Re: What are your plans for election night? (nbc)

On Mon, 3 Nov 2008 07:44:55 -0800 (PST), David in NYC
<dbillotti@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

so I need
somewhere safe to cry my eyes out with joy when Chuck Todd says,
"We're making the call. NBC News can report that Barack Obama will be
the next President of the United States."

Hopefully Chuck Todd is being a tad more careful than he was back in
2004 when he was touting a good chance of a Kerry landslide 5 months
before the election.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/popupsubscribe.html
May 2004

A Kerry Landslide?
Why the next election won't be close.

By Chuck Todd
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the last year, most political TV shows handicapping the upcoming
presidential election have repeated the refrain that the race will be
extremely tight. Last month, CNN's astute commentator Jeff Greenfield
hosted an entire segment on how easily this election could turn out
like 2000, with President Bush and Sen. John Kerry splitting victories
in the popular vote and the electoral college. Greenfield even threw
out the possibility of an electoral college split of 269-269, brought
about by a shift of just two swing states that went for Bush last
time, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. He ended his feature with the
conventional wisdom among Washington pundits: "We're assuming this
election will stay incredibly close." Reporters covering the campaign
echo this expectation, sprinkling their campaign dispatches with
references to the "closely fought" electoral race and "tight
election."

The campaign staffs themselves have been saying for months that they
anticipate that the race will go down to the wire. In late April,
Republican party chairman Ed Gillespie told The New York Times that he
expected a "very, very close" race. This winter, Democratic party
chairman Terry McAuliffe urged Ralph Nader not to enter the race,
fearing that the perpetual candidate could take precious votes away
from Kerry in a race sure to be won by a hairline margin.

There are perfectly understandable reasons why we expect 2004 to be
close. Everyone remembers the nail-biting 2000 recount. A vast number
of books and magazine articles describe the degree to which we are a
50/50 nation and detail the precarious balance between red and blue
states. And poll after poll show the two candidates oscillating within
a few percentage points of one another. There are also institutional
factors that drive the presumption that the race will be tight. The
press wants to cover a competitive horse-race. And the last thing
either campaign wants to do is give its supporters any reason to be
complacent and stay home on election day.

But there's another possibility, one only now being floated by a few
political operatives: 2004 could be a decisive victory for Kerry. The
reason to think so is historical. Elections that feature a sitting
president tend to be referendums on the incumbent--and in recent
elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral
margins. If you look at key indicators beyond the neck-and-neck
support for the two candidates in the polls--such as high turnout in
the early Democratic primaries and the likelihood of a high turnout in
November--it seems improbable that Bush will win big. More likely,
it's going to be Kerry in a rout.

Bush: the new Carter

In the last 25 years, there have been four elections which pitted an
incumbent against a challenger--1980, 1984, 1992, and 1996. In all
four, the victor won by a substantial margin in the electoral college.
The circumstances of one election hold particular relevance for today:
1980. That year, the country was weathering both tough economic times
(the era of "stagflation"--high inflation concurrent with a recession)
and frightening foreign policy crises (the Iranian hostage crisis and
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Indeed, this year Bush is looking
unexpectedly like Carter. Though the two presidents differ
substantially in personal style (one indecisive and immersed in
details, the other resolute but disengaged), they are also curiously
similar. Both are religious former Southern governors. Both initially
won the presidency by tarring their opponents (Gerald Ford, Al Gore)
with the shortcomings of their predecessors (Richard Nixon, Bill
Clinton). Like Carter, Bush is vulnerable to being attacked as someone
not up to the job of managing impending global crises.

Everyone expected the 1980 election to be very close. In fact, Reagan
won with 50.8 percent of the popular vote to Carter's 41 percent
(independent John Anderson won 6.6 percent)--which translated into an
electoral avalanche of 489 to 49. The race was decided not so much on
the public's nascent impressions of the challenger, but on their
dissatisfaction with the incumbent.

Nor was Carter's sound defeat an aberration. Quite the opposite. Of
the last five incumbent presidents booted from office--Bush I, Carter,
Ford, Herbert Hoover, and William Howard Taft--only one was able to
garner over 200 electoral votes, and three of these defeated
incumbents didn't even cross the 100 electoral-vote threshold: --1992:
370 (Bill Clinton) to 168 (George H. W. Bush) --1980: 489 (Ronald
Reagan) to 49 (Jimmy Carter) --1976: 297 (Jimmy Carter) to 240 (Gerald
Ford) --1932: 472 (FDR) to 59 (Herbert Hoover) --1912: 435 (Woodrow
Wilson) to 88 (TR) to 8 (Taft)

Poll sitting

Historically, when incumbents lose big, they do so for sound reasons:
The public sees their policies as not working--or worse yet, as
failures. That's certainly increasingly true of Bush today. From the
chaos in Iraq to an uncomfortably soft economic recovery to the
passage of an unpopular Medicare bill, the White House is having a
harder and harder time putting a positive spin on the effects of the
president's decisions.

And while Bush still retains a loyal base, he has provoked--both by
his policies and his partisanship--an extremely strong reaction among
Democrats. One indication is that turnout in this year's early
Democratic primaries was way up. Nearly twice as many Democrats turned
out for the 2004 Iowa caucuses as they had for those held in 2000. The
turnout in New Hampshire for the Democratic primary was also
extraordinarily high, up 29 percent from the previous turnout record
set in 1992--the year Bush's father lost his reelection bid.

The Democrats' recent enthusiasm at the polls may in part be because
this year's primary featured nine candidates, and Howard Dean's
unusual campaign mobilized many new voters--both for and against him.
However, the excitement in the Democratic race can't explain primary
voter behavior on the other side of the aisle. Republican turnout in
the New Hampshire primary was lower than in 2000, but that isn't
surprising considering that Bush's nomination was never in question
this year. A fairer way to gauge the eagerness of the president's base
to rally behind him is to compare this GOP primary to the last one
that featured an incumbent running for reelection with no real primary
opposition: Bill Clinton in 1996. That year in New Hampshire, 76,874
Democrats cast ballots for Clinton. This year, 53,749 Republicans cast
ballots for Bush. This is especially astonishing, considering that, in
New Hampshire, there are more registered Republicans than Democrats.

The most obvious evidence cutting against the historical trend of
elections featuring incumbents being won or lost by large margins is
that opinion polls have consistently shown Bush and Kerry running neck
and neck. But look carefully, and you'll find a couple of nuances in
the most recent poll data that point to the potential for a big Kerry
win. First, in polls that implicitly assume a higher turnout, Kerry
performs better than he does in other polls. Most of the polls you
hear about--and the ones that prognosticators trust the most--are
surveys of "likely voters." Among the criteria pollsters typically use
to identify likely voters is whether the subjects participated in the
last election. These polls have proven more accurate in recent
elections, like 2000, when voter turnout was relatively low--of the
last nine presidential elections, only two showed lower turnout than
2000. But there are strong reasons to think that voters will turn out
in larger numbers this year--especially among Democrats.

Four years ago, when the economy was strong, the country wasn't at
war, and both presidential candidates ran as moderates, just 43
percent of adults told an early April Gallup poll that they had been
thinking about the election "quite a lot." This April, when the issues
seem much bigger and the differences between the candidates much
starker, Gallup found that 61 percent of adults said they had been
giving "quite a lot" of thought to the election.

So, presuming higher turnout, an arguably better predictor of election
results would be polls of registered voters--both those who voted and
those who stayed home in 2000. In an early April Gallup poll, Kerry
trailed Bush 46 percent to 48 percent among likely voters, but led 48
percent to 46 percent among registered voters. Kerry's support had
dropped incrementally in a late April Gallup poll, but he continued to
garner higher support among registered voters than likely voters.

The second nuance to look at is what political consultant Chris
Kofinis calls "the Bush bubble": the gap between the president's
overall approval ratings and his approval ratings on specific policy
areas. According to the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll,
Bush's approval rating now stands at 51 percent. That isn't bad,
though it is noticeably below what the last two incumbents who won
reelection had at this point in the election cycle: Reagan's approval
was 54 percent and Clinton's was 56 percent. But even Bush's 51
percent may be softer than it looks. In the same poll, on seven of
nine major policy issues--the economy, Iraq, Social Security, health
insurance, taxes, jobs, the deficit--less than half of respondents
said that they approved of the president's performance. In several
cases, his approval was well below 50 percent. Only 45 percent
approved of Bush's handling of Iraq; 44 percent of his performance on
the economy; 34 percent of his performance on the deficit; and 33
percent of his stewardship of Social Security. Even on policy areas in
which the president's approval is now relatively high--education and
the war on terror--he is vulnerable to later substantive attacks by
Kerry. For instance, he currently garners 51 percent approval on
education, due largely to his role in passing a bold education
measure; increasingly, however, educators and the public are alarmed
about the effects of No Child Left Behind.

Kerry's challenge

Of course, the tight polling data does reflect a fundamental reality:
For all the fallout from his policies, Bush still appeals to many
Americans because of his seeming decisiveness, straight talk, and
regular-guy charm--not qualities that John Kerry prominently displays.
The historical pattern may strongly suggest that if Kerry wins, it
will be by large margins--but that is hardly fated. It will only
happen if Kerry successfully highlights Bush's failings while showing
himself to be an appealing alternative. Otherwise, the senator could
see himself losing an electoral rout, not winning in one. In fact, the
second most likely outcome of this election is a Bush landslide. With
just one exception, every president to win a second consecutive term
has done so with a larger electoral margin than his initial victory.
The least likely result this November is another close election.

Right now, the president is vulnerable. As The New Republic's Ryan
Lizza argued in a recent New York Times editorial, undecided voters
"know [the incumbent] well, and if they were going to vote for him,
they would have already decided. Thus support for Mr. Bush should be
seen more as a ceiling, while support for Mr. Kerry, the lesser-known
challenger, is more like a floor."

That points to both an opportunity and a challenge for the Kerry
campaign. Kerry needs to convince voters that he's up to the job--and
that Bush isn't. If he can woo voters dissatisfied with Bush's
policies, there's a potential--and historical precedent--for Kerry to
win big.

-- Chuck Todd is the editor in chief of National Journal's Hotline.

(end of article from 2004)






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