Headlines, North America

POLITICS-U.S.: Presidential Race Looks to Be Dead Heat

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 1 2004 (IPS) - Exactly four months before the Nov. 2 presidential elections, the race between the Republican incumbent, George W. Bush, and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, is a statistical dead heat, according to several polls released during the past week.

When the left-wing third-party candidate, Ralph Nader, is added to the mix, Bush comes out with a slight lead – a fact which explains why Republicans are trying hard to ensure that Nader gets on the ballot in certain key states while pressure from Democrats on the 70-year-old activist to withdraw from the race is become increasingly intense.

Despite major setbacks for Bush over the past three months, particularly related to Iraq and the prisoner abuse scandal, Kerry has failed to pull ahead; indeed, he may actually have lost some ground over the past month, despite spending a whopping 50 million dollars on television advertising, according to the polls.

But, by historical standards, Bush remains in deep trouble. No incumbent president with an overall approval rating of less than 51 percent at this stage in the campaign has been re-elected in the past half century.

With a current approval rating of only 45 percent, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Thursday, Bush’s standing is comparable to that of former President Gerald Ford, who was defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976. A New York Times/CBS News poll released Tuesday found Bush’s approval rating at an even more desultory 42 percent, the lowest figure since Bush became president.

Moreover, the Journal poll found a strong plurality of 48 percent of the electorate believing that the U.S. is headed in the "wrong direction", which is another key predictor of voting behaviour. A majority of 55 percent agreed with that assessment in a second poll released Tuesday by George Washington University (GW-Battleground 2004).

But despite those assessments, Bush remains very much in the race, according to all of the polls. "He goes into the summer period down, but not out", Democratic pollster Peter Hart told the Journal.

The latest polls also show that the electorate is not only deeply split between the two main candidates, but also substantially more committed to one or the other of them at a relatively early stage in the campaign compared to past presidential races.

A poll released late last week by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 79 percent of voters said they were "certain" of how they will vote – 40 percent for Bush, and 39 percent for Kerry. That leaves only about 20 percent of the electorate who could still go either way.

In reality, the percentage is much smaller because of the U.S. electoral system that awards all of the electoral votes allocated to each state to the candidate who gets the most votes in that state, even if that candidate fails to win a majority of the votes cast there.

Since some 32 of the 50 states are already considered either solidly Republican or Democratic, that leaves only about 18 states – most of them located in the northeastern quarter of the country stretching from Minnesota and Iowa in the west to Pennsylvania in the east, as well as Oregon, Washington State, and Florida (whose electoral votes decided the 2000 election in favour of Bush) – in the swing column.

Because the political views of voters in these swing states appear to be little different from the rest of the public, that means the two campaigns will be targeting their appeals to the 21 percent of the electorate in these 18 states who remain undecided.. That comes to only about eight million people.

According to Tuesday’s New York Times poll, Kerry leads Bush by a statistically insignificant 45-43 percent margin in the 18 swing states as a whole.

The latest polls also show that Iraq and the "war on terrorism" and the economy are likely to be the decisive issues.

On the economy, Bush has clearly gained from increases in employment over the past four months, although the electorate as a whole remains rather pessimistic. The Federal Reserve’s decision this week to raise interest rates by a quarter percent as the first of what are expected to be a series of rate hikes could deepen that pessimism as the election gets closer.

As of now, Kerry leads on key economic questions, such as job creation and social security, but the lead has diminished compared to two months ago.

"One of the most encouraging signs in this data is that an improved economy, including one million new jobs since September, has had a positive impact with voters," said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster who co-directs the GW-Battleground poll with a Democratic colleague.

On Iraq and terrorism-related issues, Bush leads, albeit by a much-diminished margin compared to two months ago, despite the latest setbacks in Iraq and the belief among a majority of the electorate, according to several recent polls, that the decision to go to war was wrong.

In the Journal poll released Thursday, 51 percent of respondents said they believed that removing Saddam Hussein from power was not worth the costs, compared to 40 percent who said it was. In an ominous finding for Bush, however, 64 percent of self-described swing voters said the war was not worth it, compared to 26 percent who said it was.

In Tuesday’s Times poll, a whopping 60 percent of all respondents said the war had not been worth the cost. In another worrisome sign for Bush, 59 percent of the Times’ respondents said Bush has not been entirely truthful about the war; an additional 20 percent said he was "mostly lying".

Bush also showed declines in public confidence in his ability to fight the "war on terrorism", with a bare majority of 52 percent in the Times poll saying they approved of his performance in that regard, down from 90 percent after the Afghanistan campaign.. A similar majority in the Journal poll said the threat of terrorism against the U.S. has actually increased, rather than fallen, in the wake of the Iraq war.

Among various ethnic and religious groups, Bush enjoys a nearly 30 percent lead among white Protestants, and a 40 percent lead among white Protestants who attend church regularly. Catholics, regardless of how observant, are split down the middle, while two-thirds of respondents who described themselves as "secular" supported Kerry.

According to the Pew poll, Kerry leads in the black vote by an 86-6 percent margin, while Hispanic voters are leaning toward Kerry, 53-41 percent. As a whole, whites prefer Bush to Kerry by an 11 percent margin.

"This race is extremely close," according to Celinda Lake, Goeas’ Democratic counterpart with the GW-Battleground poll.