Final Polls -- Fundamentals favor Kerry

From JFH

Nothing has swayed me from my prediction last week: 311 EVs for Kerry (I've added Wisconsin). The winning formula: Gore states + NH + OH + FL. Kerry does better than final polls indicate because of strong overall turnout, strong turnout among underpolled voters, undecideds breaking for challenger, and far fewer Nader votes vs. 2000.

I just don't see any fundamentals favoring Bush at this point; I don't read anything from the final battlegrounds about trends in his favor; if there are any modest trends, they all seem to point Kerry.

Bush's only hope is if the assumptions above just don't pan out for some reason: Unless we are at some kind of irreducible minimum of undecideds who really aren't going to vote, so maybe there won't be any further break to the challenger than we've already seen. Likewise, many Nader 2000 voters may stay home, but most of those voting will switch to Kerry rather than stick with Ralph. And on turnout, it's possible that the newly registered young cell phone voters will not GOTV once they realize that it's harder than just pressing a button on their cell phones (in other words, hopefully, we won't have a replay of the vaunted Deaniacs' disappearing act in the Iowa caucuses!).


Here is a polling summary from Prof. Alan Abramowitz.

His conclusion on the national popular vote:

Even in the samples of likely voters, Bush is well below the 50 percent mark generally needed by an incumbent. In fact, when Gallup allocates the undecided vote, their likely voter sample goes from a 49-47 Bush lead to a 49-49 tie. In the broader samples of registered voters, Bush is actually trailing in most of the recent polls. With a very high turnout expected tomorrow, the registered voter samples are probably more representative of the actual electorate than the likely voter samples.

His conclusions about Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania:

George Bush's situation in all four of these key battleground states is dire. His support is well below 50 percent in all of them and he is currently trailing John Kerry in 3 of the 4. A clean sweep of all four states by John Kerry is a distinct possibility.

Here is an assessment of more swing states. The candidates are absolutely deadlocked in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Mexico.

The imminently fair and balanced FOX NEWS poll has Kerry up by 2% nationally and by 5% in Florida.

And from the inimitable quotemeister, Prof. Larry Sabato, we have this conclusion:

As we conclude this amazing election campaign, we have just one question for our readers: When has an incumbent candidate ever won when he is tied with his challenger on election eve? The answer is never--at least in the age of polling that began in the 1930s. So George W. Bush needs to beat history, and the polls, to win the election tomorrow. It is possible that the vagaries of the Electoral College will enable Bush to eke out a victory, and it is also possible that the Republican Party's get out the vote effort will equal or exceed the Democrats' GOTV efforts. But if the Democrats are even half-right about the potential of their GOTV in producing additional new voters, then Kerry will win, perhaps more comfortably than anyone now suspects.

But then Sabato goes on to predict (sort of) an Electoral College tie.