We’ve already seen first hand how unreliable national polls are eight months before people actually vote. Watching the Dem nomination fight, at least four different candidates held leads between May 2002 and January 2003, and none of the data ended up mattering in the end.
These polls are nevertheless interesting, not for predictive value, but to understand, albeit temporarily, the national political landscape.
Depending on which pollster you ask, the race is extremely close at this point.
* CBS News (Feb. 24-27) — Kerry 47%, Bush 46%
* Pew Research Center (Feb. 24-29) — Kerry 48%, Bush 44%
* NPR (Feb. 26-Mar. 1) — Bush 47%, Kerry 45%
* AP (Mar. 1-3) — Bush 46%, Kerry 45%
* Fox News (Marc. 3-4) — Kerry 44%, Bush 44%
So it’s either tied or one candidate has a very narrow lead. Is this good news or bad news for those of us hoping to see a new president inaugurated next January?
I’d argue this is excellent news for at least two reasons.
First, the Dems have wrapped up the nomination fight in an unusually productive way. While most cycles produce a damaged candidate, tainted by months of internecine warfare, and a badly fractured party, this year has done the opposite. As the Wall Street Journal noted last week:
It’s the biggest man-bites-dog story of the 2004 campaign: This time, the Democratic Party couldn’t have handled the selection of its presidential candidate any better.
After vanquishing John Edwards to secure his party’s nomination, John Kerry woke up Wednesday in stronger political condition at this stage of the campaign than any Democratic challenger of the past two decades. His surprising array of assets includes unity within a normally fractious party, a positive introduction to the American public and a narrow national lead over President Bush.
“I don’t think there’s ever been anyone healthier,” says Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, who advised Howard Dean’s campaign. Adds nonpartisan opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman: “It is rare that a primary campaign strengthens the nominee. This campaign has clearly done that.”
Looking back, it’s easy to find Dems who either never fully recovered from the primaries or were hampered by the process throughout the respective election year. Mondale suffered after Gary Hart’s charges stuck; Dukakis emerged from the process badly damaged by Al Gore and Jesse Jackson; Clinton heard many of the charges levied by Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and Bob Kerrey repeated throughout 1992.
All three of those men trailed their Republican general-election opponents in early-March polls. Mr. Kerry, by contrast, has pulled ahead of Mr. Bush in several national surveys on the strength of solid support from the Democratic rank-and-file.
In March 1992, for example, Mr. Clinton trailed President George H.W. Bush in large part because he was losing roughly one-fourth of Democratic voters. In the most recent Gallup Poll, which showed Mr. Kerry leading the current President Bush, 51%-46%, he was losing just 7% of his party’s voters.
“You probably have to go back more than 50 years to find a nominating process less divisive,” says Geoff Garin, pollster for retired Gen. Wesley Clark’s primary campaign. “There is no meaningful group of disaffected Democrats coming out of this process.”
Which segues into my other point: Bush is supposed to be winning right now but he isn’t.
Bush, as the incumbent, should have a sizable lead over Kerry. The president has had plenty of time to show voters his record of accomplishments (or lack thereof), has recently laid out his national agenda in a State of the Union address, and has remained “above the fray” while the Dems battled it out for the nomination. With this in mind, Kerry should be trailing.
And yet, the recent polls show that this isn’t happening at all. As Ruy Teixeira recently noted:
[I]t’s quite unusual for an incumbent president to be running behind the challenger at this point in the cycle. According to a recent Gallup analysis, every incumbent president back to Harry Truman was leading their eventual opponent (and all other possible opponents) at this point in an election year with the lone exception of Gerald Ford in 1976. And of course, he lost.
Karl Rove & Co. are worried. I don’t blame them.