Follow the Bouncing Polls

Today I hear much gnashing of teeth and cries of woe from the left -- and screams of savage triumph from the right -- because of a new Gallup poll showing Bush allegedly "surging" against Kerry -- despite (or perhaps even because of) the Richard Clarke media frenzy.

I suggest everyone pop a few Vitamin B- complex stress tabs and calm down. There is much, much less to this than meets the eye.

The last Gallup poll was conducted almost a month ago -- when Kerry was still riding the wave of (relatively) favorable publicity that carried him through the primaries, and Bush had not yet cranked up the GOP's multi-million dollar advertising death star. That survey showed Kerry with a 5-point lead over Bush among registered voters, which even then was on the high side of the polling universe.

Since that time, it's become amply clear the race has narrowed to something close to a statistical tie. It's just that Gallup is now catching up with the parade. I've also noticed in the past that Gallup numbers tend to be a bit more volatile than most of the major national polls, and I suspect that's the case here as well.

And indeed, we have the Pew Center calling the race essentially dead even -- Kerry 47%, Bush 46% -- even though the Republican money blitz is clearly taking a toll on Kerry's favorable/ unfavorable rating, and the edge he has enjoyed on some key issues:

Earlier this month, voters trusted Kerry more than Bush to improve the job situation and health care systems by margins of roughly two- to-one. Today, these margins are much tighter, as the percent expressing confidence in Kerry has declined.

In mid-March, 53% cited Kerry as better able to improve economic conditions, today 44% favor Kerry in this area. The percentage citing Bush has remained relatively stable, while the proportion saying they don't know who would be better has increased.

Some erosion in Kerry's standing was inevitable, given the waning of the "primary effect," and the kind of money the BC (Bush- Cheney, or Before Christ, take your pick) crew has been able to throw onto the airwaves. Our paleolithic opponents are leaning hard on some buttons that are wired deep into the brains of many voters -- especially those whose world views were formed in the Reagan years:

One of the more striking findings in the new [Gallup] poll is the increased public perception that Kerry is "too liberal." Four in 10 Americans (41%) now take this view, up from 29% in late January. At the same time, the percentage saying Kerry's views are "about right" has dropped from 46% to 37%.

And yet, all this Pavlovian stimuation has only brought Bush roughly even with Kerry on the ideological seesaw:

Americans are generally split between viewing Bush as too conservative (38%) and about right (40%), while 15% consider him too liberal.

(You have to wonder about that 15% who think Shrub is too liberal. Is the militia movement really that big??)

But the real question isn't whether Kerry has been damaged, but how serious is the damage, and how long will it last? And on those scores, I see some hopeful signs in the Pew survey. It appears that so far, at least, ush's spring offensive has only succeeded in driving voters back into the undecided camp. But he has not (at least as yet) managed to rally them to his side:

In fact, on a wide range of issues, from terrorism to the economy to health care, a growing number of voters are saying that they do not know which candidate would do a better job, or that neither is clearly preferable.

Bush is the incumbent. People know him. So Bush's political brain trust (well, "trust" in the Enron sense of the word) understands that the longer voters remain in the undecided column, the more likely they are to favor the challenger in the end -- unless they're given a strong reason to lay aside their original doubts, the ones that drove them away from the incumbent in the first place.

Right now, it doesn't look like Bush has given them those reasons. He's stopped the bleeding, but he still hasn't stitched up the wound.

What's more, the Pew Survey also shows Clarke's attacks have had a significant political impact on independent voters -- and, in keeping with the bigger pattern, have driven a bunch of them into the undecided column:

Swing voters also are increasingly uncertain about which candidate can best defend the country against terrorism. In the survey conducted before Clarke's allegations were widely publicized, fully 72% of swing voters said they felt Bush was the candidate best able to protect the U.S. from future terrorist attacks, while just 11% preferred Kerry.

The current survey finds only 50% citing Bush as stronger on this issue, though Kerry made no significant gains on this issue. The proportion of swing voters who don't see either candidate as better on terrorism more than doubled from 17% to 37% as events have unfolded.

Considering how little most of these voters know about Kerry (plus, given the weight of Bush's carefully constructed "master and commander" image) this is not a particularly surprising trend, nor a discouraging one. Absent any further information, though, it seems likely these voters will eventually gravitate back towards Bush on the terrorism issue -- it's the path of least resistance. So while Clarke has succeeded in planting seeds of doubt, it's up to Kerry to see if he can make them grow, by presenting these voters with a compelling, or at least plausible, alternative.

The bottom line -- and it's a line I've come back to several times lately -- is that the current state of the campaign actually shows how much the country has changed over the past 10 or 15 years. There was a time when a propaganda sledgehammer like the one the GOP is now using on Kerry would have cracked a Democratic candidate open like a soft peanut. Now, it's been barely enough to bring Bush (who two-and-a-half years ago had the highest presidential approval rating in Gallup history) back to even with him.

Which means all you political junkies out there might want to stock up on those B-complex stress tabs. Because we've still got seven more months to go in this race, and you're probably going to need an ample supply. Posted by billmon at March 30, 2004 04:06 PM | TrackBack