With the polls tantalizingly close, only an idiot would try to predict who will emerge victorious in November’s presidential election, especially since the Republicans won’t put on their pro-Bush propaganda fest in New York until the end of the month. So here’s my prediction: John Kerry is going to win.
That’s not just wishful thinking. The meta-narrative of this election has shifted in Kerry’s favor, and the polling is starting to reflect that fact. The election is now Kerry’s to lose–which doesn’t mean he won’t, but it does mean Bush needs to find a way to reverse the storyline. That’s unlikely: The two issues which define the battle–the economy and Iraq–highlight that Bush’s prospects are increasingly (and deservedly) grim.
Let’s go to the hard numbers. It’s true that the national polls remain close. Kerry’s ahead in most, by a five- to seven-point margin (though he does trail slightly in a couple others). And Bush may well even things back up overall after his speech at the Republican convention.
The election, however, is not one national vote, but 50 winner-take-all state votes. Here the news is better. In the Northwest, which seemed like an absolute tossup a month ago, Kerry is showing new strength. He now holds a seven-point edge in Washington State, according to the most recent poll, and is winning in Oregon, where Kerry drew a crowd of 45,000 in Portland last week (that’s not a typo: 45,000!). Even better, Kerry leads in Florida, Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, and West Virginia, all Bush states in 2000. If Kerry takes either Florida or Ohio, it’s almost certainly early retirement to the country club bar for the Bush plutocracy. Even North Carolina, John Edwards’ home state, is in play right now. That means Bush has to divert time and money to shore up his red-state base, while Kerry has breathing space to go on the offense.
In the battleground states, Bush has serious trouble on the issues. Pollsters Stan and Anna Greenberg issued their battleground poll on August 16, which showed that Kerry “maintains double-digit leads on a range of issues from healthcare to retirement to creating jobs and Bush has been unable to improve his ratings on either the economy or Iraq.” In these states, Kerry leads Bush by five points, 51 to 46, or by three points if Nader is factored in.
That may not sound like much, but the real eye-opener is that voters in swing states are in a sharp anti-incumbent mood–55 percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction, only 37 percent say things are heading the right way. And 53 percent say they want a different direction than the one charted by Bush, only 43 percent like where he is taking the country. This is a key dynamic: Kerry gets 84 percent of wrong-track voters, according to a separate poll by John Zogby, while Bush gets 86 percent of right-track voters.
In other words, American voters may be disengaged and slow on the uptake, but they are not nearly as stupid as the Mayberry Machiavellis of the White House political operation think they are. Stagecraft and doublespeak will only get you so far. This month’s wretched job report–32,000 jobs created instead of the expected 200,000–and Iraq, which continues to slide, apparently inexorably, from intractable headache to outright catastrophe, means that the headlines are likely to continue to expose the hollowness of Bush’s upbeat rhetoric. Plus, a Congressional Budget Office report issued last week, which conclusively demonstrates that Bush has significantly shifted the overall tax burden from the rich to the middle class, is high-caliber ammunition for the Dems.
The wrong-direction numbers are bad news for Bush (and, incidentally, for Democratic statewide candidates in Washington as well). But here’s the truly glorious news, as compiled by nonpartisan political analyst Charlie Cook of the National Journal: Among undecided voters, a mere 19 percent believe the country is moving in the right direction, while a whopping 74 percent feel the opposite. Just 25 percent of undecideds approve of Bush’s job performance, 68 percent disapprove. “Those are very ugly numbers for an incumbent,” Cook writes.
Indeed they are. Such voters may not yet be sure about Kerry, but they know they don’t like Bush. There aren’t many of them, but they’re the ball game. Call me an idiot if you want, but I think Kerry’s going to win.
