Bush Has One-Point Lead on Kerry - Reuters Poll
32 minutes ago Politics - Reuters
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) edged into a one-point national lead over Democratic Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) one day before a cliffhanger presidential election, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Monday.
Bush led Kerry 48-47 percent in the latest three-day national tracking poll, well within the margin of error, setting up a tense final day in an extraordinarily close race for the White House.
Bush and Kerry were deadlocked at 48 percent on Sunday.
"Each candidate continues to do well among his base constituency," pollster John Zogby said. Only three percent of voters remain undecided.
Kerry was favored by young voters -- those between the ages of 18 and 29 -- by 64 percent to 35 percent, but the size of the turnout in that voting bloc is one of the biggest unknowns of Tuesday's election.
Zogby said he was calculating young voters would account for 12 percent of the total vote, but a larger share would be a boost for the Massachusetts senator. "Each point it goes higher translates into two-thirds of a percent for Kerry if these numbers hold up," Zogby said.
Kerry had a 54-40 percent edge among newly registered voters, another unpredictable group that could be a wild card on Tuesday depending on how many actually vote.
But Bush's strongest issue, national security and the war on terror, moved into second place on the list of most important issues to voters. The economy has been the top issue since the poll started on Oct. 7.
Most of the three-day poll was conducted after a threatening new videotape from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) surfaced.
At this stage of the disputed 2000 election, Bush led Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites) by one point in the daily tracking poll.
The poll of 1,208 likely voters was taken Friday through Sunday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
The national poll showed independent candidate Ralph Nader (news - web sites), blamed by some Democrats for drawing enough votes from Gore to cost him the election in 2000, with 1.2 percent.
Kerry had the lead on Sunday in six of 10 battleground states being polled separately including Florida and Pennsylvania, but Bush had a four-point lead in the critical state of Ohio.
A tracking poll combines the results of three consecutive nights of polling, then drops the first night's results each time a new night is added. It allows pollsters to record shifts in voter sentiment as they happen. |
