By David Green
And so it has come down to this. Two weeks before the most important election in a century, or perhaps all of American history. Two weeks before the conclusion (or will it be?) of one of the most bitterly fought contests in modern presidential history. Two weeks before we know which fork in the road America and the world will take. Two weeks, and we’re stuck at top dead center. Anybody who claims they can call the election today is either enjoying a very pleasant hallucination or else wants you to. We just don’t know where it goes from here.
So much about this election is of vital importance to the future of so many people, in America and beyond, that I am reluctant to indulge the much less serious – but lots more fun – perennial horse race question of presidential politics: Who will win?
But let’s do it anyhow.
Where are we and how did we get here? Generally, an election in which an incumbent is asking for a second term turns chiefly into a referendum on the president’s first term performance. That’s perhaps as it should be, and especially as it should be given a president as bold and controversial as George W. Bush.
To some degree that is the case in 2004, but the Bush team realized that allowing this to happen would be the kiss of death for the president. No president in modern history comes to a reelection contest with so much negative baggage from his first term. Indeed, it is a testament to both the mastery of Bush’s team and the general incompetence of the Kerry folks that Bush is anywhere today other than the political graveyard, buried under six feet of his own liabilities.
Republicans will of course deny this, claiming with great sincerity that W is one of the greats. But nowadays this attitude looks to me more and more like a quasi-religious article of faith for many Americans, rather than any realistic assessment of Bush’s accomplishments. My guess is that Bush could come out in favor of cannibalism and something like 35 percent of voters would still see him as the second coming. If Bush said that America had to invade Burkina Faso tomorrow because it represented a mortal threat to American security, this group of folks would be amazed that anyone could possibly disagree. Indeed, many Americans – apparently including the president himself – believe that Bush has been chosen from above to be president of the United States. You would think an endorsement like that would get you more than 48 percent in the polls, but let’s not go there…
In the end, the acid test on this question is this: If Bill Clinton had been the first president in seven decades to lose jobs on his watch, had turned a record surplus into a record deficit, had alienated the world from America, and had bogged down nine-tenths of America’s land forces in an unnecessary war based on falsehoods from here to the horizon (among other highlights of this presidency), can you imagine how Karl Rove and the Republicans would be savaging him now? Look at what they did to Clinton while he was in office, a popular president presiding over peace and prosperity!
Because the Bush team knew that an election fought over his record was a blowout in the making, they wisely managed – at least for a while – to turn the campaign into a referendum on a John Kerry strawman they invented. Kerry helped them a lot in this regard, first by genuinely acting the part to a certain degree, but even more so by not anticipating and instantly responding to Bush’s caricatures. It was amazing to hear interviews of “Joe Sixpack” in Wisconsin or Iowa a month ago, and see these folks describe Kerry as a flip flopper. The idea that one must define oneself and one’s opponent in a campaign before he does it to you first is not exactly a revolutionary new concept in American politics. Somehow, though, Kerry was absent that day from his Campaign 101 course. Bush defined Kerry, plain and simple, and you virtually heard Bush commercials coming directly out of the mouths of voters asked their opinion of the senator.
As such, by September the Bush team had turned a sow’s ear into a silk purse, and despite the fact that poll data showed most Americans wanted a new president if they could find a comfortable alternative, Bush was up in most polls by about 5-10 points. The only arguable strategic blunder the Bush people made over four years was the decision to govern from the far right, animating their base rather than trying to win over uncommitted voters in the middle. Imagine, to choose one example, what the race would look like today if Bush had not invaded Iraq. No doubt he expected it to be a cakewalk, and if he had simply maintained the very functional status quo there rather than attacking, he would likely have had one – only with Kerry as the cake rather than Saddam.
Overall, however, the Rove team has been masterful at playing an extremely poor hand (mostly of their own creation). Doing so required three things, especially. One was to portray Bush as a strong and competent leader in scary times. Part of what was necessary to pull this off was to keep him almost exclusively in friendly and highly scripted venues. Thus he rarely ever does press conferences (and rather poorly regurgitates canned lines when he does), and his campaign appearances are for the faithful only. You actually have to be screened as a supporter or even do work for the campaign to get a ticket to one of these, and if you dare to ask a challenging question, even if you are the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, you will literally be harangued, forcibly removed, and arrested for trespassing.
The second requisite was to make sure the campaign discussion was not about Bush, but about a fabricated caricature of John Kerry. This is a remarkable testament to Bush’s vulnerabilities. Here is a wartime president (this generally boosts a president’s popularity), who benefited massively from 9/11 (his job approval rating on Sept. 10, 2001 was just above 50 percent, on Sept. 12, 2001 it was near 90 percent and remained high for a long time), but who has run a campaign focused on his opponent rather than on his own record.
Third, the Republicans have also resorted to some of the ugliest practices in modern American politics in order to take an election that they don’t seem to believe they can win on the merits. The Swift Boat episode was a shameful example of this. How low have we gotten when the supporters of a man who avoided Vietnam falsely attack another who went in his place, heroically risking his life there?
But most scandalous of all are the efforts by Republicans to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. This means tearing up thousands of Democratic voter registration cards in several states, dismissing new registrations – including those of young voters – on a bogus paper thickness technicality in Ohio, intentionally purging blacks from voter rolls and using state police to harass leaders in the black community in Florida, and attempting to “suppress” (yes, they actually used that word) the vote in Detroit. That’s just a partial list of some of the most shameful activities seen in American politics since before the civil rights movement a half century ago.
All three of these techniques were working effectively to boost the Bush candidacy until the debates. Then reality caught up to them. The Kerry they had portrayed didn’t show up on those stages, and neither, for that matter, did the advertised George Bush. This was more disastrous for Bush than simply losing a debate on points. Virtually his whole campaign, to the tune of over $100 million dollars, had been about negatively defining Kerry as unreliable. All that effort went up in smoke in the 90 minutes of the first debate, along with yet more of Bush’s credibility. Across all three sessions, it was actually Kerry who appeared steady and presidential, and Bush whose personality changed erratically, fluctuating from one unflattering character to another.
Now the race is as tight as Scrooge on payday. National polls are showing either a literal tie, or Bush up by a couple of points among likely voters. But, of course, the presidency is won state by state, and the best estimates of the Electoral College right now show Kerry with just over the 270 votes needed to win. There are a number of states still being hotly contested, such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and a few others, but the big prizes will be Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. All remain extremely close. Three states, including Florida, are showing up in some polls as dead even ties, and many others have one point differences between the candidates.
As such, predicting this race – especially two week’s out – is a fool’s errand. Since I like to think I’m no fool, I’ll resist the temptation and settle instead for some handicapper’s notes.
Among the advantages Bush brings into the last lap of the race, three are probably key. One is the extremely motivated base which will break their backs to push him across the finish line. This is the upside of Rove’s decision to govern from the extreme right.
A second major advantage is the continued presence of Ralph Nader in the race, a candidacy that Republicans have struggled mightily to support, though their politics could not be more different from Nader’s. But since a vote for Nader is generally a vote for Bush (just ask Al Gore), they have been only too happy to do so.
Finally, though one hates to say it, the control by Republicans of most state governments and all three branches at the federal level will continue to facilitate the sort of unfortunate activities described above, which may represent the margin of victory in some of these extremely close states. Additionally, if there is a repeat of the kind of calamity we saw four years ago – and this may be the only safe prediction about this election, especially as lawsuits have now already been filed, even before Nov. 2 – control of these institutions may prove crucial, as it did in 2000 with the Supreme Court majority’s disgracefully partisan decision to halt the counting of ballots and award Bush the presidency. Moreover, with Bush as commander-in-chief, the possibility of deploying an “October Surprise” foreign incident as a desperate attempt to stimulate rally around-the-flag presidential support cannot be dismissed.
As for Kerry, he has had momentum on his side since the debates, though it is unclear how far that will take him. He has made up 5-10 points in the polls, but may have now gone as far as he is going to get. Still, on the important momentum front, I’d rather be Kerry coming out of the debates than Bush, by quite a lot. Kerry also doesn’t have a cohort of voters excited to fight for him, but he’s got the near-equivalent, a cohort of voters excited to fight against Bush.
A second Possible Kerry advantage is that undecideds traditionally break against the incumbent by large percentages. Remarkably, there still remain about five percent of voters not yet sure of their choice. If Kerry gets, say, three-fourths of those votes, it may be enough to give him the Electoral College, possibly even without winning the popular vote.
Third, something like 18 percent of Americans today own mobile phones only, and do not have a land-line. Since pollsters are thus prevented from reaching them, they are not counted in any polls we’ve been seeing this year. It’s not farfetched to imagine that these folks are disproportionately young and urban, both groups which I would guess will trend toward Kerry in the voting booth. Similarly, large reservoirs of new voters may also not be showing up in surveys, and there is reason to believe that they will also trend toward Kerry. If all these assumptions stack up, current polls showing Bush and Kerry tied at 48 could actually be masking a 50-48 Kerry advantage, to pick one hypothetical example.
Fourth, I expect turnout to be quite strong this election. As a rule, increased turnout benefits Democrats, and that is likely to be especially true this year. My guess is that far more newly registered voters are motivated to vote against Bush than those anxious to vote for him, as confirmed by Republican efforts in several states to disenfranchise new registrants. Bush voters, other than those newly eligible by age, are more likely to already have been registered and voting in previous elections. Finally, there is the war in Iraq, which it seems to me can only help Kerry. I doubt there could be good news coming from there which would enhance Bush’s case, but it is quite conceivable that continued bad news might sway some additional votes against him.
All that said, this election is ridiculously impossible to call, and may well not even be resolved on Nov. 2. Given how much of America’s and the world’s future rides upon it, it is both stunning and sobering to realize how little might make the difference in determining its outcome.
Stay tuned for the last installment of this series, to be filed on Nov. 3. Heck, we might even have something to report by then.