RogerRabbit
Master Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 05 Sep 2004
Posts: 748
Location: Oregon
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 Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2004 2:11 pm Post subject: Run the Numbers: The Closest Yet |
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http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-battleground04-an1019.html
| Quote: | OCTOBER 19, 2004
President Bush took narrow leads in four more states in the days following the third and final presidential debate, giving the president his best showing in our battleground-states analysis since late June.
The latest Zogby Interactive poll puts Sen. John Kerry ahead in nine states and the president up in seven states. Mr. Bush's improvement erases the gains that Mr. Kerry had made just after the first debate on Sept. 30, when a survey found him ahead in all but three of the 16 hotly contested races that we've followed in twice-a-month polls since late May.
Ohio moved back into the president's column in the latest poll, after shifting briefly to Mr. Kerry. And Florida, which Mr. Kerry led by a narrow margin for five straight battleground polls, moved narrowly over to Mr. Bush.
All of the president's leads are slim -- within the polls' margins of error. But if they held up, he would secure a sca
Here's the math:
In analyzing Zogby's results we begin by assuming that the District of Columbia and the 34 states that aren't in the battleground poll will vote for the same political party this November as they did in the 2000 election. Therefore, Mr. Bush begins with 189 electoral votes and Mr. Kerry with 172. A candidate needs 270 votes to win.
Next, we add in the electoral votes from the latest poll, regardless of the margin or error or the spread between the candidates. Mr. Kerry's nine states have 92 electoral votes, while Mr. Bush's seven control 85. Adding up the votes from battleground and nonbattleground states, Mr. Bush would win by a slim 274-264.
The 10 electoral-vote margin between Messrs. Bush and Kerry is the narrowest we've found since beginning our battlegound analyses. The closeness mirrors what's been seen in nationwide polls taken since the debates ended, and it is similar to the results of several other Electoral College calculations, including one sent today to subscribers of a political newsletter edited by columnist Robert D. Novak. It also came up with a 274-264 tally.
Still, in some ways the Zogby results show Mr. Kerry on more solid ground than the president. While none of Mr. Bush's leads are greater than the polls' margins of error, six of Mr. Kerry's nine are -- including Pennsylvania, where Mr. Bush's standing had improved since the Republican convention.
And the only state that the Zogby poll shows changing hands from 2000 is New Hampshire. President Bush won that state's four electoral votes in 2000 by a 1.3 percentage-point margin. The latest Zogby poll shows Mr. Kerry ahead by 5.1 points, several points within the margin of error. |
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