What Poll and Registration Numbers Don't Reveal
Passion and Motivation to Vote Are Hard to Gauge
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 13, 2004; 11:43 AM
With less than three weeks before the election, President Bush may be in a politically precarious position going into tonight's critical debate with Sen. John F. Kerry. Anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggest that Democrats and independent groups that support Democrats have done a better job than Republicans at registering new voters in key battleground states. In a normal year, the difficulty in getting the newly registered to the polls might mitigate this advantage. But anti-Bush passions on the left are running exceedingly high, making it more likely that marginal voters -- people who rarely or never vote -- will turn out this year.
"Conventional wisdom tells us that a good ground game means three to four points on Election Day," said Sarah Leonard, a spokeswoman for America Coming Together, a coalition of liberal, feminist and environmental organizations that supports Kerry.
University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato wrote in his "Crystal Ball" campaign analysis earlier this week that he expects a high turnout that will favor Kerry. "We are tempted to argue that Bush actually needed his full 5 to 6 percent September lead to insure a narrow victory," he wrote.
Part of Sabato's rationale for his prediction is that he thinks poll respondents who say they are undecided today will break somewhat more heavily for Kerry when they get to the voting booth.
For more than a year, a number of independent advocacy groups that support Democrats have worked diligently to identify and register potential Democratic voters. Even Republicans acknowledge that Democratic-leaning groups have registered far more people than Republican supporters.
For instance, America Coming Together says it has registered 400,000 new voters nationwide, the vast majority in the battleground states of Pennsylvania (131,000), Missouri (120,000) and Ohio (85,000).
Moving America Forward, a Latino advocacy group founded by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), announced this week that it had registered 140,000 new, mostly Hispanic voters in the closely divided states of Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada. In Colorado, Florida and New Mexico – the three states that have partisan registration -- about 60 percent of the new registrations have been Democrats, 20 percent Republicans and 20 percent independents, according to a spokesperson for the group.
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