a wildly popular president of the same party who swept the country four years later in an electoral landslide. That president: Teddy Roosevelt. The question is, will Bush's successor be the next TR, and, if so, who will fill the role?

Victory

2004-11-03T14:17:00.000-05:00

It's over. After a ten-month campaign by the DNC and the mainstream media aimed at ending the presidency of George W. Bush, the American people have spoken. The result: the first majority president since 1988. President Bush looks poised to capture a 51% majority of the popular vote, winning the highest raw number of votes of any presidential candidate of all time. Moreover, the president's coattails have brought in a handful of new GOP Members of Congress and Senators that will provide him with a governing majority in Congress and allow him to claim a mandate.

This is the day Republicans have been waiting for since Ronald Reagan first stepped onto the national stage. Yet in the past 25 years, the GOP has always seemed to fall short of sweeping the triple-play: solid control over both houses of Congress and the White House. In the early '80s, we captured the WH and the Senate but not the House. In the '90s, we grabbed control of Congress but not the WH. Finally, in 2000, we barely won the WH with a minority of the popular vote and have basically presided over a 50/50 Senate for the past four years, with the constant fear of one member switching parties and flipping the chamber. The feeling was analogous to attempting to put a cat in a bag: as you stuff the paws in, the tail pops out. And with the final pre-election polls, as well as the early exits, showing a dire situation for the GOP in the Senate and the electoral college, Republicans are now in a state of euphoria over the results. 25 years later, the Reaganites finally have control of the federal government.

As far as the actual numbers go, things seem to be solidifying into a 3-4 pt election for Republicans. We picked up 4 seats in the House, bringing us to 231 (one more than my prediction); we've added 4 Senate seats to our majority, with the GOP now at 55 (one less than my prediction); and there will likely be one more GOP governor when all the votes are counted (the same as my prediction). And in the presidential race, President Bush appears to be headed for a 51%-48% victory over Sen. Kerry. The electoral college will look eerily similar to 2000, with only three states likely to change hands: New Hampshire to Kerry and New Mexico and Iowa to Bush. That's Bush with 286 EVs and Kerry with 252 EVs.

The only area where my predictions truly fell short were in the presidential race. My final call underestimated Kerry by 1 point in the popular vote and by about 25 electoral votes. This is due primarily to my belief that Bush would be slightly stronger (or perhaps that Kerry would be somewhat weaker) in my native upper-midwest. More about this later. For now, it's time to let the results sink in as Sen. Kerry concedes the election and President Bush accepts his newfound mandate.

Final Predictions

2004-11-01T22:45:00.001-05:00

Here it is folks, the post you've all been waiting for: the Political Prognosticator lays his credibility on the line with his final predictions regarding the election of 2004. I've spent the past few hours doing last-minute electoral research to ensure that I am able to apply the requisite historical trends and most-recent polling data to discern the post-Nov. 2nd makeup of the government of the United States of America. In ten years following politics, I have been known to be very savvy with my often bold and stubborn predictions. I prognosticated that Texas Gov. George W. Bush would be the next president of the United States shortly after Bob Dole's loss to Bill Clinton. I called the 2002 midterms for the GOP in mid-2001, back when the conventional wisdom was that Democrats would add to their Senate plurality and retake the House. And I predicted that John Kerry would be this year's Democratic nominee in late 2002.

All of that said, I am willing to change my mind about my predictions if I feel I have been too bold. And while I still maintain that the President will emerge the victor tomorrow night, I no longer feel that Bush will come out ahead by 5 points and 355 EVs as I have been predicting all year. While such an occurrence could certainly still take place, the likelihood is slim and it is much more probable that the president will enjoy a much more narrow victory. And so, without further adieu, on to the predictions!

President of the United States

Popular Vote (rounded to the nearest whole number): Bush 51%, Kerry 47%, Nader and Others 2%
Electoral College: Bush 310 EVs, Kerry 228 EVs
Changes from 2000: Bush picks up New Mexico, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and trades New Hampshire for Hawaii
Possible Sleepers: Michigan --- likely Kerry but could go Bush

Rationale: There are far too many polls to make any sense of this race by examining or even averaging them. At this point in 2000, the polling average showed Bush beating Gore by 1.8 --- 2.5 points away from the actual result. Today, Bush is beating Kerry by 1.5. Add 2-3 points to that either way and we end up with a range anywhere from Kerry +2 to Bush +5. The best way to discover where the race really stands, then, is to look for anecdotal evidence.

Enter New Mexico. This state has been a bellwether since 1916, voting with the popular vote winner every time. Also, in both 1996 and 2000, the results out of New Mexico mirrored the national vote. In 2000, the final Mason-Dixon poll out of New Mexico, five days before the election, showed Bush and Gore tied in the state. The result, five days later, was a tie in NM and nationally. This year, also five days before the election, Mason-Dixon again released a poll out of NM, this time showing Bush leading Kerry by 4. The result...

Not convinced? Consider a second indicator. The Gallup Poll is no more accurate that many other national polls that have been in the business for awhile, but one thing Gallup does extraordinarily well is predict the final share of the vote an incumbent will get based on his job approval. The number that Gallup releases regarding a president's JA is almost always the same number of votes that he gets on Election Day, unless of course a major protest candidate like Perot exists to take votes from both sides. Yesterday, Gallup released the president's final JA of 51%. With minor party candidates poised to take 1-2% of the vote this year, a 51% showing by Bush would leave Kerry with 47%, just as I am predicting.

Finally, in the last election, the Harris Poll turned out to be the closest of all the national polls, predicting both the final numbers and margin between Bush and Gore with stark accuracy. This year, Harris has once again released its final poll. The result: Bush is up by 4.

As for the states, I am basically going with Mason-Dixon's final numbers, adjusting my calls a little to reflect other polls that seem to suggest trends that exist in various states. Hawaii, for example, has featured two polls that show Bush ahead. I see no reason to think that VP Cheney would have spent valuable campaign time flying out there to shore up the state if it weren't truly in play. And Wisconsin, although leaning Kerry in the final M-D poll, has been trending Bush according to other recent polls out of the state. Minnesota, on the other hand, is leaning Bush according to M-D but appears to be trending Kerry according to other polls. The most likely result, in my opinion, is that Bush will receive all the red states from 2000 except maybe New Hampshire, the blue states of Iowa and New Mexico, and at least one out of each of the following pairs of states: Minnesota and Wisconsin; New Hampshire and Hawaii. The result is a win of between 300 and 310 EVs for the president, and I am calling the latter number for no other reason than optimism. I also believe that Michigan could be the big surprise on Election Night, as the president wouldn't be spending so much time there if he couldn't win my place of birth.

Senate Results

Whew! Now to the easy stuff. Republicans will gain 3-5 seats in the U.S. Senate. Bottom line: if the GOP can hold seats in GOP heavy Colorado and Alaska, we'll have our strongest Senate majority in decades. A late breaking poll today showed the GOP Senator from Alaska moving ahead of her Democratic opponent. Moreover, Colorado has a notorious GOP GOTV machine that almost always boosts the final numbers of Republicans from that reported in the polls. While these two seats could go either way, I predict a GOP win in both.

GOP pickups: Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, South Dakota
Dem pickups: Illinois
GOP holds: Oklahoma, Kentucky, Pennsylvania
Tossup: Colorado, Alaska

Final Numbers: 56 GOP, 43 Dem, 1 Ind

House of Represenatives Composition

Larry Sabato reports that without the Texas redistricting that creates 4-8 new GOP seats in the House, Democrats are set to pickup 2 seats net. That would bring the GOP down to 225 seats. The question then becomes, just how many seats in Texas does the GOP gain tomorrow night? Obviously there's no way of knowing for sure. The most likely range for the House seems to be between 229 and 233 Republicans. The GOP came out of 2002 with 229. As the Real Clear Politics average shows the GOP edging out the Dems on the generic congressional ballot by less than 1%, I'll predict a pickup of 1 seat from 2002.

Final numbers: 230 GOP, 204 Dem, 1 Ind

Governorships

In the sleepiest part of this year's election, most states will be returning the current party to power in the governors' races. The exceptions are Indiana and Missouri on the Democratic side, which will be electing GOP governors, and Montana of all places, which is set to elect a Democrat. That's a net gain of one GOP governor nationwide.

Final numbers: 29 GOP, 21 Dem

There you have it! Feel free to comment away regarding my accuracy, foresight, or hubris. My next post will announce the winner of the Presidency of the United States. Hopefully.

Two Predictions

2004-10-31T21:58:00.000-05:00

Update: Those of you who logged onto this blog between 9 and 10 pm may have read a different version of this post. This was apparenly the result of a Blogger glitch. The post has been corrected.

With just two days to go until the polls close on the East Coast and the first of many returns begin to pour in regarding the outcome of Tuesday's election, the Gallup organization has once again put its reputation on the line by publishing its final call as to who will win the White House. Gallup is one of the oldest and most respected pollsters out there, and the famous Gallup Poll has been around so long that one of its claims to fame is calling the election of 1932 wrong, predicting a Herbert Hoover win at a time when only the fortunate had telephones. Over the past 70 years, however, Gallup has honed its skills and generally proves to be one of most accurate pollsters out there when it comes to presidential elections.

It is with both wonder and dismay, then, that I report the final results from this year's Gallup Poll. First, the wonder. Today, Gallup announced it was releasing not one but two final polls regarding the presidential race. The first was the traditional model, used by Gallup for decades. The second, an experimental model that "allocates" undecideds based on historical trends. And then, the dismay. In the traditional model, President Bush leads John Kerry by only 2 points. And in the experimental model, the two are tied at 49% each.

I can only assume that Gallup's decision for this unprecedented move is based on our stark inability to predict just who is going to turn out this year. In 2000, few expected Democrats to be so mobilized for VP Al Gore. And in 2002, almost nobody believed that the GOP could GOTV so effectively as to reverse the normal trends that almost always cause the party in power to lose seats during the midterm. This level of uncertainty is apparently so high that even pollsters like Gallup have little idea of what is really going to happen. Still, these results show it's anybody's game.

This Gallup Poll portends several things for both Bush and Kerry. Bush supporters can take heart that their candidate is still at majority approval. Even Gerald Ford, who lost by a meager 2 points in 1976, had an approval rating below 50%. Kerry voters, on the other hand, can find comfort in the fact that a tied election means a few states, such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio, will decide the race.

Speaking of states, Mason-Dixon, the gold-standard of state polling, released another bevy of battleground state polls yesterday. M-D has a rep for calling races with accuracy and precision, and its results this weekend differ little from those of a few days back. The president is still ahead in all of the red states except New Hampshire, and is currently gaining the blue states of New Mexico, Iowa, and Minnesota. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are leaning Kerry, and Oregon appears to be out of reach for the president.

The result of all of this is a possible revised prediction on my part from my year long belief that Bush would finish by 5 pts and around 350 EVs. Tomorrow night, I will release my final pre-election calls for president, key senatorial and gubernatorial races, and the likely makeup of the House. In fact, I too may have two predictions.

Bin Laden's Campaign Ad

2004-10-29T22:19:00.003-05:00

In possibly of the weirdest moments of this very strange presidential campaign, 9/11 perpetrator Osama bin Laden released a videotape today in which this murderer of thousands of Americans speaks directly to them. In a very eerie manner, bin Laden addresses America regarding our coming presidential election, giving his views on the current Administration. With arguments that ran similar to DNC talking points and Michael Moore style conspiracy theories, the al Qaeda leader attempted to "appeal" to Americans by explaining to us that a better president would have been ready for his attacks. He tried to become chummy with us, pointing out that he had to try and kill us because of our support for Israel and Arab despots. And of course, he made one thing appear above all: Bush cannot keep us safe.

Aside from the sick feelings of disgust that most Americans must experience when listening to this killer inform us that he's somehow looking out for us, the content and timing of this tape will do at least one thing: guarantee the reelection of George Bush on Tuesday.

Americans are not like the French. We are not the isolationist elites of Old Europe, who want nothing more than to close themselves off from the less-pleasant parts of the world and live in their post-socialist utopias. Instead, Americans, much like the Aussies who recently reelected PM Howard, are fiercely independent individuals who will have no desire to "make a deal" with anyone who attacks our country. Bin Laden, by attacking the Bush Administration using many of the very same arguments as the president's political opponents, is making his views on the election clear: he doesn't want us to vote Bush back into office. In some parts of the world, such a move may work. But not in America. In this country, the wishes of this terrorist will be met with a swift and undeniable rebuke. And as unfair as it may be to John Kerry, this means a vote for Bush on Tuesday.

The second and more subtle reason that the bin Laden tape virtually assures a Bush victory is the timing. With Halloween weekend upon us, most Americans will catch the news only a couple of more times before going to vote. Over the weekend, the coverage of this tape is sure to dominate the airwaves and print media, framing the election in terms of the conflict that began on 9/11. In other words, by declaring his opposition to Bush, the election is no longer about Bush v. Kerry. It's now about Bush v. Bin Laden. And in that contest, Bush wins.

Americans have seemingly by nature an instinct to view the world as black v. white and good v. evil. This can be seen from our literature, our movies, and our pop culture. Throughout American entertainment, there is always the hero and the villian; the cowboy in the white hat and the one in the black hat. Unlike some other cultures, Americans have never embraced the nuance that brings with it various shades of gray. By attempting to get involved in our election, bin Laden has reminded Americans that he is the guy wearing the black hat. And as we all remember from 9/11, it was George Bush donning the white. And with four days to go, it's hard to see how Kerry remains anything but a supporting character waiting for the results to come in.

Validation

2004-10-28T20:47:00.000-05:00

Long before I began pubslishing this blog, near the start of the general election campaign season of 2004, I came up with a bold prognostication regarding the outcome of the presidential election. As I've discussed previously on my blog, I believe this year's presidential race is the historical mirror image of the election of 1900, where William McKinely won his second election in a relatively close race against William Jennings Bryan. Without rehashing all of my reasons for believing this (I'll be outlining them again as Election Day approaches), I concluded that, like McKinley, President Bush would win this election by 5-6 percentage points nationally and garner 5-7 more states this time than he won in his first election. Using this formula, I determined that the most likely result of the popular vote would be a Bush share of 51-52% and a Kerry share of 46-47%, with third party candidates taking about 2% of the vote due to the fact that significant minor party candidates such as Nader almost always find their share of the vote dropping by half each consecutive election.

The next step, then, was to try and discover which states Bush was likely to win under the 5-6 pt scenario. The simplest way to do this, of course, was to examine the 2000 map and adjust the results of each state by 5 points. This is definitely a very crude method that doesn't take into account all of the demographic and political factors that could shift any given state from its 2000 political balance. New Jersey, for example, is currently showing a tied race despite a double-digit Gore win in 2000. Still, my very rudimentary method seemed as good as any to get a rough estimate of the electoral total at the end of the day.

The result of my calculations: Bush was projected to capture all of his 2000 states plus the Gore states of New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. This would give the president a total of 355 electoral votes. Sen. Kerry would take the remaining 13 states and the District of Columbia, with 183 electoral votes. Under this scenario, the election would be over by the time the polls begin to close west of the Missouri River.

Needless to say, my stubborn prognostication has garnered a good deal of criticism over the past months, but I have stuck with it, as I do still. And I will not deny that I am happy to report that validation may be coming my way. Far too many state polls have been released over the last few days for me to cherry pick a few in order to support my point, but I can use the polling averages tallied by Real Clear Politics to illustrate where the states currently stand.

According to RCP, if the election were held right now, President Bush would best Sen. Kerry by about 2.5% in the popular vote. This win would allow the president to garner all of his 2000 states by comfortable margins, with only Florida, Ohio, and New Hampshire within the margin of error. Out of those states, the president currently leads in Florida while being about 2 points down in the two latter states. Additionally, RCP finds that six Gore states are currently too close to call. Those states? You guessed it. All of the aforementioned Gore states that I have given to Bush minus Oregon.

But it gets better. Out of these six states, Iowa, New Mexico, and Wisconsin are currently showing Bush leads. Minnesota is tied, while Pennsylvania and Michigan are 2-3 points for Kerry. In other words, if Bush finishes by his current margin of 2.5%, he wins all of his 2000 states except for Ohio and New Hampshire and pulls the Gore states of Iowa, New Mexico, and Wisconsin into his column. But should the president finish just 3 points higher nationally, at 5.5%, he would win all of those states PLUS Ohio, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Michigan --- that would be 36 states and 348 electoral votes --- one state short of my long-term prognostication.

And so, with just five days to go, I am holding on to my prediction, as I still believe I will turn out to be right. Keep in mind that the polls we are seeing today reflect opinions taken earlier in the week. Over the weekend, those final few undecideds will be forced to make up their minds, and with a news cycle that involves a brand new terrorist threat on videotape, an ailing conservative Chief Justice, and the imminent changing of the guard amongst the Palestinians due to Arafat's health problems, it is more likely than not that voters will break Bush. Just as incumbent VP Gore gained 4 points over the final weekend of the 2000 campaign, I expect incumbent President Bush to increase his lead by a similar margin as voters once again decide that it's best to go with a known quantity. My final prediction, to one tenth of a percent, will be posted before Election Day.

Now That's What I Call An October Surprise

2004-10-27T21:37:00.000-05:00

Long before I began publishing this blog, I opined to friends and colleagues that the Bush team's October Surprise would be one of two things. Either the widely held, and probably valid, belief that bin Laden has been dead for quite some time would be confirmed OR we would discover the truth behind the fate of those elusive WMDs in Iraq. To my surprise, my latter theory has been proven correct.

In a move that is sure to change the dynamics of this election in its final days, the Thursday edition of The Washington Times will carry a story all about what really happened to those weapons that the New York Times reported missing at Al-Qaqaa. As I detailed in yesterday's post, the NYT, CBS, and every Kerry supporter under the sun has been using this story as their own October Surprise, implying that these weapons went missing after US troops entered the vicinity and that a failure of leadership from President Bush led to these weapons being swiped from under our soldiers' noses --- weapons that may now be used against them! A clever ruse, but a ruse nonetheless, as questions immediately were raised regarding the veracity of these reports. Some pointed to an NBC report that seemed to imply that the weapons went missing prior to the entry of coalition troops into Baghdad. But nobody really knew for sure. Until now.

According to the Washington Times, the Pentagon has confirmed that these tons of munitions were moved from Baghdad long before coalition troops ever established a presence in the area. Moreover, the weapons were taken not by Saddam, nor by terrorists. Instead, it was Russia, apparently with a vested interest in avoiding its imprimatur being found on any of Saddam's weapons, that moved the munitions out of the country and safely across the border into Syria. So much for the president dropping the ball.

But wait, you say. Yes, it appears that the Bush team has turned this story on its head. Kudos. But what does this have to do with WMDs? After all, everyone agrees these were conventional weapons that went missing, right? Well, yes and no. It's true, these weapons did not include biological or chemical agents that our intelligence maintained Saddam had as late as 2003. Instead, what was there was far more deadly. As the Times put it, the Russians likely moved up to 380 tons of materials "which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons."

Wait a minute. Saddam had the capacity to make nuclear weapons? The same Saddam who has al Qaeda terrorists like Zarqawi running through what was once his country? Let's see: Saddam + nuclear capacity + al Qaeda = major threat to America.

Heck, Bush was right.

Now that's what I call an October Surprise!

And all on the Thursday before the election...

Worst October Surprise Ever!

2004-10-26T21:35:00.000-05:00

Apparently, this year's long-awaited October Surprise has turned out to be a huge dud. Far from the politically brilliant move of the Gore campaign in 2000, which released the Bush DUI records the Thursday before the election, the Kerry campaign's meager attempt at rhis perennial manuever lacks both the smooth delivery and emotional impact of that of its predecessor just four years ago. But then, John Kerry is no Al Gore, nor does his team have the raw political instinct of the Clintonian political machine of the last decade.

So what was this year's October Surprise? It all began on Monday. First, the New York Times published a story regarding a cache of weapons that disappeared from a site in Iraq during the initial invasion back in 2003. The story appeared to suggest that the Saddamite arsenal had vanished because the American military had dropped the ball, or, rather, because the folks telling the military what to do had dropped the ball, i.e., Rummy, Wolfowitz, and the man up for reelection in just a few days, George Bush. Implicit in the story is the standard October Surprise message --- one that attempts to elicit an unreasoned emotional reaction from the voters that will at least last through the election. This year's message: George Bush screwed up the war and that's why your kids are dying in Iraq. The hope with this October Surprise is the same with any, that a bad taste will be left in the mouths of enough voters to cost the candidate it is used against a few points on Election Day.

The problem with this year's surprise, and the thing that qualifies it for the award of "Worst October Surprise Ever," comes both in its delivery and in its substance. First, the substance. Unlike the DUI charge, which actually happened to a young and wild George Bush, the notion that our troops failed to secure weapons that were within their reach just isn't true. In fact, in just a single day, this story has been debunked by NBC, which reported that there were no weapons to be found --- and that the cache of conventional weapons detailed by the NYT were gone prior to our military's entry into Baghdad. With the story being blown full of holes in just 24 hours, it is not likely to live another day, let alone another week.

The other reason that this year's October Surprise was such a flop concerns the messy delivery of the story. Matt Drudge reported today that CBS, the very network that released the forged documents regarding Bush's military service a couple months back, was all set to "break" this story on "60 Minutes" this Sunday --- just two days before the election! The move was characterized as being analogous to the Gore surprise of 2000 or the Clinton surprise of 1992, where Cap Weinberger was indicted over the Iran Contra scandal just days before the election. Unfortunately for CBS, and for the Kerry campaign, the story leaked a week too soon, and it now joins the myriad of baseless charges that have been thrown at the president this year, none of which has proved a death knell for this Administration.

It is only fitting that such an inept campaign like that of John Kerry would deliver such a pathetic October Surprise. I'm curious as to what Rove has up his sleeve, and I'm anxiously awaiting for the Thursday before the election, the day when all true followers of Machiavelli show their hand.

The Keys to this House

2004-10-25T19:55:00.000-05:00

With just 8 days to go until the now-apocalyptic event that we call our presidential election, it is time to divine the winner using a tried and true method that has predicted the outcome of nearly every presidential race since the Civil War! No, you are not about to be provided unscientific mumbo jumbo such as the theory that the "taller candidate always wins," though he usually does. Nor will I present you with a wacky mathematical formula that has worked in both of the last two, count 'em, two elections. Instead, this little known formula was one I came upon long ago during my mid-'90s journeys to Barnes 'n Noble --- and one that, if correct, virtually guarntees the president's reelection.

In The Keys to the White House, well-respected American University professor Alan Lichtman presents a model which accurately predicts the popular vote winner of every presidential election since 1860. This model consists of 13 "keys," conditions that are either satisfied or unsatisfied by the incumbent party. These keys cover a variety of issues, from the gauging of political trends, the power of incumbency, the presence of third party spoilers, the economy, the impact of a war, and the presence of a major scandal. It is possibly the most concise yet comprehensive electoral model I've ever seen in my ten years of devout political study and Lichtman himself qualifies his model by reminding readers that the reason this model works so well is that it involves factors that largely cannot be manipulated. Lichtman enjoys predicting the winner of the coming presidential election shortly after the midterms and he predicted a Bush win in early 2003.

The rules of the game are few but important. 1) If the incumbent party satisfies 8 of the 13 keys, they win. Otherwise, the challenging party takes the White House. 2) This result applies only to the popular vote. The electoral college can and occasionally does decide to go the other way in close elections. 3) The keys do not predict the margin of victory --- just who will finish first. The margin of victory could be anywhere from a few tenths of a point to 20 points, and it has been.

The Keys are as follows:

KEY 1, Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House than it did after the previous midterm elections.
KEY 2, Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.
KEY 3, Incumbency: The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.
KEY 4, Third party: There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.
KEY 5, Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
KEY 6, Long-term economy: Real per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
KEY 7, Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
KEY 8, Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
KEY 9, Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
KEY 10, Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
KEY 11, Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
KEY 12, Incumbent charisma: The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
KEY 13, Challenger charisma: The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

Needless to say, it is not being flippant to suggest that a few of these keys are somewhat ambiguous. What, for example, constitutes a "major change" in policy? Does the tax cut count? The Medicare bill? It largely depends on the subjective views of voters. Luckily, there are enough objective keys to predict the outcome of this election with certainty.

Few can disagree that the first four keys, or conditions, have been satisfied by the Bush White House. The 2002 midterms increased the GOP majority in Congress, hence the party mandate. Bush had no primary challenge. There is no significant third party this year. And Bush is running as the incumbent. That's four keys under the president's belt; he's halfway there.

The economy keys are fairly objective as well. The recession that took place when Bush came into office obviously gives Kerry the long-term economy key. The strong GDP growth and nearly 2 million jobs created in the last year or so, however, gives Bush the short-term economy key. The score: Bush has 5 keys, Kerry has 1.

Now the domestic policy keys. Key 7 is ambiguous. People can disagree about whether the tax cut and Medicare bill constitute a major policy change. I would say yes. Lichtman, last I knew, said no. Let's leave a question mark by that one. The social unrest and scandal keys, however, are firmly in Bush's hands according to both my analysis and that of Lichtman. Inside the beltway scandals such as the Joe Wilson tripe do not affect real Americans the way they do the DC press corps. This Administration hasn't experienced a Watergate, let alone a Monica. And we've seen nothing even remotely like the social unrest of the late '60s over the last four years. These keys go to Bush, giving him 7, one away from a second term.

Unfortunately for Bush, the next few keys give Kerry a slight boost. The Bush Administration has experienced a number of foreign failures, from 9/11 to the postwar mess in Iraq. Kerry gets that key. What about foreign successes? Does Iraq count? Or do most Americans now think of Iraq as a failure? Once again, a subjective key that I'll leave unanswered. That's Bush 7, Kerry 2, Unknown 2.

Finally, the candidate-specific keys. Is Bush a national hero or charismatic figure? Not really. This key is generally reserved for an Ike, Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, or a Ronald Reagan, who can woo the masses with his words. It would be difficult to give the president this key, meaning Kerry's total goes up to at least 3 with Bush's solid keys holding at 7, one short of the 8 requisite keys.

The last key is the converse of the previous one: is Kerry a national hero or a charismatic figure? To the latter charge, even the most ardent Kerry supporter would have trouble making the case for him, but what about the former? Aren't his purple hearts indicative of heroism? Does that count? Isn't this key ambiguous at best? I would argue no. First of all, if Kerry were to be given this key, that would also mean that Bob Dole and every other veteran who ever ran for president would also have qualified for the 13th key, a status that Lichtman has not bestowed so liberally in his book. Lichtman gives this key to Bush, and I would tend to agree, meaning that the president has at least the 8 required keys to hold onto the office and possibly the remaining two keys that I feel are too ambiguous to call, though Lichtman splits them 1-1 between Bush and Kerry (Bush gets the foreign success key, according to Lichtman, due to Afghanistan and Saddam's capture).

What's interesting about this year's Keys is the determinative effect of foreign policy and war and peace issues on the election. The fall of the Taliban and capture of Saddam, for example, are almost certainly necessary if one is to assign the foreign success key to President Bush. Conversely, the hope of obtaining the national hero key may have led Sen. Kerry to emphasize to no end his service in Vietnam. And that same consideration could have been the impetus for Karl Rove's brilliant measure to torpedo Kerry's status through the Swift Boat ad campaign last summer. Whatever the case, I would definitely recommend reading The Keys, which can still be found on Amazon, as it is a must-read for political junkies. As for this year, if the prescient nature of the Keys holds, President Bush is set to win the popular vote on Nov. 2nd.

Battleground Michigan

2004-10-24T19:57:00.000-05:00

"If Bush wins Michigan, all bets are off." That's the paraphrased sentiment of one of the political analysts on today's Sunday morning talk shows in reaction to the "shock" polls coming out of the Great Lakes State regarding the presidential race. For most of the year, pollsters, pundits, and other assorted political animals had largely written off the state of Michigan as a Kerry state --- solid "blue" political territory in which the Republicans had no chance. As a Michigan native, I found this view slightly humorous and a bit irritating, as the dismissive attitude towards my state of birth may lead to a lot of dropped jaws in just nine days.

The conventional wisdom regarding Michigan's leanings are not without merit. The state went for Clinton and Gore by big margins in the 1990s, and hasn't gone for a GOP presidential candidate since 1988. Additionally, Michigan voters just elected a Democratic governor and send 2 Democratic Senators to Washington. Sounds pretty Democratic, eh?

Naturally, intellectual laziness usually gets the best of the untrained political observer, who stops his or her analysis at this preliminary juncture. A closer look at the state, however, reveals a much more complex picture. What the conventional wisdom doesn't tell you is that prior to Michigan's current Democratic governor, the state elected by wide margins a very conservative, Republican governor three times during the 1990s. Moreover, sitting Gov. Granholm only won her 2002 election by a couple of points, despite major fatigue with the 12 year GOP administration. The legislature of the state is solidly Republican, and the congressional delegation that Michigan sends to the US House is 9-6 GOP as well. What about the 2 Democratic Senators? Well, one of them is brand new: Debbie Stabenow was elected in 2000, defeating a Republican Senator who was widely regarded as being extremely inept in the PR department. And Michigan's senior Senator, the liberal Carl Levin, brings home so much bacon for the state that, like Robert Byrd, no Michigan voter is ever going to throw this guy out.

The key to understanding Michigan's politics is to understand the concept of pragmatism over ideology. Unlike states such as Mississippi or Massachusetts, Michigan voters do not find themselves ideologically invested in either political party. There are, of course, plenty of single-party regions of the state, such as the rabidly Democratic Detroit or the solidly GOP southwest, but on a statewide basis, elections are won or lost based on the novel concept of who could best handle the job. As a consequence, Michigan voters will elect far left Democrats, far right Republicans, and everyone in between.

The result is a state that almost always breaks big for the winner of the national popular vote in presidential elections. The reason for this is that, except in very close elections, the nation usually makes a definitive decision in presidential elections regarding who is the right man for the job. Michiganders almost always agree with this decision and often give the winner a bigger margin of victory statewide than he gets nationally due to the smaller number of partisans and ideologues in the state relative to the nation as a whole. In fact, since 1972, Michigan has gone with the popular vote winner in every election other than 1976, when former Michigan congressman Gerald Ford changed the dynamics of the state in that election, for obvious reasons.

Based on all of these observations, I fully expect Michigan to go with the winner of the popular vote this time around as well, provided that one of the candidates is able to break out with a clear win on Election Night. Even a popular vote win of 2-3 points will probably signal enough of a national consensus that Michigan voters will follow along with the rest of the nation as they almost always do. This, of course, should make the Kerry people very nervous, as the loss of Michigan would end any hopes of the 2000 result in reverse, where Bush wins the popular vote and Kerry, the electoral college. In fact, it would be almost impossible for Kerry to put together the requisite 270 EVs without Michigan, which is why Bush folks have been elated over some of the recent polls coming out of the state.

So where is Michigan according to the polls? Well, it depends which poll you look at. The current range of the polls out of that state go from Kerry +10 (Zogby) to Bush +5 (Det. News). There are a couple of polls at each, well, pole, with the highly credible Mason-Dixon falling somewhere in the middle, giving Kerry a mere 1 pt lead. Still, a final Bush push in the state, combined with the gay marriage amendment on the ballot, could flip Michigan to the president. Whether Michigan turns out to be an election spoiler or the icing on the winner's cake remains to be seen.

"Team America" Review

2004-10-23T20:59:00.001-05:00

Michael Moore as a suicide bomber. Kim Jong-Il feeding Hans Blix to sharks. Hollywood actors eaten by cats. These are just a few of the priceless yet raunchy scenes you'll be treated to/faced with when seeing "Team America: World Police," the latest cinematic commentary on the war on terror. This film is the product of the creators of the Comedy Central series "South Park," who specialize in an uncanny ability to offend everybody without really taking a position. The message of "Team America," however, is clear, and I will paraphrase the moral of the story (as stated near the end of the film) minus the creative and/or offensive analogy used in the movie. Yes, America does have a tendency to anger the rest of the world from time to time --- but it is that very gumption that allows America to be uniquely suited to take on the terrorists, whose sole goal is to cause harm to everybody.

The film tries to be a combination of an intelligent political satire and a plethora of potty humor, the mixture of which can often seem awkward. About halfway through, most of the gags start to get old, though the first half of the movie is a riot and failing to stay until the end will cause you to miss a rewarding climax. The "characters" in the movie are actually puppets, most designed to look like various famous people, including outspoken liberal Hollywood types (led by Alec Baldwin), Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, fmr UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, demagogue Michael Moore, and a host of others. The plot involves a Charlie's Angels style team charged with the task of hunting down terrorists (all depicted as Muslim men with beards and turbans) and prevent them from using their "weapons of mass destruction" in the world's major cities. The result is usually the destruction of various age-old monuments (the Sphinx, the Eiffel Tower, etc.), not by the terrorists, but by Team America, whose faulty execution of their missions leaves the rest of the world quite vexed.

There's no point in summarizing the rest of the story, as it exists largely to attempt to poke fun at all the major players in the war on terror and to deliver the "South Park Republican" message, as Andrew Sullivan calls them. I have noticed that the film is getting scathing reviews from the Left, which should be expected as the movie is a bit harder on them than the Bushies. If anything, the South Park folks do admonish the neocons for being a bit too brash and cowboy-ish when it comes to executing the war on terror (there's a hilarious pun regarding "bad intelligence" that you have to see the movie to understand), but the bulk of the criticism does fall on the terrorists, who are just bad people, and the Susan Sarandon types here in the West who are portrayed as misguided, elitist, and actually hurting our chances at winning the peace they so badly desire.

All in all, I'm not sure that I'd recommend it, or at least not to everyone. If you get offended easily, don't see it. If excessive and unnecessary potty humor will cause you to walk out of a movie despite the underlying social commentary, don't see it. If, however, you do want to see an intelligent satire regarding the war on terror and you don't mind sitting through a few awkward scenes if the reward is a series of priceless scenes, great lines that you'll be quoting for days, and a clever soundtrack with songs like, "Freedom costs a buck-o-five," then see this movie.

Mason-Dixon: The Gold Standard in Polling

2004-10-22T17:22:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post tonight as I'm off to enjoy the evening. In order to back up my claims regarding the accuracy of the Mason-Dixon polling organization, which performed the battleground state polls referenced in my last two posts, I have come upon this useful graphic that compares M-D's final polling results in the 2000 battleground states with the results on Election Day. Note that in only one state did M-D miss the margin between the candidates by more than 2 percent. Also note that the average margin of error is 1.5 percent, an extremely low margin for a pollster. In other words, if M-D finds that a state is going by 3 pts or more to one candidate or another, take it to the bank.

Additionally, I've heard a bit of political gossip today regarding the dwindling hopes of Kerry supporters. Maureen Dowd is claiming, either in a column or on one of the political talk shows, that top Democrats are throwing in the towel on the 2004 race. Meanwhile, a top GOP strategist, who I am also unable to reference, believes that we are about to see a major swing towards Bush as the undecideds break for him the way they broke for the incumbent party in 2000, when Al Gore pulled out into a lead around this very time. Zogby backs this theory up a bit, with Bush creeping up in his daily tracking poll about a point a day over the last two days. And Time is out with a national poll today showing Bush up by 5 or 6, depending on who you believe. Lots of rumors out there but very little confirmation on this Friday evening.

Time to head off.

The Polls are Coming Together

2004-10-21T20:07:00.001-05:00

Last night at this time, I thought I'd be writing a different post right now. I thought I'd be telling you all about how the national polls make no sense, how the pollsters are finding widely disparate results, and how everything's going to depend on turnout. But the Polling Fates have smiled upon we political junkies over the past few days, as everything is starting to make sense in the wonderful world of public opinion once again. Bottom line: Bush is currently leading Kerry by about three percentage points nationally.

How can I be so sure of this seemingly random prognostication, you ask? The answer is simpler than it seems. The first and most obvious method is to simply look at the public opinion polls. The good folks at Real Clear Politics (see links) are gracious enough to average all of the national polls over the past seven days to come up with a pretty decent picture of where the race stands. Polling averages are very rough but highly effective at controlling for outliers and poll results that attempt to skew the race, intentionally or otherwise. The RCP finding: a national Bush lead of 2.8 points.

Method #2: Observe the daily tracking polls. As I've mentioned in previous posts, a number of organizations are conducting daily polls of the presidential race. These organizations include Zogby International, ABC/WaPo, TIPP, and Rasmussen Reports. The average of today's 4 trackng polls: a Bush lead of 3.3 points.

The final and most interesting method by which to calculate the race is to look at the bevy of state polls that have been released over the last few days. As I remarked in yesterday's post, this is an excellent time to partake in such an exercise as the incredibly accurate pollster, Mason-Dixon, has released polls from about a dozen swing states. M-D only called one race incorrectly in 2002 --- a track record that would make even the boldest naysayer think twice before protesting.

In yesterday's roster of M-D polls, we found that out of the battleground states that Bush won in 2000, the president was currently leading Sen. Kerry in each of them, with the closest results coming from Ohio (B+1), Florida (B+3), and New Hampshire (B+3). Today, M-D released polls from seven battleground states won by VP Gore in 2000. The result: they are split down the middle, 3 going to Bush, 3 to Kerry, and one showing a tie. The results are listed below, with the 2000 results in parenthesis next to each state.

Iowa: Bush +6 (Gore + 1)
New Mexico: Bush +5 (Gore +1)
Minnesota: Bush +2 (Gore +3)
Wisconsin: Tie (Gore +1)
Pennsylvania: Kerry +1 (Gore +4)
Michigan: Kerry +1 (Gore +5)
Oregon: Kerry +1 (Gore +1)

Now here's where things get interesting. Notice that the difference between the results from each of these states from 2000 and the current margin between Bush and Kerry today represents on average a 3.5 point difference. The range is from no change in Oregon between 2000 and now to a 7 point change in Iowa. That's a 3.5 point midrange and, if you do the math, a 3.7 point mean to this data set. Considering that Gore bested Bush by half a point in the popular vote last time around, the conclusion that must be drawn from the state polls eerily matches that of the nationals: Bush is leading Kerry by 3 percentage points.

What all this means politically is simple: if the election were held today, Bush would win with about 300 EVs. Just taking the M-D polls from yesterday and today at their face value would give the president the 278 electoral votes from the 30 red states and the blue states of Iowa, New Mexico, and Minnesota, three blue states with a total electoral count of 22 EVs. That's 300 electoral votes, and should Wisconsin also fall into line, the president would garner an additional 10 EVs. Even the loss of Ohio would not prevent President Bush from obtaining his second term.

Equally important is how close the president is to overcoming Kerry's miniscule lead in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Oregon. These states were all within 5 pts in 2000, and the first two are typical states from the northern midwest filled with pragmatic voters and Reagan Democrats. A final GOTV push could land these 45 additional electoral votes in the president's column, ending any chance of a Kerry call for endless recounts and litigation.

Can Kerry still win? Of course. But he's got the harder task. In order for Kerry to put together the magic number of 270, he has to sweep the table. He has to move ahead of Bush in Ohio. He must try to erase the president's lead in Minnesota, Iowa, and New Mexico. And he must not lose Wisconsin. The president, on the other hand, just has to win one or two of the aforementioned states to win the election. Simply holding Ohio, providing Florida's in the bag, will end the election. And should the president lose Ohio, he can offset it with some combination of the above states that he is currently winning or very close to winning, as discussed last night. In other words, with only 12 days to go, it's Bush's race to lose.

Update: The Minnesota poll referenced above hasn't been released by M-D as of post time. It was leaked earlier today on the Web and, if accurate, should be released shortly.

Ohio: Ground Zero

2004-10-20T19:17:00.000-05:00

There are two posts that I need to put together in order to capture the recent polling revelations that have taken place over the past few days regarding the presidential race. Tonight's post totally ignores the national vote because, as I will detail in tomorrow's post, the national vote is now irrelevant unless the president is able to bust this race wide open next week. No, as the race stands now, it's a game of electoral math. The good news for Bush supporters: the president is close to putting a lock on the 270 electoral votes he needs to retain the presidency. The bad news: whether or not he gets there may all come down to one state, Ohio.

As the polling roundup on websites such as The Hedgehog Report show, the past few days have seen a mountain of state polls from each of this year's battlegrounds detailing the current state of the race. In fact, just hours ago, the Mason-Dixon polling firm released polls from all of the swing states that Bush captured in 2000 --- states that, along with the nation's solid GOP states, comprise 278 electoral votes. That's 8 more than needed to win the White House, regardless of the popular vote. Mason-Dixon is possibly one of the best pollsters out there when it comes to state-by-state races. In 2002, they called 23 of 24 races exactly right. In other words, Mason-Dixon is a pollster you can put your money on.

So what do the folks at M-D show regarding the battleground states that went to Bush in 2000? Here are the results in a nutshell:

Colorado: Bush +6
Nevada: Bush +10
New Hampshire: Bush +3
Missouri: Bush +5
West Virginia: Bush +5
Florida: Bush +3
Ohio: Bush +1

With only 13 days left, and President Bush leading in all of the battleground "red states," most of which show the president pushing the magic 50% according to these polls, Sen. Kerry's only option becomes clear. He must win the state of Ohio. Period.

I will not mince words. Ohio is the only thing standing between Bush and a second term. Should Bush lock down Ohio between now and Nov. 2nd, the election is over. Should Kerry succeed in persuading the undecideds in that state, and there are many, the president will have to attempt to replace Ohio's 20 electoral votes with some combination of soft Gore states from last time.

Just how close is Ohio? M-D finds the President garnering 46% of the vote to Sen. Kerry's 45%. Moreover, the president's job approval in Ohio is a mere 47%. Out of all the Bush red states, Ohio is giving the president his lowest level of numerical support. Kerry, however, has not managed to take the lead in the Buckeye State, with 8% of voters refusing to support either candidate. If I were Kerry, I would spend the next 12 days camped between Cincinnati and Cleveland.

If I were President Bush, however, I would focus both on Ohio and on her potential replacements. Bush is still in the better position. Kerry has to win Ohio to win the presidency. Bush doesn't. The most recent polls from both Wisconsin and Minnesota have shown a tied race in each state. A win in these two states, which comprise 10 electoral votes each, would neutralize the possible loss of Ohio. If Bush were to replace Ohio with neighboring Pennsylvania, the Keystone State's 21 electoral votes would also give Bush another four years. And if Bush loses Ohio but wins New Mexico and Iowa --- two more states both showing statistical ties --- the final electoral tally would be Bush 270, Kerry 268.

So, with nary a dozen days to go, the race hinges on the state that no Republican president has ever lost during an electoral victory. And, barring a major change in the race in the coming days, the outcome of the race will be determined by a few largely rural states in Middle America. Bush supporters should take heart, however, as your candidate is just one state away from four more years.

Factor This, Bill

2004-10-19T20:29:00.000-05:00

By now, anyone who's politically curious enough to be reading this blog has surely heard about the charges being leveled against media giant and Fox News superstar, Bill O'Reilly. When the charges broke last week, I was speechless. In an episode reminscent of the sex scandals that brought down many a televangelist in the 1980s, O'Reilly, the current spokesman of conservative populism in America, may be brought down in a very Clintonian manner.

I'll not waste time summarizing the facts of the scandal, yet all the raunchy details can be found here. Based on the specificity with which the conversations were transcribed, most experts believe the accuser must have tape recorded many of the phone discussions between herself and O'Reilly. Legally, it's impossible to say how much trouble, if any, O'Reilly will find himself in due to his sexual advances. Politically, however, the consequences could be fatal.

Even if O'Reilly wins the legal battle, he may lose the PR war. This is not because Americans are puritanical or prudish --- if they were, Bill Clinton would have been impeached and Al Gore would be running for reelection right about now. O'Reilly's fall, if it comes, will be the result of a pattern of behavior that does not fit with the view of the world that the man trumpets on his nightly show on Fox News. In other words, Bill O'Reilly will have been proven a hypocrite, which is far worse than adultery in today's American political experience.

With Irish-Catholic, working-class roots, Bill O'Reilly's appeal has been monumental in Middle America. With a message that resonates to a wider audience than that of the ideological Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly has been instrumental in propelling Fox News to the top of the roster of cable news networks and continues to carry the station's prime time lineup. Unlike, Rush, Hannity, and other conservative commentators, O'Reilly doesn't just speak to folks who consider themselves aligned with a certain political party or ideology. Instead, he speaks directly to "the folks," as he calls them, working Americans who believe, at the end of the day, in basic American traditions and values like fairness, hard work, responsibility, justice, and freedom. These principles are less Democrat or Republican than they are traditionalist --- and O'Reilly considers himself a traditionalist as he speaks for the regular guy and against the coastal elites who have never accepted guys like O'Reilly in their Ivy League cloakrooms.

The reason this message resonates so well in flyover country is that most Americans have a great deal of distrust for the powerful. Perhaps our roots are to blame, but that same sentiment that led Americans to reject the edicts of the British Empire now periodically leads Americans to revolt against the social designs of the Hollywood elite and the Eastern Establishment. And this sentiment does not only exist on the Right. It is alive and well within the populist Left as well --- within rural Democrats who may be as far to the left as possible on economics but still have no love for Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon dictating their values onto the unwilling masses. These are "the folks" that O'Reilly speaks to daily --- working class and middle class Americans who want to be left alone to live their lives and who want a fair deal at the end of the day.

And it is for these very reasons that O'Reilly's actions have jeopardized his career. When a man who builds a career on the notion that embracing values such as decency, responsibility, and doing the right thing in life is found to have propositioned a young coworker while his pregnant wife was at home, it becomes very difficult to take the messenger seriously even if the message still holds true. The whole situation is a secular version of the fall of those '80s televangelists --- men who established media empires that reached out to millions of the same types of Middle Americans, only to fail to practice what they preached.

O'Reilly's saving grace, however, may turn out to be his ability to unite the people against the powerful. For every liberal anchor from another network that tries to capitalize on the event, there will be a growing number of folks in Middle America who feel that O'Reilly isn't getting the same treatment that, say, the previous President of the United States received when caught in adultery in the Oval Office. And for every outspoken member of the elite that trashes the man, there O'Reilly will be, reminding us that it's not him they hate, it's his values, or should I say, our values. If O'Reilly is able to frame the issue as yet another attempt by the Secularists to remove a major obstacle to their attack on American Traditionalism, he just may come through this thing with only a few scars. Because at the end of the day, when Americans have the choice between the regular guy who screws up and the haughty elitist who looks down upon them, they'll choose the regular guy every time. Just as Harry Truman. Or even better, ask George W. Bush in about two weeks.

I Never Thought I'd Say This, But...

2004-10-18T21:38:00.000-05:00

Pat Buchanan has it right.

Yes, everyone's favorite paleoconservative --- the champion of 1930s economics, American isolationism, and social ultraconservatism has seen the light, much as Ross Perot did in 2000, and has come home to the GOP and endorsed President Bush.

Don't get me wrong. I don't dislike Pat. Heck, the guy reminds me of more than one of my relatives from the small, rural community in the Northern Midwest where I grew up. But I do think Pat's got it wrong on a lot of issues. I think he's fighting the prevailing winds in a quixotic exercise to enact a sea change in the culture that will never take place. Let's face it, globalization is inevitable, and so is American hegemony. But that's a topic for another time.

Today's topic is Buchanan's endorsement of Bush through his political reader, "The American Conservative." You can view the endorsement for yourself here. I strongly recommend that you take a look at it. Even if you consider the guy at best behind the times or at worst a xenophobe, his writing always impresses and his logic cannot be denied if you accept his premises. Money quote:

"Yet, in the contest between Bush and Kerry, I am compelled to endorse the president of the United States. Why? Because, while Bush and Kerry are both wrong on Iraq, Sharon, NAFTA, the WTO, open borders, affirmative action, amnesty, free trade, foreign aid, and Big Government, Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing." (Emphasis added.)

I couldn't have said it better myself.

"I may not even vote..."

2004-10-17T16:21:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday evening, following the final presidential debate, I went forth with the bold prediction on this blog that President Bush would move well ahead of Sen. Kerry in the polling averages by Sunday due to his stellar performance in the final debate. I went on to predict a Bush lead of 5 points in the polls by early this coming week. Well, the polls have once again proved me right, as the president has apparently moved once again into a comfy lead over the Senator from Massachusetts.

As fans of statistics know, no one poll can be used to ascertain the true state of the race. In fact, the most accurate method to control for outliers has always been the tried and true method of averaging polls, a means employed by the good folks at Real Clear Politics for a number of years now. RCP, whose website can be accessed via my "Links" section, maintains a constantly-updated polling average for the presidential race that takes into account the myriad of polls released during any given week. RCP's finding as of today: President Bush currently leads Sen. Kerry by a small but significant margin of 4 pts. The president's mean score in all of the current polls puts him at a hearty 49%, while Kerry remains true to his predecessor, Michael Dukakis, garnering the same 45% of the vote as "The Duke" back in 1988. Nader picks off a couple of points and the hard undecideds appear to have dwindled to a mere 4% of likely voters --- a number that is getting dangerously low if Sen. Kerry hopes to pull this thing off.

Without getting into the specifics of individual polls, the trends recorded by RCP over the last month allow us to infer a few points.

1) The net impact of the four debates was a two point "bump" for Sen. Kerry. Prior to the first presidential debate, Kerry was polling at a meager 43% in the polling average while Bush was garnering 49% --- the exact same portion of the vote he's getting now. We can only assume that Bush's stellar performance in the final debate cancelled out his abysmal showing in the first, and that Kerry's Mary Cheney gaffe has nearly negated his solid performances throughout the debates. The result: the race got closer, but only because a third of the undecideds decided to go for Kerry. The remaining undecideds are still just that: undecided.

2) With the hard undecideds down to 4%, and with a gap of 4% also separating Bush and Kerry, in order for Sen. Kerry to simply tie the president on Election Day, he would need near-unanimity amongst undecided voters to swing their support behind Kerry over the next 16 days. Even the most optimistic pundit would have trouble with the notion of undecideds breaking unanimously for either candidate at this point. And with Rove's GOTV ground game set to match the DNC's urban registration efforts, Kerry won't be able to count on secret swarms of "new" voters to carry the day for the Democrats the way they did for Gore in 2000.

3) Kerry's only shot at winning this thing, then, is to move some of the "soft" Bush voters, those who are not solidly behind the president, into his camp. This is extremely difficult because there remains no national forum from which Kerry can address the nation as a whole. The conventions and debates are behind us and all that remains are two weeks on the campaign trail. The conclusion: absent an October Surprise favorable to the Democrats, the best Kerry can do is hope the undecideds break 9 to 1 his way, resulting in a tied election. The chances of that happening: not likely.

But who are these hard undecideds? And why, after a year long election, are they still undecided? The short answer is that neither candidate has proven himself a viable option to these folks. How do I know this? Because I happen to have a very reliable source: a longtime friend from Ohio who is moderate, civic-minded, and still undecided.

You may remember this friend of mine from earlier posts. He is truly representative of the 4% of voters who are squarely in the middle of the political spectrum and who simply cannot bring themselves to vote for either one of these guys. Like most of the undecideds, Bush had won his support after his top-notch performance at the Republican convention. And, also like most undecideds, my friend went back to being an uncommitted voter following the first debate. And now, with but two weeks left until America votes, my friend revealed his likely decision the other day: he may not even vote.

This is exactly in line with John Zogby's statement from a couple weeks back, who was surprised to see so many undecideds this late in a race involving an incumbent. It is also consistent with the Gray Davis strategy that embattled incumbents often have to run, which consists of painting your opponent as an unacceptable alternative to those voters who are ambivalent about reelecting you. It worked for Davis in 2002, and it will work for Bush in just 2 weeks.

So, just as I've been predicting all year, we're probably not going to see the 60% voter turnout that some pundits are so giddily calling for. Instead, turnout will be about average, with a few million likely voters staying at home and replaced by a few million unlikely voters who are literally driven to the polling place by the respective bases of each political party. The result is an election that is won or lost based on the party base --- and while I believe that's a game my party will win this time around, such a result is certainly not good for the nation in the longrun. If this strategy is effective, it will only embolden both sides to try and replicate it in 2008, with both parties moving closer and closer to the poles of the political spectrum and those in the middle becoming more and more disenchanted. And if anyone doubts this will happen, think about it this way: how else will Hillary ever have a chance of winning a national election?

Life In Our Nation's Capital

2004-10-16T20:22:00.000-05:00

"You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."
- Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars (1977)

To inject some well-needed levity into what is otherwise a fiery political discussion on this blog, today's post concerns a subject that is surely of interest to all political junkies who aren't fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough?) to reside in the midst of our nation's capital. Like most politicos, I had formed a mental image of DC life and atmosphere far prior to my move here just a few short years ago. And, like every Mr. Smith who goes to Washington, the actual experience of living and working here is nothing like that which the outsider could possibly imagine. And although the essence of this city defies words, I will do my best to project an accurate description.

I was inspired to write this post after meeting some friends just last night for an evening on the town. Desiring an atmosphere that exemplified what it means to be in DC, my friends wanted to try one of the many haunts on Pennsylvania Ave. that is frequented by Capitol Hill staffers, or "Hill Rats," as they call themselves. As a former Hill staffer myself, I had not been to this strip of establishments since my days working for a Member of Congress (don't ask which one --- that's classified!), and my return to "The Hill" for a very happy "Happy Hour" immediately brought back nostalgic memories of an experience like nothing else.

For those of you who are both old enough and young enough to remember the original "Star Wars" films, the DC political scene is best described as Mos Eisley with suits, ties, and heels. Comprised primarily of folks under 35 --- who are young enough to still believe that idealism is worth working long hours in hostile conditions for low pay --- the Hill is fueled by a mixture of workaholism, principle, and ambition. The adage "work hard, play hard" fits DC politics like the proverbial hand in the glove, and the near-insanity of one's work environment on Capitol Hill is nearly made up for by the glamour and intense social environment that natually derives from a plethora of overworked young people, making even the most conservative staffers at least consider the fruits of social libertarianism.

As far as the work goes, Hill life is anything but conventional. Reminscent of that cult film, "Office Space," Hill staffers are often treated to higher-ups that demand the unreasonable, make inefficient decisions, and just generally create more problems than need exist. Each congressional office is like an individual "mom 'n pop" shop --- with the atmosphere easily soiled by conflicting personalities and the hiring and firing left to the often-misplaced judgment of a single individual. The lack of institutional checks and balances leaves employees unhappy and exacerbates an already-high turnaround due to a salary that rarely reflects the exorbitant DC cost of living. And the environment is anything but laid back, with each office taking on the atmosphere of a PR firm that's in perpetual crisis mode.

The stress of the job and the disproportionate number of young, single folks makes the Hill area bars and restaurants popular hangouts on weeknights. The clickity-clack of heels and the mixture of black, blue, and gray suits fills Pennsylvania Ave. as dusk comes upon the nation's seat of power. As the night goes on, professionalism and smarminess are replaced by less-guarded behavior, and things can get quite raucous, depending on the occasion. And there's been more than a few times that intra-office spats were reportedly settled down this or adjacent streets.

Of course, countless more could be said about life in Washington, and yes, more important topics certainly exist. But it is nice to take a break for a moment from the constant concern over who shall next take the reins of the American Hegemony and focus on something a bit more fun, more personable, more reflective of one's day-to-day life in modern-day Imperial Rome.

Dick Morris and the Polls

2004-10-15T15:38:00.000-05:00

While we won't know for sure until Sunday whether or not the third debate gave either candidate a sizeable "bump" in the polls, the inclusion of at least one day of post-debate sampling in our three daily tracking polls seemingly indicates a pro-Bush trend. The WaPo tracking poll from yesterday, which presumably polls during the day and is released at night, shows Bush gaining a single point in the matchup with Kerry and the race moving back into a dead heat. Rasmussen showed a similar one point gain for the president, with Bush ahead by 3 in the overall numbers. And Zogby gives Bush a 3 point bump since the debate, with the president now leading Kerry by 4 in the multi-candidate matchup. The conclusion seems to be that President Bush is currently leading Kerry by 2-3 points nationally, and that the post-debate trend does appear to be back towards Bush, at least for the moment.

If one listens to Dick Morris, however, the 18 days left until Americans cast their ballots render these polls fairly meaningless. Morris, who served as Clinton's version of Karl Rove until the two nastily parted company, was privy to the internal campaign polls from both 1992 and 1996. His view: in each of the last three presidential races, the American electorate has swung at least four points one way or the other in the remaining two weeks before the election. If such a swing were to occur this year, it would basically determine the winner of the popular vote.

Now, I'm not one to put a lot of stock in Morris' political predictions. As the pollster who predicted that Hillary would never run for Senate and that New Jersey was a bellwether state as late as 2000, Morris hasn't exactly shown himself to be prescient. I do, however, feel that Morris is extremely bright and will trust him to analyze and report facts --- and if he's being honest, the facts at his disposal suggest the electorate is even more fickle than we'd like to believe. According to Morris, the 1992 election was a virtual tie just a week before Americans went to vote. Then, when Iran Contra figure Cap Weinberger was indicted just days before the election, the polls swung 5-6 pts to Clinton, which is where he finished on Election Day.

A comparable event happened in 1996. For months, the polls had shown Clinton was headed for a double-digit reelection against tired, old Bob Dole. Then, in the last two weeks of the election, Ross Perot began carping about the Chinese money scandal that took a great deal of wind out of Clinton's second term. The scandal didn't have legs in the long run (though Monica certainly did), but it was enough to send a few more voters to Dole and Perot and give Clinton an 8 pt reelection victory. And, of course, who could forget 2000, where the DUI charge leveled against Bush the Thursday before the election wiped out his 4 pt lead (according to Morris) and resulted in a tie.

The question then becomes, what will be the election-altering event, the aptly named, "October Surprise," this year? Now, this event does not have to be a cleverly perpetrated scheme by the other side, a la 2000. Instead, it can be an incident totally out of anyone's control. In 1996, for example, it was simply bad luck and not GOP dirty tricks that brought out the Chinese money issue in late October. And in 2002, it was the Democrats' own actions --- the shameful political event that resulted from the Wellstone funeral --- that shifted a few points to the GOP at the end of the day. So what will it be? Mary Cheney? A development in the war on terror? A shocking revelation about John Kerry? We'll find out in a matter of days.

Kerry and Mary

2004-10-14T19:59:00.000-05:00

After spending the last few hours watching cable news and perusing the political blogosphere, I just must weigh in on an incident that I missed entirely during my coverage of the debate, and something that is quickly becoming a budding controversy in the race for the White House. I'm referring, of course, to John Kerry's response last night to a question about gay rights issues, during which he evoked the name of the vice president's daughter, Mary Cheney, who happens to be a lesbian.

Now I have to be honest --- upon hearing this remark by Kerry, I did not exactly jump to the edge of my seat. After all, it is common knowledge to any casual observer of politics that the veep has a gay daughter. And Kerry, by mentioning it, seemed to be trying to imply that the president was a hypocrite on issues of gay rights, a charge that, while without merit, consititutes nothing new or scandalous in hardball national politics. But in the cable news coverage immediately following the debate, the conversation quickly turned to the appropriateness of Kerry's remark, with even ultra-liberals like Ron Reagan and Andrea Mitchell agreeing that the Senator had crossed the line of decency.

Perhaps it was for generational and cultural reasons that I did not reflexively experience the same level of outrage at this evocation. As a twentysomething male who has spent the last few years on the east coast, I may have forgotten the social stigma that still exists in my native Middle America when it comes to issues of this sort, or that of generations past who didn't regularly flip the remote past shows like "Will and Grace." The disparate reactions that folks are having may also have to do with gender. Indeed, my sentiment was shared by Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, certainly no cheerleader for Kerry, who found from his call-in show that men generally seemed perplexed by the whole ordeal while women of all stripes were furious. As a member of the less-refined gender, I can only speculate on what may have induced this firestorm, which I suppose goes to the greater level of privacy that women place around their own private lives and that of others.

But wait, there's more. As if the statement by Kerry weren't potentially damaging enough, Elizabeth Edwards, that plain-spoken champion of the working class, decided to insert her two cents today by informing everyone that Kerry was right to bring up Mary Cheney --- and that her parents are clearly "ashamed" of her. Now, I am the first to admit that I am no master of subtlety or tact, but even I was taken aback when reading this statement along with millions of other Americans on the Drudge Report. The Kerry campaign should be apologizing to Mary Cheney and her family, not continuing to drag her name and her private life through the political mud. While John Kerry may have married up, we can be certain that John Edwards did not.

The result of all of this is a clip of Lynne Cheney, burning with a mother's fury, making known in the most direct way her feelings about John Kerry. The cable news networks have been regularly airing the clip, reinforcing Ms. Cheney's view in the minds of voters that the Senator from Massachusetts is just "not a good man." Whatever the merits of the accusation, this just can't be good for a candidate who's running behind in the polls just 19 days before an election. And if my Machiavellian instincts are serving me correctly, this won't be the last we'll hear of Kerry's words on Mary.

Five Points

2004-10-13T21:33:00.000-05:00

Once again going forward with a bold prediction that defies the punditry, I am at this moment prepared to call the debate and the election for George W. Bush. Longtime readers will know that I am no partisan hack when it comes to my analysis of forums such as debates and conventions. In fact, I've admitted on this blog that Sen. Kerry did quite well in the first presidential debate and I even called the second debate a virtual tie just last week. But upon witnessing the contrast between the president and Sen. Kerry during this last opportunity for both to address the nation before America goes to the polls, it is evident to this midwesterner-at-heart that Middle America will swing big to Bush.

The debate format: basically the same as the first, with President Bush and Sen. Kerry each standing at a separate podium, usually seen on television in split-screen format. The similarities with the first debate end there. Unlike in the debate two weeks ago, Kerry seemed old and tired. Somewhere between that event and this, the spring in Kerry's step went springing off into the wilderness. What we saw in its place was a Bob Dole-like candidate --- a wonk from the Senate who had to attempt to defend a myriad of amendments and procedures and votes from his record all while trying to make the case for replacing an incumbent president.

Bush, on the other hand, was invigorated. Filled with positive energy and an optimistic stride, the president articulated his vision for America in a manner comparable to his performance at the Republican convention --- the very event that pushed him up to an 8 pt lead in the polls prior to the initial debate. Whether he spoke of his faith, his family, or his views on education, the president was able to frame the issue in terms of values --- not the cheap-shot "family values" exploited by so many pols, but the values that we as Americans universally share: values like freedom for all mankind, the importance of life, the essential nature of a government that works with Americans to achieve their dreams instead of one that tries to rule them, and our common goal at removing any threats to our civilization. The president's heart was in this debate tonight, and it was on his sleeve for all to see.

Possibly the most evident contrast between these two candidates was one of manner. President Bush was the optimist tonight. He was the John Edwards. He was the one who evoked a painting of the sun rising in the east, and applying that daily wonder to his vision of America's future. It was President Bush who let Americans know that it was morning in America once again. By contrast, Sen. Kerry was dark and dismal. His responses to questions usually began with a list of complaints about America, then about the Bush Administration, and then, if his time wasn't up, he would assure the country that he had a plan. Oh, and he'd work with John McCain! We all like John McCain, right? Right? Pathetic.

Even more pungent was the continuing demagoguery of Kerry. He continues to promise to cut taxes on the middle class, give everyone health care, end the war in Iraq, win the war on terror, fix the schools, raise the minimum wage, grow the economy, AND give everyone a pony ALL by raising taxes 5 percent on rich people. Apparently either we're going to add another 5 trillion dollars of debt under Kerry's plan or "the rich" will end up including everyone who's reading this blog. And that means YOU.

Moreover, President Bush continued to show that he is a New Republican who will not cede domestic issues to the Democrats but will come up with feasible, pragmatic plans to respond to the needs of real Americans in areas like education and health care. Kerry, on the other hand, once again called for Hillary Care, assuring folks that they could either choose the government's plan or "keep their high premiums." Apparently socialism is spelled K-E-R-R-Y.

On cultural issues, the president was the clear winner. Bush came out as a social conservative who wasn't too conservative, opposing a litmus test on abortion for judges one way or the other and defending the rights of the American people and not the courts to decide these cultural issues, like gun control and gay marriage. Kerry, on the other hand, made it clear that all of his judges would be pro-abortion --- apparently, that's just one more lobby that John Kerry is beholden to. The man truly is Dukakis Version 2.0.

At the end of the night, each candidate was asked to discuss the women in their lives and what they've learned from them. President Bush retorted with a witty, "I've learned to listen to 'em," which garnered laughter from the audience and a big belly-laugh from Kerry, similar to Reagan's "Mondale Moment" in 1984. Kerry, on the other hand, attempted to pull off a quip regarding his sugar-mama, Teresa Heinz, commenting that both he and the president had "married up," though he had done so a bit farther up. The joke came off as smarmy and elitist --- and the thought running through the president's head, based on his facial expression, was probably the same that was running through the collective mind of Middle America: what a gold digger!

Therefore, I am prepared to put my credibility on the line and predict that by Sunday, when the polling begins to drop all pre-debate samples, President Bush will move decisively ahead of Sen. Kerry in the polling averages. I believe the president will lead Kerry by an average of 5 points by this coming week, and it's my guess that he will finish with a comparable margin of victory on Election Day. Tonight, President Bush earned his second term.

Endgame

2004-10-12T19:21:00.000-05:00

Today marks the beginning of the end for what has to be one of the most emotionally-charged, nationally-divisive presidential elections in decades. With exactly three weeks to go before this 8-month general election is put to rest once and for all, a flurry of national and state polling, all of which were completed after the three debates that have taken place in the last two weeks, are finally available to present an accurate picture of the state of the electorate. The conclusion: a race almost as tight as 2000 with Bush ahead by a nose. Moreover, today's polls show just how flexible the electorate really is at this late date, illustrating the importance of tomorrow night's final debate. Finally, state polling shows that we must once again be ready for the increasingly likely event that one candidate will win the popular vote and the other, the electoral college.

First, the national polls. It appears that I spoke a tad too soon regarding the disparity in the poll numbers yesterday. Over the past 24 hours, most pollsters have finally dropped any pre-debate samples from their current tracking polls, meaning that all national polls now reflect an electorate that's witnessed both presidential debates and the vice presidential debate. This is very important due to the huge swings that have taken place within the electorate due to each of these debates, which I will illustrate in a moment using the CBS poll released earlier today.

The national polls currently fall into two categories. First, there are those that basically show the race as a tie. Those polls include Rasmussen (Bush +1), Gallup (Kerry +1), and Zogby (tie). Average those polls and you get an even race. The second category are those polls that show Bush a few points ahead. Those include CBS (Bush +3), WaPo (Bush +3), and ICR (Bush +5). Average those and you find that Bush is ahead by about 4 pts. The truth, as usual, is probably somewhere in between, meaning if the election were held right now, Bush would probably win the popular vote by about 2 points.

The impact of the presidential debates thus far can be seen through the trends of the Zogby and CBS polls. Yesterday, Zogby's tracking poll, which included samples from Fri-Sun, found Kerry up 3 pts over the president. Today, by dropping his Friday sample, which was taken before the second debate, Bush moves into a tie with Kerry. This is more evidence of my theory as articulated in an earlier post that the conventional wisdom that Bush won the debate is turning out to be correct. This trend is especially clear in the CBS poll. Prior to the first debate --- the one which Kerry clearly won --- Bush was ahead by 9 pts. In the CBS poll taken after the first debate but prior to the second, Bush and Kerry were exactly tied. Now, after both debates, CBS finds Bush up by 3. Whether Bush is actually up by 3 is not important --- what IS important is that Kerry received a roughly 9 pt bump from the first debate and Bush, a 3 pt bump from the second debate. That's a net 6 pt shift to Kerry from late-September, when Bush was ahead by 8 in the Gallup Poll. This is just more evidence that Bush is probably actually head by about 2 pts right now.

This is why tomorrow night is so important for both candidates. Presumably, either candidate could garner around a 3 pt bump in the polls by winning tomorrow's debate. The bump could be bigger if that win is decisive. The conclusion is somewhat unnerving: the winner of the debate tomorrow night will most likely be the winner of the popular vote.

That does not mean, however, that the electoral college will follow suit. Quite to the contrary, President Bush, in a highly Machiavellian strategy worthy of Karl Rove, has solidified so many states under his belt that it will apparently take a decisive Kerry win in the national vote to garner a majority in the electoral college. Colleagues who are far less "fiscally conservative" than me have informed me that Rasmussen's premium polling for those with paid memberships has shown Bush ahead by 5 pts or more in both Florida and Ohio for the past 10 days. This is consistent with public polls, one of which today showed Bush up by a similar amount in Ohio and a number of which have shown the president well ahead in Florida. Additionally, the last two polls out of Wisconsin show Bush up by 3-4 points. As the Kerry campaign long ago pulled out of additional "lean Bush" states like Arizona and Missouri, the only states that Bush won in 2000 that appear to be in play are Nevada, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. If Bush lost all three of those, but held Ohio, Florida, and captured Wisconsin, he would garner 275 electoral votes, enough to hold the White House and weather the occasional faithless elector. Additionally, the closest of these states now leaning towards Bush does appear to be Wisconsin, which suggests that only a Kerry gain of 3-4 pts nationally will endanger the GOP hold on the electoral map. In short, Kerry could easily win the popular vote by a point or so and lose the election.

Now for some prognosticating. The way I see it, there are three possible outcomes tomorrow night. 1) Kerry pulls off a decisive victory, reminiscent of the first debate. He gains back the 3 pts he lost this past week, wins the popular vote, and everything comes down to turnout in a few states. 2) Bush blows Kerry out of the water. With Kerry's last chance at capturing the national stage gone, Bush gains about 3 pts in the polls and finishes with a 5-6 pt win on election day and an easy electoral college victory. 3) The two candidates pummel each other to a draw. The race remains exactly where it is now and Bush wins by 1-2 pts, garnering all of his 2000 states except for New Hampshire as well as pulling in the blue states of Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Mexico. A respectable victory, but still a 49-percent president.

Endgame begins tomorrow night.

Somebody's Gotta Be Wrong

2004-10-11T09:20:00.000-05:00

October is possibly the most important month of the year for the myriad of news organizations and professional outfits that now engage in the art of polling. October was the month in which Gallup incorrectly called the election for challenger Tom Dewey in 1948 based on its polls, only to be slightly more than embarrassed when Harry Truman won reelection by a respectable margin just weeks later. And veterans of politics may remember polls that showed the Reagan/Carter race of 1980 too close to call to the very end --- until Reagan broke out with a lead that translated into a 10-pt victory in November. Yes, October is the month pollsters go for broke, and with the three latest polls on the presidential race showing three different results, somebody's gotta be wrong.

So far, three organizations have instituted a daily tracking poll to measure the day-to-day status of the presidential race. These daily polls average the responses given from the previous three days in order to control for any off-days and present a fairly accurate picture of where the race is headed. So where does the race stand now according to these polls? Well that depends on which poll you believe.

If one is to put their faith in the Zogby tracking poll, Sen. Kerry is currently leading President Bush, 47%-44%. Zogby is a pollster who was made famous for his precision during the 1996 presidential election. While all the other polls projected a Clinton double-digit victory, Zogby was able to tap into a last-minute swing towards the challengers, Dole and Perot, that left the former president with an 8-9 pt win. The Zogby outfit did not do quite as well last time around, however, when it projected a Gore victory of 2 pts. In 2002 and beyond, Zogby began using a variety of unconventional polling methods, such as Internet polling, that seem to be showing wacky results in his state-by-state analysis as well. Bottom line: either Zogby's going to pull the wool over the eyes of the other pollsters once again or the man's finally gone off the deep end.

A second daily tracking poll is that of pollster Scott Rasmussen. Like Zogby, Rasmussen uses a variety of unconventional methods, such as automated polling in order to avoid the assumed hesitation of some respondents to reveal their vote to an actual person. Unlike Zogby, the Rasmussen poll shows President Bush ahead, 50%-46%. Rasmussen's polling as well must be taken with a grain of salt. Those of us who have been observing his year-long endeavor to track the race will notice a dearth of fluidity that matches none of the trends agreed upon by almost all of the major polling outfits. While other polls had Kerry well ahead in May, Bush in September, and so forth, Rasmussen's numbers barely moved more than a couple of points one way or the other all year. And the occasions when those numbers rarely coincided with the collective movement of the other polls. For a pollster who was off by 8 points in 2000, Rasmussen remains highly suspect. But one can be cautiously optimistic I suppose.

The thirdt tracking poll is the more traditional poll released by ABC/WaPo. Unlike these other orgs, ABC and the Post see no need to replace time-tested polling methods with "new fangled" means that may or may not turn out to be accurate. The result: Bush leads Kerry by 5 points, 51%-46%. Moreover, the president is well over the 50% mark and is back to majority support. This tracking poll seems to make the most sense --- we saw the numbers move toward Kerry after the first debate and back towards the president after the two debates this past week. That sort of movement would be consistent with the conventional wisdom regarding the winner of each of the three debates that has taken place thus far.

So, determining who is really ahead in this race is more of a game of darts than a science. Perhaps all of these polls will fall into line prior to the election. If they don't, somebody's going to lose a good deal of credibility when the dust clears.

Bush "Gored" Kerry

2004-10-09T14:21:00.000-05:00

After ruminating on the issue for a few hours, the shape of the post-debate race is become quite clear to my political eye. First, my initial view that the debate was substantively a draw mirrored that of respondents in a Gallup flash poll taken last night which showed a statistical tie between those who felt that Bush had won the debate and those who felt that Kerry once again bested the president. Secondly, it is becoming increasingly clear that for all practical purposes, Kerry struck out last night and Bush emerges the political winner if only by default. The chattering classes, doing what they do best, are beginning to echo the very same lines about Kerry that they parroted about Gore in his debates with Bush just four years ago: that Kerry was defensive about his record, aloof, distant, confusing, and allowed Bush to get under his skin. In other words, Bush "Gored" Kerry.

This will come as no surprise to Texans and other assorted politicos who have followed the president's political career from his rise to the governorship of one of our largest states in 1994. Sitting Texas Gov. Ann Richards fell victim to the Bush debate trick, as did VP Gore, who is probably still in shock that a man of his intellect, with his resume, and with the strongest economy of all time under his belt could be beaten in a debate by George W. Bush.

The Bush technique is simple, and it works with every opponent largely because of the president's ability to bamboozle his opponents into underestimating him. Bush goes into every debate the same way: prepared to give broad, thematic responses to even the most specific questions, ready to put his opponent on the defensive, and with a "regular guy" persona that seems to fluster every challenger. Once the president has mispronounced a few words, incorrectly stated a couple of facts, or missed the point entirely on one question or another, his opponent usually attempts to go in for the kill. It's at that point that the debate usually turns to the president's favor. When his opponent attacks, Bush deflects, makes a broad statement about his view on the subject, and attacks his opponent. His opponent responds with another attack. Bush calmly responds the same way: deflect, broad statement, attack opponent. The result is perpetually the same: a frustrated opponent who knows that any Ivy League debate coach would have disqualified Bush by now. This is the point at which Bush wins the debate. Why? Because his insulted opponent begins to show his pomposity, his disgust at having to debate in front of regular Americans instead of lofty intellectuals, and his general feeling that he "can't believe he's losing to this guy." The result: Bush wins every time.

And so it will come as no surprise to me when Bush destroys what's left of the Kerry campaign at the third and final debate this coming week. This last debate, covering only domestic issues, is good news for the president who, as a "New Republican," or "compassionate conservative," or whatever they're called these days, has a positive, pragmatic domestic agenda that is much more feasible than the tired, old, liberal New England drivel being proposed by Sen. Kerry. Right now, Kerry's down but not out. I expect Bush to deliver the final blow this coming week.

And The Winner Is...

2004-10-08T21:28:00.000-05:00

As I write this, I have yet to listen to the talking heads of the mainstream media nor the myriad of opinions on the Leviathan of the Internet. And while mine may not initially be the conventional wisdom, I have a pretty good ear for politics, and I am fairly confident as to the mixed result that will be the outcome of the night. I am prepared to declare two winners to this debate: President Bush AND Sen. Kerry.

For viewers that watched only the first half of the debate, Sen. Kerry edged out the president in style if not in substance. The president seemed immediately defensive over the topic of this first portion on international issues. And of course, in today's political jargon, international issues is code for one thing: Iraq. Kerry came out swinging, once again proclaiming every Orwellian line about the war in Iraq without even addressing his own flip-flopping on the issue over the years. And, just as in the first debate, President Bush seemed to get visibly angry when questioned on the issue, interrupting the moderator and repeating the Saturday Night Live line about "working hard" that was used to mock the president just this past weekend. The president even tried to give Kerry his "Mondale Moment," saying to the audience that Sen. Kerry's response made him want to "scowl." The problem was, Bush was so miffed at the time that the delivery of the joke came across horribly. No one laughed. At about 9:30, I threw up my hands and said nonchalantly, "Well, there's always 2008."

But the Fates are often fickle and around 9:40, the tide began to turn --- big time. All of the sudden, the debate went to domestic policy and President Bush became more relaxed, personable, and less emotionally involved. The president began to attack Kerry's domestic plans, which basically consist of giving everyone a pony, for the fiscally irresponsible demagoguery that it is. President Bush reminded America that Sen. Kerry can't possibly pay for all of the new programs he's proposing just by taxing the wealthy. Who then will be taxed? The upper middle class? Small businesses? Won't that hurt the economy? What can we infer from Kerry's record in the Senate regarding this issue? Has Kerry done anything in the Senate over the past 20 years?

It was this line of rebuttal that set Kerry off. The smile disappeared from his face and it was Kerry who became defensive over his record and his plans for the country. The next issue was health care. Kerry's plan sounded very similar to "Hillary Care" of the early '90s. Bush capitalized on this and retorted with a common sense health care plan of his own. Then came energy and the environment. Unlike many previous Republican presidential candidates, Bush had plans for both of these domestic areas --- and they were more pragmatic than those of Sen. Kerry. And at the end of the day, Sen. Kerry gave lip service to his own Roman Catholicism while supporting nothing less than spending the tax dollars of unwilling Americans to provide abortion services. As a fellow Papist, I was not impressed. Neither was President Bush.

The result: viewers who watched the first half of the debate probably will declare Kerry the winner while those who turned on the television around 9:45 pm will most likely feel that Bush won the night. I guess that's a draw, for whatever that's worth, and I'm not sure how such a mixed result will impact the race in the long run. I do find it interesting, however, that the president won the portion of the debate that dealt with domestic and social issues. I believe this is due primarily to Sen. Kerry's laundry list of votes in the Senate where he's been on the far-left side of every domestic issue as well as his pie-in-the-sky plans for the country if elected. If this debate is a portent of things to come, President Bush is set to be named the clear winner of the third debate covering solely domestic issues which should propel the president neatly over the finish line.

How the Race Has Changed (For the 35th Time)

2004-10-07T20:14:00.000-05:00

In what is becoming one of the most overused phrases of this year's presidential race, (here goes) today's bevy of national and state polling shows yet another change in dynamics to this volatile election. 2004 is sure to go down in political history as one of the strangest presidential elections of all time. Unlike almost every other race for the White House involving a sitting president, this year's electorate seems more fickle than anyone could imagine, changing their collective minds in a New York minute over such important issues as whether or not Bush grimaced during the debate. Whatever the case, there is no single historical analogy that best describes this race and, depending on what happens in the next 26 days, Election Night will either give us a replay of 2000, 1976, or the election of 1900!

Rewind to January of 2004. The new year was upon us. Saddam Hussein was in prison, not in power. President Bush's job approval was through the roof. At that point, the 2004 election began to look a lot like 1964, with ultra-liberal Howard Dean prepared to play the role of conservative stalwart Barry Goldwater, who lost 44 states to LBJ that year.

Then came the surprise nomination of Kerry, following a less-than-stellar SOTU by the president, more violence in Iraq, and an all out assault on the president by the mainstream media. Bush's approval fell below the magic 50%, Kerry won the nod, and the race began to look a bit like 1980, when a disenchanted electorate embraced a candidate once considered too far to one political extreme or another in order to replace an embattled incumbent with whom the country had lost faith.

Fast-forward to April. Kerry couldn't seem to get his general election campaign off the ground. Tracking polls showed the electorate swinging back towards Bush, though his approval rating remained below majority-level. Kerry remained aloof and distant. Comparisons to 1948 were sounded, in which Harry Truman won reelection with a 49% plurality due largely to a weak opponent who the American people just couldn't warm up to.

Late spring and early summer brought a barrage of bad news for Bush. Abu Ghirab, the Edwards pick, and Kerry's convention were accompanied by polls showing Kerry consistently winning by a nose, with the battleground states consisting of 5-10 of the 30 red states that Bush won last time. Pundits began comparing the race to 1976, a year in which an incumbent Americans were ambivalent about lost by a mere 2 points to a challenger that the country was equally ambivalent about.

Then came August. The Swift Boat ads, the conservative media, and Bush's convention effectively turned Kerry into a cartoon version of himself. Moreover, Bush was able to use his convention to remind Americans of the GOP successes of the past four years and of the superiority of the Republican vision for the nation. In the wake of the RNC, Bush was back to majority approval amongst the American people and began widening his lead over Sen. Kerry as the month of September progressed. The battleground states became ten or so blue states won by VP Gore last time around. All of the sudden, this race became 1988 redux, with a guy named Bush prepared to defeat an aloof Massachusetts liberal by about 8 points.

And then, of course, came the president's debate disaster. While only a week has passed, the changes in the race are clear. According to the folks at Real Clear Politics, who have averaged together all of the recent national polls on the race, the president's job approval now stands at exactly 50%. Moreover, Bush currently leads Kerry in the horserace by about 2 points. This finding is consistent with the daily tracking poll now being put out by ABC, which also shows a 2 point lead for the president.

In order to determine where the race will finish, we must also take into account the number of persuadeables left in the race. According to the ABC tracking poll, only 4% of voters are still indicating there's a good chance they may change their mind, with those voters currently splitting evenly between Bush and Kerry. If all of these voters went to Kerry, the result would go from a 2 pt Bush lead to a 2 pt Kerry lead. Conversely, should all of these voters go to Bush, we would end up with a 6 pt Bush lead. To put it more simply, the likely outcome of this race, barring any monumental October Surprise, will fall somewhere between a 2 pt Kerry win and a 6 pt Bush win.

In the former case, we do end up with a replay of 1976 and Kerry becomes the new Jimmy Carter. Keep in mind, though, that the GOP-friendly electoral college would certainly be the elephant in the room under this scenario. In 1976, when Gerald Ford also lost the popular vote by 2 pts, a mere 20,000 votes in 2 states would have given Ford an electoral college majority and kept him in the White House. Any Kerry victory, then, would be one in which the senator just manages to squeak by --- and that makes the term "mandate" the farthest thing from his potential presidency.

The latter scenario, and the one that I believe will happen, is the replay of 1900, where Bush reprises the role of William McKinley and wins by about 6 pts, taking all of the red states and most of the close blue states from last time. This scenario certainly falls short of the hopes of just a week or so ago, when states like New Jersey seemed ready to vote Republican for the first time in ages, but a healthy 6 pt victory would almost certainly provide the president with a majority of both the popular vote and electoral college and set him up for a healthy second term.

There is a middle scenario, of course, and one that I dare not mention, lest it occur --- things could stay exactly as they are, Bush could win the popular vote by a couple of points, and the presidency could turn on which candidate is able to get out the vote in a few precincts of Ohio and Wisconsin. This is the nightmare scenario --- a replay of 2000, except one in which Bush wins the popular vote and Kerry possibly wins the electoral college. Democrats would scream poetic justice. Republicans would call for a constitutional amendment. Faithless electors, the involvement of the courts --- we'd be in for another wild ride for the next few weeks. And the result would be a country even more divided. This is one result that we don't need.

Truth be told, it will most likely be the final two debates that determine the fate of this race. I will be looking forward to blogging tomorrow's debate, as I believe that President Bush will stage a comeback that no one is expecting. Sen. Kerry is overconfident --- the stage has been set. Let's see who's right.

Cheney Beats Edwards

2004-10-05T21:41:00.000-05:00

In one of the many ironies of a irony-filled campaign, Vice President Cheney spent the last hour and a half steamrolling over young, charming, ex-trial lawyer, John Edwards. This is especially delicious considering that for months, liberals have been hailing the Cheney/Edwards debate as their chance to out the cronyism of the Bush Administration by pitting the son of a millworker against the former CEO of Halliburton. But it's not often that the "Hardball" panel of pundits is unanimous on anything --- yet tonight all agree that the Vice President won the evening.

Mature, intelligent and experienced, Dick Cheney made the case tonight for a second Bush term that the president was unable to make last Thursday. The veep spent the first half of the debate cutting into Edwards' clever talking points that basically reiterated Iraq was the "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" by reminding America of the Bush Administration's fundamental philosophy regarding the war on terror: hunt down the terrorists, deal with states that sponsor terrorism, and spread democracy as an antidote to future generations of terrorists. This was the very case for our action on Iraq that McCain and Rudy were able to articulate at the convention quite well --- and one that resonates with the majority of Americans. Cheney went on to take apart the irresponsible actions of Kerry and Edwards over the last few years, taking whichever position on the war on terror that is politically popular at the time, often bowing to political pressures during the Democratic primaries. As Cheney so aptly pointed out, if John Kerry couldn't stand up to the pressures of Howard Dean during the primary fight, how on earth can we expect the man to stand up to the terrorists?

On domestic issues, Cheney was able to neutralize Edwards and his man Kerry very effectively --- a tribute to the fact that Republicans have reached the 21st Century when it comes to issues like Medicare and education. Today's GOP realizes that we can no longer cede domestic issues to Democrats, and the first four years of the Bush Administration has demonstrated the president's interest in these issues. Dick Cheney touted the government reforms to programs like Medicare and education that have been enacted at the behest of President Bush. And while John Edwards brought back the old Kerry line about taxing the rich, cutting taxes on the poor, giving everyone health care, cutting the deficit, and providing every child with a brand new pony, Cheney reacted in a way that any intelligent person would: basically telling Edwards to get real.

One of the best moments of the night concerned the moderator's direction to each of the candidates to contrast themselves, not the man at the top of their respective tickets. The current veep used this question as a chance to let America get to see the real Dick Cheney. We found out that this "corporate crony," like millions of Americans, including John Edwards and myself, was the first in his family to go to college. Like Edwards, Cheney wasn't born with anything silver in his mouth. Unlike Edwards, we've never known about it because Cheney doesn't spend every other speech telling us about it. Edwards, on the other hand, was unable to answer the question, breaking the moderator's rule twice and mentioning Kerry's name, causing even Cheney to laugh.

The bottom line: Cheney reminded America that he is a bright, mature, likeable guy who is part of a competent team running this country. John Edwards, on the other hand, may be optimistic and smart and have great potential, but he couldn't sell his current client, John Kerry, to the American people. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the polls swing back to President Bush over the next few days. But it will be up to President Bush to finish the job during the final two debates over the next few days.

Uncharted Territory

2004-10-03T20:26:00.000-05:00

As of today, the presidential race of 2004 has moved into uncharted territory. According to the newly-released Gallup Poll, President Bush's 8 pt lead over Sen. Kerry has evaporated in the wake of the first debate and the subsequent media spin. Gallup finds Bush and Kerry tied at 49% each, with Nader garnering a single point and virtually no undecideds. Moreover, the president's job approval fallen from safe majority support and is now at exactly 50%.

Folks, we are now in uncharted territory. Since the advent of modern polling, we have never seen a presidential race involving an incumbent with the country divided right down the center with less than a month to go. Over the next few days, you'll hear a lot of blowhard commentators compare these numbers to Carter's in 1980 or Ford's in 1976, both of whom went on to lose the presidency. Don't believe them. As any true student of politics knows, both Ford and Carter had approval ratings well below 50% by October, with Carter in the low 40s and Ford in the upper 40s. Job approval is a huge deal in races involving incumbents, as voters who approve of the job an incumbent is doing are almost certain to cast their ballots in favor of him or her. Therefore, we can infer the following from the Gallup Poll: as of today, about half of the country wants to reelect President Bush while the other half would probably pull the lever for Sen. Kerry.

What Kerry needs to knock Bush out, of course, is also what Bush needs to stage a comeback: to win the remaining two debates. An October Surprise of sorts, such as the capture of bin Laden or the discovery of those elusive WMDs, would almost certainly boost the president back to majority approval amongst such a fickle electorate. And let's not forget today's scoop by Drudge regarding speculation that Kerry may have broken the rules during the first debate by bringing in a "cheat sheet." Expect the right-wing media to be all over this one in the coming days.

Supporters of the president can take comfort in a few small but significant caveats to the Gallup Poll. First, among registered voters, as opposed to likely voters, Bush still leads Kerry by 2 points. Could this be the result of the massive push by Karl Rove to register millions of politically-apathetic conservative Christians this year? If so, we could see the reverse of what we saw in 2000, where Al Gore did 2 pts better on Election Day than Gallup anticipated in its final poll due to Democratic GOTV efforts in our major cities.

Possibly more important is this historical trend: GOP presidential candidates almost always end up with a higher percentage of the vote on Election Day than as reported by Gallup in its first October poll. This has held true since 1952, with the only true exception being 1968, when Nixon ended up with 43.5% of the popular vote and not the 44% predicted by Gallup a month before the election. Usually the GOP gain is only a couple of points, but in this race, a couple of points would make George Bush president for another four years.

A Mondale Moment

2004-10-02T13:12:00.000-05:00

I can't help but find both annoying and amusing the after-the-fact reactions to the first presidential debate from the chattering classes. Andrew Sullivan, in his latest attempt to rationalize a vote for Kerry, is stopping just short of calling the president unfit for office due to a 90-minute debate performance. I've always liked Sully, but I cannot respect his intellectual dishonesty on this election due to nothing more than Sullivan's emotional attachment to the gay marriage issue. How this former Thatcherite can support Dukakis Version 2.0 is beyond me, as I told him in a recent email, and I can only assume that he has gone wobbly.

And so Republicans continue to sulk about, anxiously awaiting the post-debate polls to ease their fears of a change in dynamics to this race. Democrats, on the other hand, are re-energized, which is a shame considering that the best way to beat Democrats, who are primarily creatures of emotion, is to convince them that their candidate can't win. Had Kerry lost the debate on Thursday, the election would have been over. Since he won, he lives to fight another day.

The good news for we rational folks, however, can be found in the first of the post-debate polls. An ABC poll taken immediately following the debate showed that while a plurality agreed that Kerry was the winner of the night, a 51-47 majority still favored the president for re-election (the previous ABC/WaPo poll showed Bush winning, 51-45). Just hours ago, Democracy Corps released a poll showing a similar dynamic: Bush's pre-debate support of 50% remained intact, but Kerry moved from 46% to 48% support. Additionally, Kerry's favorability ratings on most issues jumped way up from where they had been before the debate.

It is clear from these polls that this debate did two things. First, it reminded the half of the country that voted for Clinton and Gore in the last two elections that John Kerry isn't necessarily the Karl Rove version of him that has been portrayed on the Swift Boat ads, in political cartoons, and in the conservative media for the past couple of months. Kerry certainly rose the nation's opinion of him through his ability to articulate responses to tough questions and command the issues --- qualities that definitely stood out next to a president who could do neither on that particular evening.

Secondly, the debates convinced the soft, undecided voters in the middle to lean towards Kerry. Bush's saving grace in all of this is that with only a month left until Election Day, undecideds are so few that even if Kerry were to take all of them, as these last two polls showed, Bush would still win due to the 50-51% of Americans who supported him both before and after the debate. It doesn't look like these folks are poised to change their minds, meaning the president can probably count on reelection. What has to have the Bush team miffed, though, is that the president's reelection, which just a week ago would have been by 6-8 pts, looks like it will now be a 2-4 pt victory, one that will come with minimal coattails and keep us all up way too late on Nov. 2nd.

This is not to say Bush can't turn things around. What the president needs now is for Kerry to experience a Mondale Moment at the next debate. Interestingly, the first Reagan/Mondale debate in 1984 was very similar to the Bush/Kerry debate we just witnessed. Mondale seemed intelligent and in control of the issues. Reagan came across as tired, a bit out of it, and like a man who didn't have the knowledge that we assume four years in the White House would provide. During the second debate, however, Reagan diffused the issue --- with a joke. Capitalizing on the spin from the first debate, Mondale remarked on Reagan's age, implying his unfitness for the presidency. Reagan retorted, completely deadpan, that he would not make age an issue in the campaign by exploiting his opponent's youth and inexperience. The crowd roared with laughter and Fritz Mondale himself let out a long belly-laugh. At that moment, the race was over.

It's impossible to say whether Bush will get his Mondale Moment at the next debate, but the need for one is clear. The president has the vote of at least half the country, enough to give him a close victory in November barring a total meltdown beforehand. But this president needs more than a close victory, he needs a mandate. Supporters of the president should be hoping that he can manage to pull out some of the Gipper's well-needed wit and effectively hand Kerry his hat.

Round One: Too Little, Too Late

2004-09-30T22:42:00.000-05:00

Tonight was Round One of this year's long-awaited presidential debates and the first of three chances John Kerry had to prove to the nation that he deserves to take the place of President Bush at the helm. As I stated earlier this week, Kerry's task was twofold. First, he had to convince the small majority of Americans that currently approve of President Bush's job performance that they are, in fact, wrong about the president. Then, he had to go on to convince these same Americans that he, John Kerry, is an acceptable alternative to the president. Fortunately for Mr. Bush, Sen. Kerry was unable to accomplish either task tonight.

I watched the debate in a DC bar alongside two Democratic friends. Like many in the bar, both periodically scoffed and snickered at the president's performance. Unlike Sen. Kerry, President Bush is no professional debater. The president was visibly nervous. He often tripped over words and phrases. Several times, he went back to familiar points after losing his train of thought. Sen. Kerry, on the other hand, is a master of debating. Kerry was articulate, able to play with language in a way the president just cannot. He came across with a mastery of the issues, similar to Al Gore in 2000. If the winner of presidential debates was determined by a collegiate debate team of judges, John Kerry would be declared the winner.

But the winner of the debates will not be decided by debate coaches. Instead, the winner will be declared by the American people. And, as far as my midwestern gut instinct is concerned, this debate was a true draw. Both candidates came across with both a major strength and deficiency. For the president, that strength was his sense of resolve and leadership. President Bush, while unable to word things as eloquently as his opponent, emanated a sense of seriousness regarding his presidency and his charge to win the war on terror. The president seemed likeable, personable, and like someone that regular Americans could emphasize with.

Sen. Kerry, on the other hand, spoke against the backdrop of an 8 month campaign that has defined him as a flip-flopper and an indecisive DC insider. Even his attempt to "clarify" his position on Iraq seemed like a clever exercise of nuance --- and one that probably changed few minds. His ability to articulate his points was often cancelled out by the sheer boredom felt by the room when Kerry's responses went into their second 30 seconds. As much as you wanted to, you just couldn't like the Senator from Massachusetts.

So you can imagine my surprise when both of my Democratic friends, after witnessing the debate, quite honestly admitted the very finding of the "Hardball" focus group tonight --- almost no minds were probably changed by this debate. On one side, we had Sen. Kerry: articulate but boring, well-spoken but insincere. On the other, President Bush: resolved but often unable to get his point across. The result: this debate changed nothing. President Bush will remain ahead in the race by 6 to 8 percentage points as October begins.

As Bill Maher remarked the other night on cable news, presidential debates are often like boxing. In boxing, you can't win the title by just doing better than the champ. You have to knock him out. In this debate, Sen. Kerry failed to KO the president. He's got two rounds left.

Tony Soprano: Bush Voter

2004-09-29T20:27:00.000-05:00

As readers of this and other political blogs well know, the litany of polls released over the past few days show that President Bush is currently leading Sen. Kerry by 6 to 8 percentage points nationally. And, as would be expected, the polling average over the last week or so from the individual states shows a comparable result, with Bush generally doing 6, 8, or even 10 points better in most states than he finished in 2000. One would expect then that any state that Al Gore was able to win by double-digits can be easily set aside as a solid Kerry state. Based on the polling of the last couple of weeks, this rule appears to be true with two exceptions: Maryland and New Jersey.

These two states, easily won by Al Gore in 2000, are not showing the high single-digit Kerry leads that should be expected based on Bush's national lead. Instead, it appears that both are --- get ready --- showing statistical ties between the two candidates. That's right, liberal, Democratic Maryland and New Jersey, states that haven't elected a conservative Republican statewide since the 1980s, appear primed to cast their electoral votes for the president in November.

To be sure, I am not basing this observation on a single poll. In both states, multiple recent polls have shown this shocking result. In MD, the last two polls show a scant Kerry lead of between one and two percentage points. As for the Garden State, an average of all September polling gives Kerry a statistically insignificant lead of, you guessed it, between one and two points! What is going on in these traditionally Democratic states to cause an electoral sea change towards a culturally conservative Republican president from Texas?

The short answer is probably 9/11. Maryland and New Jersey are two of the states that lost a number of citizens due to the attacks of 9/11 over three years ago. North Jersey, as East Coast residents well know, is basically comprised of New York residents who choose not to live in the city, including the families and loved ones of many of the victims of the World Trade Center tragedy. And much of Maryland, as we Beltway types are aware, is primarily a suburb of DC, meaning that a good number of DC workers reside across the Potomac in the state just north of Washington. The aggregate psychological impact of 9/11 on the residents of these states may be of a greater magnitude than that felt by folks in many areas of the country that seem far more insulated from the terror that could befall our nation. The good people of New Jersey and Maryland have an emotional connection with 9/11 --- and, by extrapolation, with President Bush.

And so the usually highly Democratic voters of New Jersey and Maryland may just go out this November and pull the lever for the president. Will this change in attitude affect races down the line in these two states? Probably not. There is little evidence that the increase in support for Bush in these states is representative of an overall ideological change in the region. Rather, the good Democrats of the mid-Atlantic region appear to be prepared to overlook their many disagreements with the Administration this year and support the man they know takes the war on terror most seriously.

Teresa Heinz: Double-Agent

2004-09-28T20:11:00.000-05:00

Allow me to preface this post by assuring my readers that my tongue is firmly in cheek while writing, lest I receive a bevy of tinfoil hats through the mail. As my longtime readers know, I've taken a special interest in that fiery would-be-First-Lady: Ketchup Queen, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Throughout this campaign, Ms. Heinz has acted as a modern incarnation of Marie Antoniette, with a haughty demeanor and plethora of verbal gaffes that even include an equivalent of the infamous, "Let them eat cake!" line that all students of popular history know so well. Her aristocratic upbringing, apparent sense of entitlement, and "o-PIN-yuh-nay-ted" nature are only serving to crush the imploding Kerry campaign more each week. And the worst part is, as political observers as diverse as Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Wolf pointed out this week, Kerry seems completely subdued and unable to do a darn thing about the breadwinner in the Kerry family.

Problems with Teresa began shortly before the Democratic convention, when she shouted down a reporter on camera (the now-famous "Shove it!" line) and instructed her faithful serfs to refer to her as "Mama T," a title as foolish as it is demeaning. Then came her wonderful speech at the convention itself, where she addressed the audience with the words, "I love you too," apparently assuming that everyone MUST love her, and proceeded to talk not about her husband, or her Party, but herself for the next 15-20 minutes. Yes, Mama T cleverly relayed to us stories we could all relate to about growing up as a member of the ruling class of an African dictatorship and impressed us all with her generous philanthropy that's all made possible by the pocketbook of her late husband and his wonderful ketchup. Apparently, someone had forgotten to brief Ms. Heinz that she wasn't the one that would be on the ballot this fall.

But that's not all. Since, the advent of the fall campaign, Teresa has been humorously popping up here and there to throw yet another monkey wrench or two into an already struggling campaign. In the past few weeks she has referred to opponents of her husband's policies as "idiots." She has proclaimed that on her husband's first day in office, everyone will have health care (we can only assume she means socialization of health care via Executive Order?). In true Antoinette form, she responded to the plight of the Florida hurricane victims by saying, and I'm not making this up, "Let them go naked..." And finally, to put the icing, er, ketchup on the cake, there was this recent zinger directed at a heckler: "If you want to say (Kerry) flip-flopped, just say so..."

Folks, the GOP couldn't have gotten a better deal out of Teresa Heinz if she were a Republican plant --- which is the very fact that makes me wonder...what if she is?

Unbeknownst to most Americans is the political background of Teresa Heinz. As most political junkies are aware, Teresa's first marriage was to John Heinz, the Republican Senator from the state of Pennsylvania. At that time, she admitted that she didn't trust Teddy Kennedy and referred to the Democratic Party as putrid. But here's the kicker: as late as 2001, Mama T considered herself a Republican and told far-right National Review columnist Kate O'Beirne, "I agree with everything you say on TV."

What?!? So why would someone with views like Teresa's want to help fill the highest echelons of the White House with such "putrid" individuals of the Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts liberal caliber? Maybe the truth is, she doesn't.

Is Teresa Heinz Kerry a Republican mole intent on bringing down her husband's presidential bid? Will the mainstream media pick up this story before it's too late? Wouldn't it be fun to taunt Democratic friends with this very rumor, just to see if a "Dump Mama T" move develops amongst the far-left nutjobs equally in need of tinfoil hats right now? Stay tuned...

New Polls Show Sustained Bush Lead

2004-09-27T20:36:00.000-05:00

Two new polls out of time-tested, credible organizations show that President Bush has seemingly settled into a comfy single-digit lead over Sen. Kerry just five weeks out from the election. Let's get right to the numbers:

Gallup

Bush: 52%
Kerry: 44%
Nader: 3%
Bush Job Approval: 54%

ABC/WaPo

Bush: 51%
Kerry: 45%
Nader: 1%
Bush Job Approval: 52%

Polling Avg

Bush: 51.5%
Kerry: 44.5%
Nader: 2%
Undecided: 2%
Bush Job Approval: 53%

What's striking about these polls is the near-identical results obtained by two completely different polling orgs amongst two separate samples. Both of these polls were released today and were presumably taken over the same period of time --- most likely the past three days --- and are indicative of two things: 1) the president has convinced a small but solid majority of Americans that he deserves reelection and 2) Kerry is stuck in the mid-40s, a level comparable to his predecessor, Michael "The Duke" Dukakis, at this point in 1988.

Interestingly, the Gallup Poll taken in late Sept./early Oct. in 1988 showed a lead of 6 pts for Bush the Elder, who, as all political junkies remember, went on to win by 8 pts a month later. It would reason, then, that the president's current 6-8 pt lead should translate into a similar margin of victory on Election Day.

What could Kerry do to turn things around? The short answer is: not much. Remember, this is not 2000, where Bush and Gore traded 5 pt leads each week leading up to the election, only to end in the Mother of all Tied Elections (well, that doesn't include 1876, but as we've already established on this blog, to today's students of politics, American political history began with FDR). Unlike races such as 2000, this is an election involving an incumbent, meaning that there is generally much less volatility and a much greater ability to predict the result. Why? Because elections involving incumbents are primarily a referendum on the incumbent and the results are largely dependant on his or her approval rating. A majority job approval almost always guarantees the reelection of an incumbent. The converse isn't always true, as voters have often been known to go with an incumbent they're ambivalent about (think Gray Davis in 2002) when they see no acceptable alternative in the race.

So Kerry's job for the next five weeks is as follows: 1) convince up to 4% of American voters who approve of Bush's job performance that they are wrong and 2) go on to convince those same approximately 4 million voters that he (Kerry) is an acceptable alternative. That's 4 million voters in 5 weeks, or several hundred thousand a day. Logistically, it just doesn't seem possible and Kerry's only real shot is to hope that he scores several home runs at the debates.

Kerry can't just "do well" at the debates if he hopes to have any chance of winning at all. If Kerry simply "holds his own," he might as well start actually showing up for his Senate work again as he'll be heading back there in January. Kerry has to win the debates. And he has to win them big. If there is not unanimity following at least two of the three debates that Kerry is the clear winner, both in style and substance, the election is over. There is no other conceivable way to move several million voters, some of whom are voting absentee right now, in so little time.

With that in mind, I am looking forward to blogging the first debate this Thursday, as well as to the imminent SNL parodies. Perhaps Jon Lovitz will play the part of Kerry, reprising his Dukakis role from 1988, and once again aptly remark, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."

Senate Prospects

2004-09-25T08:57:00.000-05:00

At least one reader has requested that I give my take on the GOP's Senate prospects this November. Of course, I had a pretty good idea of where the Senate would end up as early as this spring. But, naturally, had I given my opinion during the summer, I would have been barraged with the usual, emotional line from Democrats about how I have my head in the clouds, I'm not looking at the Blessed Polls, how "everybody knows" the Democrats are going to win this November, etc. But now, with Democratic panic setting in, what better time to drive the knife in further and speculate as to the state of the Senate, post-Nov. 2nd.

Due to the massive number of retiring incumbents, there are a good dozen Senate seats that could go either way this year. Luckily for us, most of them are currently held by Democrats. Let's go through the roster.

Vulnerable GOP Seats

IL: Once a midwestern swing state, Illinois has become the California of the heartland. This state is now bright blue --- Al Gore won it by 12 pts in 2000 and it recently dumped the GOP from power in its state house and legislature. Plus, this year's Senate contest is between Democrat Barrack Obama, a bright, articulate, post-racial law professor, and Alan Keyes, a far-right demagogue. Obama wins handily, flipping this seat.

AK: The GOP would be fine in ultra-conservative Alaska were it not for two things: 1) the appointment by fmr Sen. Murkowski of his daughter to serve out his term and 2) the nomination by Dems of fmr Gov. Tony Knowles to challenge Murkowski for the seat. I'd give a slight edge to Knowles --- he was a popular governor and nobody likes nepotism --- yet the race has been basically tied all year. Bottom line: Knowles has never won in a blowout in GOP Alaska. In every statewide race, he ekes out a victory at around 49%. Unless President Bush's massive coattails in a state he'll win by 30 pts pulls Lisa over the line, Knowles takes the seat.

CO: All the polls are showing a neck-and-neck race between professional politician Ken Salazar and beer magnate Pete Coors. The two are evenly matched for good reason. Salazar has been elected statewide, but never for an office where his positions on the issues mattered. Colorado is a center-right state and, as we found out in 2002 when they re-elected "Sen. Dullard" over a more interesting yet liberal opponent, Colorado voters will elect a can of beer over a candidate they think is too liberal. The question is: will it be a can of Coors beer? My guess is that Salazar's liberalism, Bush's coattails, and Coors' bankroll will put the millionaire over the edge. GOP hold.

OK: The GOP in this state did something very smart, nominating a candidate who hails from the Oklahoma City area --- the same region as Democrat candidate Brad Carson. GOP candidate Coburn is basically guaranteed victory as he'll tie Carson in Oklahoma City, the only area of the state that's not far-right, and crush Carson in the rest of the state, as any Republican would do. Pay no attention to the polls on this one: it's a GOP hold.

Vulnerable Democrat Seats

GA: This race was over months ago. Georgia is the epitome of the conservative, Southern state that once was Democrat but has completed its transformation into a GOP-base state. GOP pick-up.

SC: See GA. GOP pick-up.

LA: Republicans are very nervous about Louisiana due to the outcome of the last two senatorial and gubernatorial races in 2002 and 2003, respectively. In 2002, incumbent Dem. Sen. Mary Landrieu went to a runoff with the WH's handpicked challenger and won, 52%-48%. In 2003, an interesting young candidate of Indian descent, Bobby Jindal, lost by, you guessed it, the same margin to an old, stuffy, conservative Democrat for governor. Yet this is a state that consistently votes for GOP presidential candidates by wide margins. What gives? I would argue that these two races do not show a Democratic trend, but two individual races with conditions that made it easier for the Dems to win. Landrieu was an incumbent, and it's always harder to take down an incumbent than to win an open seat. The fact that she only held on by 4 pts is a tribute to the conservative leaning of the state. As for Jindal, let's face it, this was the state of David Duke. It's disgusting, but we'll probably have to wait another generation before a guy with a name like Jindal can win down there. Anyway, the point is, this year's GOP Senate candidate, David Vitter, is well-liked, well-respected, and is pushing the magic 50% in most polls while two Democrats are fighting to get to 25%. GOP pickup.

NC: Another conservative state that Dems pretend is in play, they point to Bowles' perpetual 10-pt lead over GOP nominee Burr as evidence that they are going to hold the seat. A number of things are working against them. 1) Bowles never seems to get above 45% in these polls. That's the same percentage of the vote he received in 2002, when voters decided he was too liberal and broke for Liddy Dole at the last minute. 2) This particular Senate seat changes party hands every time it's up for election. 3) The latest poll shows Burr within 3 pts of Bowles. GOP pickup.

FL: Dem candidate Castor is a Janet Reno clone and is in real trouble if the GOP gets their act together. After a very divisive primary, WH candidate Mel Martinez, a Cuban-American, won the nod. The conventional wisdom is that a lot of new Cuban voters in Miami will boost Martinez by a couple of pts and give him victory. The polls show Castor with a slight lead, and I fear that Martinez may experience a Jindal problem in Northern Florida, which is very rural and Southern in culture. But we'll see. I think the GOP will pull it out.

SD: In possibly my favorite Senate race this year, Sen. Min. Leader Tom Daschle is about to be taken down by fmr. Rep. John Thune. Daschle was basically destroyed politically when he became the symbol of the liberal DC establishment, bent on thwarting President Bush's plans. Calling SD conservative would be a massive understatement, and Daschle's running under 50%, which is horrible for an incumbent. Thune has won statewide and has a reputation for being a nice guy. Plus, SD now has an entire Washington congressional delegation --- two Senators and one Congresswoman --- made up of Democrats. They'll want to go ahead and change that this fall. Thune wins.

Sleeper Races

WA: In a state that President Bush only lost by 6 pts, Sen. Patty Murray may be in the fight of her life against George "Giant Killer" Nethercutt, the man who took down a sitting Speaker of the House exactly 10 yrs ago. Murray has a number of problems, including making a very weird statement that tried to find some moral equivalency btwn us and bin Laden. In any other state, she'd be finished. But Seattle may keep her afloat. Nethercutt is awfully conservative, but constantly underestimated.

CA: If the Arnold juggernaut creates a massive GOP sweep statewide in Cali, Boxer could fall. Cali voters like Arnold's reforms and are none too happy with the Dem establishment and may just send some of them packing. The problem is that the dysfunctional Cali GOP has nominated an arch-conservative who will scare half of the Left Coast with his views on social issues and bascially make Boxer's reelection a near-guarantee.

WI: In what I think may be this year's sleeper, Sen. Russ Feingold is losing ground to his unknown GOP challenger. Feingold is another candidate who never wins huge victories and often barely makes it over the finish line. And with the changing culture of the northern midwest --- with the good-government states of MN, IA, and WI moving into a post-New Deal era due to generational and demographic shifts --- Feingold may be the victim of circumstance as the GOP takes Wisconsin big this year.

So, to sum up, I see the GOP losing IL and AK while holding onto CO and OK and taking all 5 Southern seats (GA, SC, NC, FL, LA) as well as SD. For those of you who can do basic math, that would be a 55-45 GOP Senate, similar to the Senate of the late 1990s. Further, I think it is likely that the GOP will take one seat out of the three possible sleepers, most likely WA or WI.

Final prediction: 56 GOP, 43 Dem, 1 Ind

40 Days to Victory

2004-09-22T21:12:00.000-05:00

“If you win Tampa (Bay), you win Florida..." --- Veteran Democratic pollster David Beattie, quoted in the St. Petersburg Times, Sept. 19th.

Today’s polling results from Tampa:

Bush: 49%
Kerry: 39%

It's over.

Bush Campaign Takes My Advice...Sort of

2004-09-22T20:50:00.000-05:00

Just a few weeks ago, I opined on this blog that the Bush campaign would be wasting a golden opportunity if it failed to remake this ad from 1972 that was run by the group, "Democrats for Nixon." I encourage everyone to take a look at it using the link I provided, as it is brilliant as it is simple. Or, if you can't view the ad itself, check out my original description of the ad from a post back in July here.

So you can imagine my surprise today upon discovering that someone from the Bush campaign had actually taken my advice! Well, either that or the ancient maxim about "great minds" is once again proven correct, as maxims often are. This year's incarnation of the "McGovern Turnaround" is appropriately dubbed, "Windsurfing." Like its predecessor, the ad uses images of John Kerry flipping and flopping --- or in this case, blowing in the wind ---- back and forth in order to illustrate his constantly-changing positions on the issues. And while this ad replaces the ominous tone of the original with a more lighthearted feel, it is equally effective at making its point: John Kerry, whichever way the wind blows.

Or is it George W. McKinley?

2004-09-21T21:23:00.000-05:00

During the 2000 campaign, Karl Rove was constantly heard on cable news shows analogizing his candidate, George W. Bush, to former president William McKinley. Of course, such a comparison meant little to the MTV generation, to whom American political history began with FDR. What most political observers fail to realize is that American politics is cyclical, that it runs in alignments, re-alignments, and de-alignments, and that we are currently at the apex of the present alignment that began with Ronald Reagan's positioning of the Republican Party in a manner that created a majority coalition of Western libertarians, Southern evangelicals, Eastern establishmentarians, and Midwestern Catholics. But that's a topic for another time. Just accept my premise for a moment and consider the Bush/McKinley comparison.

The parallels are astounding. Before ascending to the White House, William McKinley was the governor of a large Republican state, the state of Ohio. He ran for president in 1896 against a non-incumbent, man-of-the-people, William Jennings Bryan. WJB ran a populist campaign, emphasizing, in so many words, a people-versus-the-powerful theme. McKinley, on the other hand, ran an establishment campaign. The result: McKinley won in a fairly close election. Not as close as 2000, mind you, but close enough to create an electoral map that was a virtual mirror image of 2000; only here, the "red" states are in the North and East and the "blue" states are in the West and South! You can see an image of the map here.

In 1900, after four years of a recovering economy and war with Spain, the Democrats again nominated Bryan to go after McKinley. This would be the equivalent of a Gore nomination in 2004, which almost certainly would have happened had Gore run. Still, Kerry is clearly playing the Bryan role this year. The Democrats attacked McKinley for his “imperialistic” wars and his refusal to pull out of the territories conquered from Spain. McKinley insisted that we must continue to occupy the territories and “civilize” them before we left. In the end, it was the economic recovery of the time that made the difference. A look at the electoral map of 1900 shows that the Red States of the time went to McKinley again and most of the Blue States again went Bryan. However, about 6 Blue States, the swing states of the time, left Bryan and went to McKinley. The popular vote result: a 51%-46% McKinley victory. You can see those results here.

I believe that like McKinley, Bush will be reelected by about 5-6 pts and win all of the red states plus the purple states from last time: OR, NM, WI, IA, MN, PA, and MI. This would give Bush 37 states and 355 EVs. Oddly, this would be a win of 65% of the electoral college: the same percentage of the electoral college that McKinley won when he added six purple states to his total in 1900. Unfortunately, you'll be unlikely to hear any such validation of my theory from cable news commentators on election night, who will probably continue to make Bush/Truman comparisons ad nauseum. But, hey, we can't hold our journalists to an unreasonable standard, now can we?

Lyndon Baines Bush?

2004-09-20T20:32:00.000-05:00

Depending on which day you ask me, I am tempted to revise upward my prediction that President Bush will garner 37 states and 355 electoral votes on Nov. 2nd, winning the popular vote by about 6 pts. Well, based on some afternoon state polls, today is one of those days.

It has long been my theory that President Bush is the modern day incarnation of William McKinley, a president who governed about a century ago and who won his first election in 1896 against the Al Gore of the era, William Jennings Bryan. Due to the lack of a sense of political history amongst today's students of politics, I've yet to hear one talking head evoke this analogy other than Karl Rove himself (Karl, I'm sending my resume' over).

In any event, a plethora of polls today is tempting me to modify my prediction to encompass a 1964-style landslide that would be reminiscent of the victory of fellow Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson over GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater. In that election, Johnson won 44 states and eviscerated Goldwater in both the electoral college and the national vote. After plugging today's polls into an electoral vote calculator and making some logical assumptions based on their findings, it appears that President Bush could be headed for, you guessed it, a 44-state victory.

So what do these state polls show? First, the red states. With the possible exception of New Hampshire, every single red state is now solidly behind Bush based on polls released over the last week or so. If you average the two most recent NH polls, you get a substantial Bush win there too. So that's 278 electoral votes and 30 states under the president's belt.

Now, the blue states. First came a bevy of polls from the highly accurate Mason-Dixon polling firm, which show President Bush taking the lead in Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Oregon. That's 4 more states and 29 more EVs, or 34 states and 307 EVs. Additionally, Mason-Dixon also showed today that Bush is only a single point behind in Pennsylvania, two pts behind in Minnesota, and 6 pts down in Michigan.

But there's more. The heavily Democratic states in the mid-Atlantic region are showing a double-digit swing toward Bush from their margins in 2000. These are states that Al Gore won by 15-25 pts four years ago, and now Maine, Maryland and New Jersey (if you avg the last two polls) are exactly tied in the presidential race. Moreover, the Empire State itself is showing a 4 pt race, with Bush within grasp of the state's mountain of electoral votes. Finally, the most recent poll out of Illinois, a state that Al Gore won by 12 pts, shows a 4 pt Bush deficit as well.

All of this indicates that the most recent Gallup Poll, showing Bush with a national lead of 14 pts, may well be accurate. How else could one explain double-digit gains in so many states for the president? And if Bush really does win by double-digits, it is highly likely that New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, and even New York will respond to the national juggernaut and fall into the president's column. And if these states fall, ending the race by 9 pm EST, does anyone doubt that California, which Al Gore also won by a dozen pts, and Washington, which went for Gore by half a dozen pts, will fall victim to Democratic apathy, a la 1980, as millions of Democrats getting off of work at 6 pm on the West Coast will see no need to go out and vote for a race that has already ended?

The result: Bush would take the aforementioned 34 states currently showing a Bush lead for 307 electoral votes; he would take the states that he is statistically tied in (NY, NJ, MD, MI, PA, MN, ME), giving him 41 states and 415 electoral votes; finally, the early end to the race would create a domino effect as things moved westward, giving Bush three more states (IL, CA, WA) for a grand total of 44 states and 502 electoral votes. Sen. Kerry would win only the New England states of MA, RI, CT, DE, VT, and the state of HI for a total of 6 states and 36 electoral votes.

Could Bush repeat LBJ's 44-state victory from 1964? It's certainly possible. Am I ready to change my original prediction? Not without seeing more extensive polling out of the big blue states from 2000. But whatever the case, it's getting harder and harder to imagine a Kerry victory in November.

Six Weeks Left

2004-09-19T20:59:00.000-05:00

With a mere six weeks and two days until a third of the country goes into depression over the election results, things are looking better and better for President Bush and the national GOP. For the first time since 1980, the dynamics of a presidential race involving an incumbent has shifted 180 degrees since Labor Day. And for the first time since 1948, that shift has benefited the incumbent president. The significance of this cannot be downplayed. Most presidential incumbents running for reelection are involved in boring races that are won or lost within the first few months of the year. Everybody knew Clinton was going to beat Dole, Reagan would trounce Mondale, and Ike, LBJ, and Nixon would steamroll over their respective opponents for reelection. Conversely, the presence of Ross Perot was the only factor keeping George H.W. Bush's loss from being a foregone conclusion by spring of 1992 and Ford was viewed as a goner by summer of 1976. It's not often that an incumbent president runs neck-and-neck all year with his challenger, but when he does, things tend to break one way or the other very late in the race. And once things do break, you have your winner.

In 1980, President Carter and Ronald Reagan ran within 5 pts or so of each other for most of the year, often times trading the lead. Reagan got a huge bump out of his convention, but it soon faded and the race was back to a tie. Then, after the first debate in late September, Gallup showed voters breaking for Reagan. Reagan continued to increase his lead and ended up beating Carter by 10 pts and winning a majority of the vote in a multi-candidate race.

In 1948, it was Harry Truman who broke out with a lead in late October, after the few polling organizations of the time had closed up shop, assuming Dewey was going to win. Dewey had maintained a single-digit lead over the incumbent all year, one that evaporated in the final weeks of the race, giving Truman the victory.

What do these races have in common? Like the current race, both 1980 and 1948 featured a close race involving an incumbent. Neither the incumbent nor the challenger was able to maintain a consistent double-digit lead in either race, meaning that voters hadn't truly made up their minds on who to vote for until later in the game.

Like these races, 2004 was a year that saw President Bush and Sen. Kerry consistently within a few points of one another in most major polls since early spring. Both candidates seemed stuck in the mid-40s and, up until late-August, neither had been able to close the deal with a majority of Americans. But since the GOP convention, it cannot be denied that not only has the president taken the lead, he now has majority support amongst the American people, virtually guaranteeing his reelection based on electoral precedent.

It's difficult to say just exactly by how much the president is ahead in the national vote. The latest Zogby Poll released today shows Bush leading Kerry by 3 pts. This week's Gallup Poll, however, showed Bush 14 pts ahead! In 2000, the final election result was basically the average of these two polls, meaning that, as the New York Times found earlier this week, the president is probably actually leading Kerry in the high single-digits. Moreover, the president's all-important Gallup approval rating remains at 52%. No incumbent president has ever been defeated with a majority Gallup approval rating at this point in their election year.

As far as the states go, the tables have once again turned as the "red states," those won by Bush in 2000, are now solidly behind the president, while the "blue states," those that went for Gore in 2000, are the new swing states. This is exactly the opposite of the state of the race for most of the spring and summer, when 6 or 7 red states were the swing states and all of the blue states were solidly behind Kerry. Mason Dixon released a bevy of polls yesterday showing that all of the formerly endangered red states, including Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Arizona, and Nevada, are now backing Bush. Moreover, the last Florida poll showed a 5 pt lead for Bush in the state. Just by winning all of these states plus the solid Bush states from 2000, the president garners more than enough electoral votes to retain the presidency. Throw in the blue states that the president is leading in based on the most recent state poll (Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Mexico) as well as those blue states too close to call (Minnesota, Oregon, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey) and you have a virtual blowout in the works.

In short, in order to win this election, John Kerry would have to swing the national vote by anywhere from 5 to 10 pts while winning back the half dozen or so blue states that are now showing Bush leads AND winning at least one or two red states that Bush now comfortably leads in. And if the last few weeks have shown anything, Kerry is not up to the task.

The initial Democratic response to the changed dynamics of the race --- to bring Bush down with a myriad of scandals --- has backfired. The Kitty Kelley book was a flop, with charges so outlandish that the American people dismissed them within moments. The national guard story has been transformed into a story about CBS and liberal biases in the media, and has possibly discredited any attempt in the next few weeks at using scandal against Bush by morphing all such stories into a mixed-up mish-mash of efforts by the liberal establishment to bring down the president. In fact, CBS and Dan Rather may have inadvertently taken all personal attacks on Bush off the table for this election by planting the seeds of doubt in the public's collective mind about any future "smoking guns" that may surface regarding Bush's past.

In order for Kerry to win, he needs to change the minds of a few million Americans in the next 6 weeks. And the only avenue he now has to reach so many people in so little time are the coming presidential debates. In other words, Kerry must "win" the debates in a landslide if he hopes to win the race by a hair. It's that simple. There's no other way the candidate can convince enough voters from enough states to change their minds and their votes in less than 50 days.

Can he do it? Probably not. It would be a tall order for Bill Clinton, let alone a stiff aristocrat like Kerry. To his credit, Kerry has dumped the old Dukakis/Gore crew and brought Clinton's people back from the political batcave to run the final days of the race. Drudge was reporting today that Kerry would spend the rest of the race focusing on a single issue: Iraq. This is probably Kerry's best bet, and is demonstrative of the political savviness of the Clinton types. To attack Bush on any other issue would be a fool's errand. Bush has managed to pass landmark legislation in fiscal and domestic areas, the results of which won't be clear for several years. Any speculation on the effects of No Child Left Behind, the tax cut, or the Medicare bill, is just that: speculation. And the war on terror remains Bush's strongest suit. Iraq, then, becomes the only Achilles Heel the president has left. Memories about WMD intelligence and postwar mishaps still haunt the psyche of the American voter, and while they generally trust Bush on the issue, many are still left with a bad taste in their mouths. Kerry's problem, of course, is that he's taken about 50 positions on Iraq since the original Gulf War in 1991, all of them inconsistent and most of them fairly stupid given the context. I mean, come on, the man voted against the war to liberate Kuwait but for the war to find the elusive WMDs? For the war but against the funding? There was no philosophy to these positions, only political calculus that went bad each time. Unless John Kerry can somehow convince voters otherwise, he will be doomed in November. And he most likely is.

Weekly Polling Update

2004-09-12T22:44:00.000-05:00

Ten days after the Republican convention, President Bush still maintains a lead over Sen. Kerry in every national poll. Here's the rundown:

Rasmussen: Bush +3
Time: Bush + 11
Newsweek: Bush + 6
AP: Bush + 5
Washington Post: Bush +9
CBS: Bush +7
Zogby: Bush +4
Democracy Corps: Bush +3

If you do a quick polling average, you find that Bush leads Kerry by roughly six points in a multi-candidate race. That's probably where the race really stands and it wouldn't surprise me if the final tally on Nov. 2nd looks something like this:

Bush: 52%
Kerry: 46%
Nader, etc: 2%

Such a margin would confirm my yearlong theory that we're watching a rerun of the election of 1900, where William McKinley won his second election against a liberal Democratic candidate in the midst of an economic recovery and an "imperialistic" war.

No state-by-state update today as I detailed the state of the states in a recent post. Besides, there are so many states that haven't been polled since prior to the GOP convention that any electoral tally wouldn't reflect reality (e.g., WV would be in the Kerry column, etc.). Still, if you won't be able to sleep tonight without the current electoral college tally, take heart that Dave Wissing of the Hedgehog Report has Bush up over Kerry, 284 to 254 EVs.

My 9/11 Memory

2004-09-11T19:57:00.000-05:00

Each generation experiences an event of such magnitude that it makes a distinct impression on its collective psyche. For the WWII generation, that event was Pearl Harbor. For the boomers, it was the assassination of JFK. For Gen Xers like myself, that event was 9/11. Like those past, no one in my generation will ever forget where we were on the day that thousands of people were murdered simply trying to provide for themselves and their families by a new brand of fascists bent on destroying Western civilization.

I remember that day well, as it was the day that I was in the process of relocating from the heart of the midwest to our nation's capital. I was about to start my first job out of college, a position located in Washington, DC. I drove off from a sleepy town in Middle America on what was a beautiful Tuesday morning to begin the long commute. I was on the road for less than an hour when I flipped on the radio to hear the terror that had come upon our great cities. The feeling was both surreal and unimaginable. At first, I didn't believe it. I was of the impression that a modern-day Orson Wells was playing a prank on his radio listeners. I flipped to another station. And another. And another. To my shock, I realized it was all very real.

And so there I was, on my way to live and work in a city that had been hit by, as President Bush would soon call them, faceless cowards. At the time, rumors were flying about on the air that the Capitol had been hit and that the White House may be under attack. I considered turning around. I almost did. But I pressed on. I continued driving east, toward my ultimate destination. Why? Because I'm an American. And this is America. And in America, terror shall not reign and freedom shall not take second place to fear wielded by fanatical theocrats whose motivation is hate and whose goal is destruction. Tyranny shall not stand, freedom shall not bend her knee, and like every other patriot, I had to press on. There was no alternative.

As I drove, I continued to listen to our public officials as they commented and speculated on the horror befalling our nation. I was touched to hear of the bravery of the New York City firefighters and of the leadership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a true American hero. Terrorism experts quickly came to a consensus that the most likely sources of the attacks were either Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network of Islamic terrorists, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, or both.

And then President Bush spoke. Like Rudy Giuliani, I too was thankful that Bush was president. After hearing his concise and to-the-point response, I knew our nation was in good hands. I knew that this was a man who would stand up to those who attacked our nation, who would hunt them down, and who would bring justice upon them. Moreover, I knew that the president would stop at nothing to make sure America was secure so that repeat attacks would not follow. This president was a grown-up. And he was acting like one.

Three years later, there have been no further attacks on the American mainland. On this anniversary of 9/11, of that horrible day, Americans everywhere went out shopping, dining, and gathered to watch the afternoon football game. There has been no follow-up attack on the American mainland by al Qaeda or any other terrorist group. Instead, the terrorists are on the run all over the Middle East as the groundwork is being laid in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, for the end of their destructive ideology. For this, we have many folks to thank: the first-responders who help guard us at home, our brave men and women overseas who give everything so that we don't have to, and our president, George W. Bush, who has assembled a brilliant, competent, serious team capable of leading America in the post 9/11 world. And that is why I am not ashamed to call George Bush my president.

State of the Blue States

2004-09-08T19:50:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece entitled, "State of the Red States," detailing which of the states from the last election that voted for President Bush were in danger of flipping and why. As I had anticipated, the culmination of the GOP convention has changed the dynamics of this race and turned the state of the states on its head. With brand new polls from the Gallup organization as well as others showing the president leading outside the margin of error in Missouri, Ohio, and Arizona and no worse than tied in Florida, the question now becomes, which of the "Blue States," the states that voted for Gore in 2000, are most likely to flip?

There are a total of 9 blue states that could end up in the president's column this election. 7 of these states came within 5 pts or less of voting for the president in 2000 and the remaining 2 were not far off. Should Mr. Bush win all of the red states as well as these 9 blue states, he will garner 39 states and 370 EVs. My prediction: the president will win 7 of these states and finish the race with 37 states and 355 EVs. This is consistent with the long-term election prediction of numbers wizard Scott Elliott (ElectionProjection.com), whose projection I did not steal, but let's just say that great minds think alike. In any event, here is the current state of the blue states.

New Mexico: Bush lost this state by a handful of votes in 2000. The Western culture of this state, combined with the president's outreach to Hispanics, should snag him the state this time. Latest poll: Bush leads by 3.

Oregon: Another state Bush just barely lost last time, Oregon is probably the least "left" of the "Left Coast" states due to the lack of a major urban area like Seattle or LA. Once again, the western culture of the state doesn't take kindly to New England Aristocrats. Likely Bush pickup. Latest poll: Bush leads by 1.

Wisconsin: This state is a member of the Midwestern Triumverate of populist "good government" states that haven't voted for a GOP presidential candidate in ages but appear to be trending Republican. Along with Minnesota and Iowa, Wisconsin teetered on the electoral edge in 2000, but VP Gore managed to eke out a victory. And if a moderate, incumbent veep from the heartland couldn't beat Bush by more than a couple points, what are the chances of John Forbes Kerry? This state will go Bush. Latest poll: Bush leads by 2.

Michigan: Ah, my home state of Michigan. Possibly the most independent state in the country, Michaganders like to vote for the "best man for the job." Despite inside-the-beltway belief, Michigan is far from a Democratic state and voted for Reagan and Bush heavily in the '80s, as well as a very conservative governor three times in the '90s. Result: a very close election in this state, but Bush will take it. Latest poll: Bush leads by 1.

Pennsylvania: Analysis is similar to Michigan. Folks who know its politics say the state is trending Republican, and it reelected a culturally conservative GOP senator easily in 2000. The result will be similar to that of MI. Latest poll: Bush leads by 1.

Iowa: See Wisconsin. Latest poll: Bush tied with Kerry.

Minnesota: While this state will probably go kicking and screaming into the GOP column, the election of a conservative GOP governor in 2002 as well as the defeat of fmr VP Mondale by GOP Sen. Coleman bodes well for Bush. The fact that he only lost the state by 3 pts in 2000 is enough to make me think it will tip over the edge this time. Latest poll: Bush tied with Kerry.

Washington: While Bush only lost this state by 6 pts in 2000, the first post-convention poll out of the state shows Kerry with a huge lead. Seattle will probably be too strong even for a 5-7 pt national victory for the president. Kerry will carry the state. Latest poll: Kerry ahead by 8.

Maine: Scott Elliott understands this state better than I, which assigns electoral votes based on who wins each congressional district instead of the whole state. Scott has consistently predicted that Bush will take 1 EV from Maine with Kerry taking the rest. Whatever the case, I expect Kerry's New England roots to take most or all of Maine. Latest poll: Kerry ahead by 5.

Welcome New Readers!

2004-09-07T21:45:00.000-05:00

Today, my blog recorded over 250 visits! That's 4-5 times the normal amount and it means that a couple of hundred new visitors have stumbled upon my Political Prognostications. I am honored that you have taken the time out of your day to read my posts and I encourage you to come back daily to peruse my latest thoughts. Come on! Everybody's doing it. Jump on the bandwagon! Succumb to peer pressure! :) And email any comments or questions to metroguy78@yahoo.com --- I will begin publishing reader responses if I get enough of them.

The Democratic Response? Panic!

2004-09-06T20:52:00.000-05:00

No polling update this week due to the dearth of state polls to gauge the state of the electoral college. But over the weekend, a few national polls have come out showing the effect of the RNC on the national popular vote. Three time-tested polls --- from Time, Newsweek, and Gallup --- show President Bush garnering 52% of the vote in both a two-man and multi-candidate race. In addition, the president's job approval is at 52% in two of these polls and even higher in the third. The conclusion: the RNC has bumped the president over the 50% mark and given him majority support.

This is extremely important. As I discussed in previous posts, the Bush campaign's strategy has been to run this race like 1988: sit back while the Dems empty their arsenal in the first seven months of the year and then start carpetbombing them. The first Gallup Poll in September of 1988 gave VP Bush an 8 pt lead over Dukakis. He ended up winning by that very margin two months later. Provided Rove continues to follow the Atwater strategy, President Bush should finish by at least 7 pts two months from now.

Naturally, this has a lot of Democrats very disturbed. So what's the solution on the part of the Dems? A bold new agenda? New ideas from John Kerry? Nope. Instead, Democrats appear prepared to use the only weapon they have left: tabloid scandal-mongering. That's right, the Kerry campaign and other assorted lefties are apparently going to spend the next two months trying to convince some of that 52% not to support the president because he's just a bad guy.

We began hearing the prelude to this after the RNC was finished last week. First, Kerry got up at midnight to give a ridiculous response to the president's well-prepared and articulate address. Then, former Dukakis campaign head Susan Estrich, usually a smiling and well-paid Fox News contributor, seethed as she angrily called for a campaign based on Bush's past addiction to alcohol. The centerpiece of this campaign: that you can't trust a former alcoholic with his hand on the nuclear button. Such a classless and crude attack would virtually guarantee a 1972-style blowout for Bush should it be put into action. The Kerry folks may want to buy Susan a ticket to someplace warm for the next couple months.

Today, however, the smear campaign became reality as tabloid-style author Kitty Kelley is set to release her new book on the Bush family in mere days. This book makes outrageous claims about the president's past drug use, sex in the Bush clan, and, of course, the ever-present notion that the Bushes are out to conquer the Middle East in the name of Christendom. Or Israel. Or oil. Or something.

The really remarkable part of all of this is that all over the web, liberals and Democrats appear to be embracing this strategy with an eerie eagerness. At one of the most popular liberal blogs, dailykos.com, libs are jumping for joy at the Estrich/Kelley strategy. They shouldn't be.

If Democrats go down this road, they will be ignoring one of the lessons of the Clinton years: the American people will no longer punish a candidate over sex, drugs, or rock 'n roll. Instead, they will punish those who try and exploit the issue. The last time such a move worked in national politics was during Gary Hart's presidential bid in the 1980s. When conservatives tried to replicate the Hart torpedo in 1992 against Bill Clinton, they lost. When they made "outrage" over Clinton's myriad of "mini-me" scandals the issue in 1996, the GOP lost again. And, of course, who can forget 1998, when impeaching the president over "something to do with sex" became the centerpiece of the Republican campaign? No, we couldn't just sit back and watch Clinton implode over the issue, we just HAD to promise to impeach him. That went over real well with the American people, who gave us the number of votes that we deserved that year.

And for those that think this is more of a Clinton phenomenon than anything, just look at what happened when Democrats tried to use the same strategy against Arnold in the Cali recall in 2003. That's right, California voters came to him in droves at the last minute, right when those charges were put forth.

Don't get me wrong: negative politics has always and will always have some value. Just look at the Swiftees' influence on the Kerry campaign. But the last decade has shown that the American people have drawn a line in the sands of politics and will punish anyone who dares to cross it by getting too "personal" with personal attacks. It's hard to say just where this line is, but it does seem to encompass personal behavior, especially that which has taken place long ago, that has little relevance to the job performance of the public official. So while folks may agree that it was morally wrong for Clinton or Arnold to womanize or for Clinton or Bush to abuse substances in the past, Americans are quite capable of distinguishing "young and stupid" behavior from adult behavior and have always been able to forgive.

So a message to Democrats: please, please, please make every unsubstianted rumor about the president's past the centerpiece of your campaign for the rest of the election season. You may just give the GOP our 60-seat Senate after all.