--Good news for the president in two states Gore carried, Iowa and New Mexico; four-point Bush edge in Florida
By Tom Curry
National affairs writer
MSNBC
Oct. 31, 2004MILWAUKEE, Wisc. - With 24 hours of campaigning left, President Bush is holding on to leads over Democratic challenger John Kerry in two-thirds of states surveyed by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, including six of the nine that remain on most lists of crucial "battleground states" that are considered too close to call.
The 15 state polls were done for MSNBC, Knight Ridder and other media outlets.
Bush has a four-point lead in Florida, and a two-point lead in Ohio.
In Iowa, which Democratic candidate Al Gore carried by 4,144 votes last time, pollsters found that the president has a five point lead, 49 percent to 44 percent over Kerry.
In Arkansas and West Virginia the president has a lead of eight percentage points.
What’s disheartening for Kerry in the surveys’ findings is that so far Kerry has not been able to take a significant lead in any of the states Bush carried in 2000. The Massachusetts senator finds himself in the final two days of campaigning spending some of his time defending Democratic turf, Wisconsin and Michigan, even as he presses the attack in Ohio and Florida.
In New Mexico, pollsters found that Bush has 49 percent to Kerry’s 45 percent in the state.
If all of the polls’ findings were to be exactly replicated on Election Day, Kerry would lose three states that Al Gore carried four years ago, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Mexico, which together have 22 electoral votes, which, if Bush won them, would more than offset the loss of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes.
Of the 15 states surveyed by Mason-Dixon, Kerry has a lead, and a tiny one, in only one of those that Bush carried in 2000, New Hampshire, where 47 percent of respondents backed Kerry and 46 percent back Bush.
One of the sources of resilience for Bush seems to be that he enjoys greater loyalty from self-identified Republicans than Kerry does from self-identified Democrats. In Florida, for instance, Mason-Dixon found that 88 percent of Republicans support Bush, while 79 percent of Democrats back Kerry.
Terrorism continues to be one of the reasons Bush holds a lead in most battleground states. In the Minnesota survey, for instance, when asked who they feel would do a better job at handling issues related to homeland security and terrorism, 53 percent said Bush, while only 39 percent opted for Kerry. Voters in almost every state have stated they feel President Bush would do a better job dealing with terrorism. |
