John Zogby is one of those pollsters you tend to either love or hate. For this week, anyway, Dems everywhere have reason to love him.
A full six months before a single vote is cast, Zogby wants everyone to know his prediction.
I have made a career of taking bungee jumps in my election calls. Sometimes I haven’t had a helmet and I have gotten a little scratched. But here is my jump for 2004: John Kerry will win the election.
Have you recovered from the shock? Is this guy nuts? Kerry’s performance of late has hardly been inspiring and polls show that most Americans have no sense of where he really stands on the key issues that matter most to them. Regardless, I still think that he will win. And if he doesn’t, it will be because he blew it…. [A]s of today, this race is John Kerry’s to lose.
I’m not sure if I’d characterize it quite this way, but it’s nice to see it in print. With a dead heat in the polls, Kerry is not exactly in the drivers’ seat yet. But Zogby’s right; Kerry’s in much better shape than the conventional wisdom would have us believe.
Of course, Zogby’s prediction isn’t just a wild guess. He laid out four specific reasons to explain how he arrived at this conclusion.
First, he looked at the polls, relying, of course, on his own data.
[M]y most recent poll (April 12-15) shows bad re-election numbers for an incumbent President. Senator Kerry is leading 47% to 44% in a two-way race, and the candidates are tied at 45% in the three-way race with Ralph Nader. Significantly, only 44% feel that the country is headed in the right direction and only 43% believe that President Bush deserves to be re-elected — compared with 51% who say it is time for someone new.
In that same poll, Kerry leads by 17 points in the Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000, while Bush leads by only 10 points in the Red States that he won four years ago.
Second, he looked at the lack of undecideds.
[T]here are very few undecided voters for this early in a campaign. Historically, the majority of undecideds break to the challenger against an incumbent. The reasons are not hard to understand: voters have probably made a judgment about the better-known incumbent and are looking for an alternative.
Third, Zogby isn’t optimistic about domestic and international affairs.
Will the United States actually be able to leave by June 30? Will Iraq be better off by then? Will the US be able to transfer power to a legitimate and unifying authority? Will the lives lost by the US and its allies be judged as the worth the final product? It is difficult to see how the President grabs control of this situation.
And finally, he notes Kerry’s tendency to get stronger, not weaker, as his campaigns progress.
Something happens to him in the closing weeks of campaigns (that obviously is not happening now!). We have clearly seen that pattern in his 1996 victory over Governor Bill Weld for the Senate in Massachusetts and more recently in the 2004 Democratic primaries. All through 2003, Kerry’s campaign lacked a focused message…. His timing [in January] caused him to come on strong at the perfect time.
It’s a fairly persuasive take and a bold prediction this far out. Zogby’s track record is mixed, but we can hope he’s on to something here. In fact, forget hope; let’s help make it happen.