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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russwinter who wrote (20223)	10/18/2004 7:55:24 PM
From: mishedlo	Respond to of 110194

here is another site on undecided. synapse.princeton.edu .....This brings me to the biggest point of all: undecided voters are not counted in point spreads, yet history suggests that most of them vote against the incumbent. This suggests that if Bush's true threshold is about 48%, which is where he is now. This is the big story among pollwatchers this week. =========================== Charles Cook: I don't have either candidate anywhere near 270 electoral votes. The only way you can do this is to take state level polling and push states with just one or two point leads into either the red or blue column. Given that a quarter of these polls are complete garbage and another quarter fairly suspect, I think that this exercise is very problematic. Unless someone happens to be privy to the much more sophisticated (and expensive) polling that is being conducted for the two parties, the chances of anyone accurately calling all of the 11 states that we are calling toss ups (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin) are pretty slim. If the margin in this race is more than one percentage point, the Electoral College vote won't matter, if it is inside of one percent, then there are too many states that are too close and the state level polling, even the good ones, won't be of much use, much less these three-dollar state polls that are flying over the internet. I cannot remember ever seeing a race where a well-known, well-defined incumbent won a half or more of the undecided vote. Generally it is at least two-thirds to three-quarters going to the challenger, somebody was throwing a figure around of 85 percent, don't know if that is right. But as a general rule, undecided voters overwhelmingly break toward challengers, unless the incumbent is relatively unknown, undefined, appointed or something. That's why it is a mistake for people to focus on the spread between the two candidates, the far more relevant figure is the actual vote percentage of the incumbent in a poll (or better, average of polls). If you assume that Nader/others get about two percent of the vote (down from combined 3.1 percent last time), if President Bush is at 46, 47 or maybe 48 percent of the vote going into election day, he probably loses, 49 percent, on the cusp, 50 percent wins. washingtonpost.com