Election 2004: Perfect Storm

Gerry Daly of dalythoughts.com crunched some Harris Poll numbers to see what it would take for John Kerry to overtake President Bush due entirely to increased turnout. He found that Kerry will need 9.6 million new voters. And he doesn't mean new voters between the ages of 18-21 who've never been able to vote for president before. He means "nearly 10 million people, aged 22 and over, who did not vote in 2000 but are going to this year." "Maybe," Daly writes, "there is such antipathy towards George W. Bush that will bring voters out even more than the candidacy of Ross Perot did [in 1992]. We'll know in less than two weeks. If there are, then the Harris poll suggests that Kerry is in the ballpark. If these votes do not materialize, the Harris poll suggests that it will be a short night a week from Tuesday." ... The Horserace Blog, meanwhile, uses a poll by the Center for Policy and Economic studies to look at the black vote: "According to this poll, Kerry is underperforming among blacks by roughly 14 percent of the vote, a statistically significant difference. What would that mean if these numbers hold for the next month?" The answer: "If there were a perfect replay of Florida, Kerry's total would shrink by 122,312 votes. If there were a perfect replay of Ohio, Kerry's total would shrink by 62,207 votes (making Nader's absence on the ballot this year wholly irrelevant). If there were a perfect replay of Michigan, Kerry's total would shrink by 56,542 votes. If there were a perfect replay of the national vote, Kerry's total would shrink by 1,459,966. In other words, Bush would win the popular vote by about 1 million votes! John Kerry simply cannot win this election if he performs among blacks 14 percent worse than Gore did."

John Podhoretz: Perfect Storm