??According to the experts, the 2004 presidential race is John Kerry?s to lose. As pollster John Zogby put it on his website, President Bush?s re-elect numbers are in dangerous territory and there are surprisingly few undecided voters to woo during the remainder of the campaign:
My most recent poll (April 12-15) shows bad re-election numbers for an incumbent President.? Senator Kerry is leading 47% to 44% in a two-way race, and the candidates are tied at 45% in the three-way race with Ralph Nader. Significantly, only 44% feel that the country is headed in the right direction and only 43% believe that President Bush deserves to be re-elected ? compared with 51% who say it is time for someone new.
In that same poll, Kerry leads by 17 points in the Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000, while Bush leads by only 10 points in the Red States that he won four years ago.
? According to the experts, the 2004 presidential race is George W. Bush?s to lose. As economics columnist Bruce Bartlett put it in a recent column, there seems to be a clear relationship back in time between economic performance and presidential elections:
For months, economists have been predicting that solid growth in the gross domestic product would translate to a comfortable victory for Bush on Election Day. The economy has now averaged 5 percent real growth over the past year. Experience shows that this is well more than enough to ensure victory for the incumbent party in the presidential election.
With the April 29 announcement that the economy grew 4.2 percent in the first quarter, Yale University economist Ray Fair raised his prediction of President Bush?s share of the two-party vote in November from 58.7 percent to 60.4 percent. Either figure would constitute a blowout victory.
Other economists are not quite so optimistic, but nevertheless show Bush with a large and growing lead. In an April report, Global Insight, the giant economic forecasting company, has him winning 55.8 percent of the two-party vote this year.
Economist Robert Dye of Economy.com, looked at economic growth in individual states in an April 21 report and did an electoral analysis on a state-by-state basis. Overall, he sees Bush with 54 percent of the vote and carrying every state except California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. This translates into an Electoral College victory for Bush of 373 votes to 165 for John Kerry.
