If you were a bookie... Polls and bets on the 2004 elections

7. Everybody sees Kerry as an underdog. An ABC news poll said that 53% of respondants think Bush will win compared with 32% who think Kerry will win (this is very different from asking who they support).

It's hard to see Rasmussen as inserting partisanship into his polls, too, when often he has been one who has Kerry ahead when most of the others still give Bush the edge.

I've long been predicting a Bush win, but I've never been so unsure of that as now (not because the election is upon us, but because of the data and trending I have been seeing).

I hadn't wanted to say anything because soz would claim I jinxed it, but I remembered that I don't cog to superstitious stuff...

Here's to some hope.

Marist College
Survey conducted on October 31. Data compared with poll of October 21.
LINK

likely voters
Bush 48 (-1)
Kerry 49 (+1)
Nader 1 (no ch.)

registered voters
Bush 48 (+1)
Kerry 48 (+1)
Nader <1 (-1)

George Washington University Battleground Poll
conducted by the Tarrance Group (R) and Lake Snell Perry & Associates (D).
Oct. 27-28 & 31, 2004, compared with October 25-28:

Bush 49 (-1)
Kerry 45 (no ch.)

(according to pollingreport.com and 2.004k.com, that is; according to realclearpolitics, it's Bush 49, Kerry 46 in both two- and three-way race, with Nader at 0%.)

We?
Didja vote, nimh?

In 2000, Zogby, TIPP, Gallup and Pew all were pretty close. Zogby had Gore in the lead by 2%, the others Bush by 2%; the end result was a tie, when you measure it in whole percentage points. CBS thus had been a little closer still: it had given a 1% edge in its last poll. But the one poll that had the elections pegged exactly right was Harris.

Harris did two polls, then. A conventional phone poll and an "interactive" poll. They both showed the same thing: the race at a tie. Gore 47%, Bush 47%.

So what does Harris say now? Yesterday, it again has two polls out. And, err ... they differ.

survey of 3,926 likely voters conducted online.
Kerry 49%
Bush 47%
Nader 1%
Badnarik 1%

survey of 1,092 likely voters conducted by telephone.
Bush 49%
Kerry 45%
Nader 2%

And just to ramp up the suspense some more,

"This is NOT the final Harris Interactive poll release before this election. We will continue to poll throughout today, Monday, November 1, and will analyze and release the results some time tonight or tomorrow morning"

The final Harris Polls show Senator John Kerry making modest gains at the very end of the campaign [..] Both surveys suggest that Kerry has been making some gains over the course of the past few days [..] If this trend is real, then Kerry may actually do better than these numbers suggest. In the past, presidential challengers tend to do better against an incumbent President among the undecided voters during the last three days of the elections, and that appears to be the case here. [..] The surveys both suggest an increase of a few percentage points above the 51.3% turnout (of all adults) in 2000, but not as big an increase as some reports have suggested.

02/NOV/04
07:00 PM 15519 Which candidate will win the U.S. Presidential Election in 2004?

George W. Bush -130

John Kerry -110