Category: Politics

It’s Down To 11 Votes

Based on my predictions, President Bush needs only 11 electoral votes to win. Right now the electoral situation works out roughly like this: Bush loses New Hampshire to Kerry. I don’t see Bush keeping it. On the other hand, Bush gains New Mexico, which gives him a net increase of 1 electoral vote. With Colorado and New Mexico looking safe Bush, that gives Bush 259 electoral votes to Kerry’s 228. That sounds like a solid margin, until one considers that Bush’s readiest source for those 11 votes is not trending well for him.

This race now comes down to only four states: Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. If Bush wins Ohio, he will be reelected. If he wins Iowa and Wisconsin and Kerry takes Ohio and Minnesota, Bush still wins. All Bush has to do is win any two of these states, and Kerry is done for. The rest of the nation is either safely red or safely blue (which the exception of Hawaii – which could throw the election if it becomes a tight contest…)

Florida has been looked at as a possible Kerry pickup, but I’m skeptical. The 2002 polls underestimated turnout for Jeb Bush, and I have a feeling that Florida is relatively safe for the President. There’s a potential for a dramatic (and campaign-ending) turnaround there, but it’s slim.

The state that Bush should be most worried about is Ohio. If Bush takes Ohio, Kerry’s done. But Ohio is trending blue this week, which is not good news for the President at all. In fact, it appears as though Kerry has built up a lead in the Buckeye State. Could Bush pull a surprise upset? I’d like to believe he could. I have the feeling that Kerry’s numbers are slightly inflated right now due to a lot of people, especially in an industrial state like Ohio, who are simply afraid of openly supporting the President right now. However, it’s an open question as to if that would be enough of a factor to swing the state back to Bush. It could be, but I’m skeptical. Right now if I were to play the odds, I’d have to give Ohio to Kerry.

This election is down to the wire, but my odds are still on Bush. The latest Badger Poll has Bush up by 3 in Wisconsin. The latest Research 2000 poll in Iowa gives Bush a narrow lead. In Minnesota, the RCP average shows a tied race, and that includes a St. Cloud State University poll that’s a massive statistical outlier from the other polls. If that poll is discarded, the simple poll average for Bush in Minnesota jumps to around 2 points. If tradition holds and Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota vote as a bloc, Bush could easily win without Ohio.

If we take the RCP averages in this race as an indication of the results on Election Day (risky, I know), Bush wins with 290 to Kerry’s 248 – and that’s operating under the assumption that Kerry takes Ohio.

One thing is for sure… this election will be a nail-biter…

The Power Of The Blogosphere

Over at Red State, they’ve managed to raise over $1000 for John Thune in 24 hours and are well on their way to $2000.

The Democrats had an early lead in online fundraising with the Dean Machine – not that it got them anywhere. Thankfully the right is starting to catch on. It was the conservative movement that pioneered the use of direct mail, and conservatives were a force in the blogosphere long before the left created their echo chamber.

With Thune pulling ahead against Daschle, it’s more important now than ever to help get the Senate out of the Daschle Dead Zone. As we learned from Howard Dean, even small donors can make a big difference. (Well, that and don’t make an ass of yourself on national TV, but I digress…)

Zogby Doesn’t Forcast Bush Win

Now it appears as though Zogby is not forecasting a Bush win afterall.

Personally, I think Zogby is full of it. No candidate picks up 5 points in a single day unless their opponent is caught in bed with an underage hooker or a horse or possibly an underage equine hooker. Zogby’s performance in 2000 was essentially blind luck – the stopped clock being right twice per day. His 2002 polls were less than worthless, and his methodology that applies an artificial partisan balance is laughable. Anyone who assumes that the partisan balance in this country hasn’t changed since 2000 is making a very big assumption – an assumption that is virtually guaranteed to be wrong.

Zogby’s own tracking polls show Bush tied with Kerry today, which certainly doesn’t indicate any major shift with undecided voters. Indeed, even with Zogby likely oversampling Democrats, Kerry can’t maintain any kind of solid lead outside the margin of error. By now if there was going to be any kind of major movement with undecided voters we’d be seeing it. Instead, they appear to be breaking either even or just slightly for Bush.

I’d take London’s odds long before I’d take John Zogby’s…

Zogby Forecasts Bush Win

Pollster John Zogby is now predicting that President Bush will win next week, contrary to his earlier prediction of a Kerry victory:

Pollster John Zogby surprised the political world back in April with a long-range prediction that John Kerry would defeat George W. Bush for president. On Monday this week, Zogby told me, he changed his mind. He now thinks the president is more likely to be re-elected because he has reinforced support from his base, including married white women.

That conclusion would be a surprise for frantically nervous Republicans and cautiously upbeat Democrats entering the campaign’s final days. In fact, nobody, including Zogby and all the other polltakers, can be sure who will win this election. Yet, it is clear that President Bush’s strategists have succeeded in solidifying his base to a degree that makes it much harder to defeat him next Tuesday.

It’s welcome news, but it ain’t over until the fat lady is out there belting out _La Traviata_. It’s more critical than ever for every Republican to get to the polls next week and help ensure that President Bush stays in the White House and this country remains safe.

A Pile Of QaQaa

ABC News is reporting that that 380 tons of high explosive that was supposedly stolen was more like 3 tons, and much of it was likely moved before the war.

Iraqi officials may be overstating the amount of explosives reported to have disappeared from a weapons depot, documents obtained by ABC News show.

The Iraqi interim government has told the United States and international weapons inspectors that 377 tons of conventional explosives are missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation, which was supposed to be under U.S. military control.

But International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported.

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on “declaration” from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.

But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency’s inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the start of the United States launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in March 2003.

Furthermore, it’s now being revealed that Russian forces may have helped spirit away some of the material before the war:

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, “almost certainly” removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

“The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” Mr. Shaw said. “Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units.”

Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.

I’m not sure how reliable this information is, although I’ve heard that Bret Baier of Fox News is reporting that his sources are confirming the story and indicated that we have satellite photos showing the operation in progress. If so, this story just got a whole lot more interesting.

I have a feeling that this attempted October surprise just badly misfired for Kerry’s propaganda organ the mainstream media. They seized on this story hoping to air it this weekend so that the Bush team would have no chance to respond – but it broke early, and now it’s clear that the Democratic talking points on this issue were completely and utterly wrong. The HE was taken before the war, and not by looters but by someone who knew exactly what they were looking for. The amount of material was vastly overstated by the Iraqis, and Mohammad al-Baradei is once again being a hack who has no business running the IAEA.

Furthermore, I think this story was leaked preemptively. As Wizbang notes, it was the blogosphere that leaked this story before the weekend where it could have really done harm. Why do I get the feeling there was something deliberate about that? It appears that our good friend Josh “ua Micah” Marshall has just been turned into Karl Rove’s bitch by leaking the story in such a way as to give the Bush Administration time to get ahead of it. If that’s so, it’s a plan of genius. Not only did the Bush team defuse what could have been a major bombshell before Election Day, but they may have used the rabid BDS of a major lefty blogger to do it.

Of course, this leads to larger questions than electoral politics as well. If Russia did help the Iraqis (which isn’t surprising), what repercussions will their be for Moscow? Can we trust the Russians as allies, even erstwhile ones? If the Russians helped to clean out al-Qaqaa, what else did they help the Iraqis stash away?

There’s a lot going on here, not only the evisceration of another CBS/NYT smear, but also a major geopolitical scandal. How this story develops will be of great interest not only in terms of the election, but in the larger war as well.

Is Minnesota Bush Country?

I wouldn’t have thought that Minnesota would go for Bush, but the Hubert Humphry Institute puts Bush ahead of Kerry by 3 points – a narrow lead, but also a sign that Kerry is in deep trouble in the Midwest.

Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin tend to vote as a bloc, and right now Bush the potential to take all three. If that happens, it’s virtually impossible for Kerry to win unless he picks up both Florida and Ohio. Right now the momentum in the Electoral College remains with the President, and Kerry is fighting just to stay even. I’ve been predicting that this race will be decided east of the Missouri River, and if Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin go for Bush, Kerry’s campaign will meet its Waterloo in the Midwest…

Bush Leads With First-Time Voters

A recent Pace University Poll of first-time voters finds that Bush has a narrow lead with first-time voters, contrary to expectations:

Among first-time voters, President George W. Bush seems to be gaining ground as the campaign proceeds. He has a statistically insignificant lead over Senator John Kerry (48% favor Bush in a head-to-head race, and 44% favor Kerry). Bush’s support in this group has climbed 8 points since the previous Pace Poll/Rock the Vote survey in July (from 40% to 48% now). Meanwhile, Kerry’s support has slipped 6 points (from 50% in July to 44% today). Seven percent remain undecided.

I have a feeling that first-time voters aren’t such a massive Kerry support bloc. First time voters are the first voters of the 9/11 Generation. There have been studies that indicate that college students are becoming more and more conservative on certain issues, and that helps Bush. Campuses are still liberal, but nowhere near as liberal as they once were – especially not after September 11 helped shatter the moral nihilism of the left.

There’s a lot of sketchy data out there making it difficult to make a conclusion. However, if this Pace poll is correct, it bodes very well for President Bush. With so few undecided voters, there may not be enough to swing the race to Kerry, and I have a suspicion that Kerry’s poll numbers may be higher than his actual percentage of the vote may be. I know of many people who don’t like Bush, especially on domestic policy, but just can’t trust Kerry to make them safe. Even if this percentage of people is no more than 1-2% of the electorate, it could be more than enough to ensure a second term for the President.

Rasmussen: Bush Has Momentum

The latest Rasmussen tracking poll is out and it shows Bush with a 2 point lead against Kerry both with and without leaners. Rasmussen also finds that late deciders are tending to lean towards Bush – despite the fact that most everyone has decided by now, and those that haven’t aren’t very likely to vote at all.

The usual caveats apply, one poll does not tell the whole story, especially a tracking poll, and your mileage may vary. However, this does indicate that Bush has some momentum in this tight race, and I would predict that there are a lot of people who will shift from Kerry to Bush when they’re in the privacy of the voting booth. With all the Democratic thuggery going on, I wouldn’t blame someone for being unwilling to pubilcly support the President in some places. However, when it comes right down to it, Kerry has not closed the deal. Instead of offering solutions he’s offered nothing but criticism and negativity. The American electorate trusts President Bush to keep them safe by a wide margin, and that is why I maintain that the President will be reelected in less than a week.