Tentative answers to some big voting questions

A quick follow-up to my last election post about possibilities not included in the polls: 1) Looking at the latest batch of polls, I notice that some of them include Nader, but I haven’t seen any of them include Badnarik (if I’m wrong about this plase post a comment). Again, my hunch is that the Libertarian party candidate will be the equivalent of Nader for disaffected right-leaning voters. 2) Peter Wallsten wrote a story last week in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that the evangelical vote — a vital Bush constituency — might not turn out as much as the administration hopes:

An estimated 80% of the evangelical vote went to Bush in 2000. But Bush’s senior political strategist, Karl Rove, said after the 2000 election that the president might have won the race against Democrat Al Gore by a comfortable margin had 4 million more evangelicals gone to the polls rather than sitting out the election. This year, the Bush campaign and conservative groups have made enormous efforts to mobilize evangelicals, a group that includes more than 70 denominations, and which generally sees the Bible as the authoritative word of God, emphasizes “born again” religious conversion, and has committed to spreading its faith and values. Evangelicals are thought to make up about a quarter of the electorate. In appeals to evangelicals, the president’s supporters have pointed to Bush’s stance against abortion, his appointment of conservative judges and his support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. And yet a recent poll found a slight slippage in the president’s support. A poll published last week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 70% of self-described evangelicals or born-again Christians planned to vote for the president, down from 74% in the same survey three weeks earlier. That was not only a slight decline, but lower than the 80% to 90% support that Bush campaign officials had been forecasting. (emphases added)

UPDATE: Chris Sullentrop speculates that there’s another problem — the Republican effort to get out the evangelical vote also triggered greater turnout among Democratic-leaning non-voters:

It’s possible that Rove and the Bush campaign have turned up a huge trove of conservative nonvoters who were registered to vote four years ago and who therefore aren’t showing up in the numbers of new registered voters. Unless that’s true, however, the early indications are that Rove’s repudiation of centrist politics will backfire. The secret of Bill Clinton’s campaigns and of George W. Bush’s election in 2000 was the much-maligned politics of small differences: Find the smallest possible majority (well, of electoral votes, for both men) that gets you to the White House. In political science, something called the “median voter theorem” dictates that in a two-party system, both parties will rush to the center looking for that lone voter—the median voter—who has 50.1 percent of the public to the right (or left) of him. Win that person’s vote, and you’ve won the election. Rove has tried to use the Bush campaign to disprove the politics of the median voter. It was as big a gamble as any of the big bets President Bush has placed over the past four years. It has the potential to pay off spectacularly. After all, everyone always talks about how there are as many people who don’t vote in this country as people who do vote. Rove decided to try to get the president to excite those people. Whether Bush wins or loses, it looks like he succeeded.

3) The cell phone vote tilts towards Kerry — maybe. Zogby has a poll:

Polling firm Zogby International and partner Rock the Vote found Massachusetts Senator John Kerry leading President Bush 55% to 40% among 18-29 year-old likely voters in their first joint Rock the Vote Mobile political poll, conducted exclusively on mobile phones October 27 through 30, 2004. Independent Ralph Nader received 1.6%, while 4% remain undecided in the survey of 6,039 likely voters. The poll is centered on subscribers to the Rock the Vote Mobile (RTVMO) platform, a civic engagement initiative launched last March by Rock the Vote and Motorola, Inc., responded to this poll between October 27 and October 30.

The problem with this poll is that while it went after cell phone users, it apparently did not identify those people who have no land line — so there’s no way to know the magnitude of any sample bias in more traditional polls. [Isn’t another problem with this poll that they used Rock the Vote’s database, which might be nonpartisan in theory but is undoubtedly Democrat-heavy in practice?–ed. Zogby says “The results of the survey are weighted for region, gender, and political party,” so I’m assuming he’s compensated for that kind of sample bias — but this is open for debate.] Again, remember the electoral projection motto of danieldrezner.com: “I don’t know who’s going to win — and you don’t know either.” UPDATE: The three things mentioned in this post trend towards Kerry, so here’s a thought that trends towards Bush. If I remember correctly, last time around Zogby’s polling trended strongly towards Bush in the last week or two of the election, leading to one poll suggesting that California was a dead heat between Bush and Gore. Obviously, those polls underestimated Gore’s growing strength over the final few days. Now a lot of people are assuming that the polls will kick the same way this time, and that therefore a tie really means Kerry is up by a few percentage points. Click here for an example. However, what if the trend that the polls missed wasn’t the late surge towards a Democrat, but the last surge towards the incumbent party? I know this flies in the face of the incumbent rule, but it’s still worth keeping in mind. LAST UPDATE: Will Saletan et al at Slate get the final word:

Here is the math that matters: If all the states in which the data lean discernibly to either candidate vote as the polls suggest, the election will come down to Florida and Ohio. If Bush takes both, he wins. If Kerry takes either, he wins.