What polls, past say on election

By Robert G. Kaiser
The Washington Post

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WASHINGTON — As they gather for their convention in Boston, Democrats allow themselves hope. The news for the White House has been bad for months: chaos and casualties — but no weapons of mass destruction — in Iraq; the prison-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib; sharp rebukes from the Senate intelligence committee and the Sept. 11 commission; little or no credit from the public for economic recovery, according to surveys.

A vice president snapping an obscenity at a senator, a president whose once-confident body language often seems tense — Democrats like the looks of this, too.

Yet polls say the race remains virtually tied. President Bush somehow survives. Perhaps those hopeful Democrats are kidding themselves? What's up with public opinion anyhow?

The easy explanation is the evenly divided electorate. This election looks as though it could be a rerun of 2000. Or so many commentators have argued. But political analysts are a little like generals, prone to re-fighting the last war when they ought to be figuring out how the next one will differ. And this one will be different from 2000; you can bet on it. Only twice since World War II has an election closely resembled the one before it: in 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower skunked Adlai Stevenson for the second time, and in 1984, when Ronald Reagan dispatched Walter Mondale, just as he had trounced Jimmy Carter in 1980. In those two cases, popular incumbents beat the same, or nearly identical, opponents during good and peaceful times.

Historical comparisons

Mark Mellman, Sen. John Kerry's pollster, uses historical comparisons to argue that Bush is in trouble. Since 1964, Mellman notes, incumbents with approval ratings of less than 50 percent in the spring and summer of the year when they are running for re-election always have lost. This was the case in 1976, when Gerald Ford lost to Carter; in 1980, when Carter lost to Reagan; and in 1992, when Bush's father lost to Bill Clinton.

By contrast, incumbents with approval ratings exceeding 50 percent five and six months before the election always won: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.

Depending on the poll, Bush's approval rating is in the mid- to upper 40s.

Every incumbent who has won re-election in modern times had a double-digit lead over his opponent at this stage, Mellman notes. A single-digit lead isn't enough. That's what the first Bush had over Clinton in early summer 1992. Carter held a small lead over Reagan in early summer 1980, and it survived until late October in many polls. Both those incumbents lost. That puts Bush in company that he'd rather not keep.
 
Mellman is a Democrat promoting Kerry's candidacy. Would a Republican pollster see history differently? Richard Wirthlin, Reagan's pollster and a principal strategist in Reagan's 1980 and 1984 campaigns, was asked.

Wirthlin said he thinks Mellman is right. "It's a pretty solid picture," he said. The problem for Bush is that a challenger enjoys natural advantages that tend always to erode an incumbent's early lead: "If a challenger runs an effective campaign, and that always has to be assumed, you've got to have a margin for the incumbent, because you almost always lose support as the challenger becomes better known, and is better able — and I think this is often overlooked — to pick and choose which issues can be driven to the disadvantage of the incumbent."

In other words, an incumbent is stuck with his record, but a challenger has a more open field to play on, and has more leeway to pick the issues that seem to suit him, and the times, best. This was just what Reagan did so effectively in 1980.

1980 revisited?

This year's race feels a lot like 1980. Then, as now, a majority of the electorate disapproved of the incumbent's performance. Then, as now, the party out of power was energized, and had raised a lot of money. Carter, like George W. Bush, initially won the presidency by a narrow margin, and he never built strong, lasting support. Bush, of course, received a huge boost of popular support for his leadership after Sept. 11, and again from the invasion of Iraq, but initially high approval ratings withered in both cases.

Carter remained close to Reagan in the polls during the summer and fall of 1980. Indeed, Carter ran better in horse-race polls than Bush is doing. But Reagan ultimately won an electoral landslide. Why?

Because the country really wanted an alternative to Carter. Initially, many Americans were nervous about the idea of a staunchly conservative movie actor as president. A brilliantly run campaign, aimed from the beginning at reassuring voters that Reagan would be a perfectly plausible — and likable — president, laid the groundwork for the one presidential debate that year, eight days before the election. Reagan charmed the country that night. "There you go again," he said, brushing off Carter's attempts to depict him as an arch-conservative ogre. Reagan's question to the audience — "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" — proved devastating. Most Americans felt they were not.

Kerry ahead on economy

Today, according to the latest Washington Post poll, clear pluralities of voters think Kerry would handle domestic issues, including economic ones, better than Bush. Asked which candidate can be called a "strong leader," nearly as many apply that term to Kerry as to Bush. On the question of who would do a better job fighting terrorism, Bush has the advantage — 51 to 42 percent. But a clear majority also now thinks the war in Iraq was a mistake. And other recent surveys show that most Americans think the United States is "off on the wrong track."

Could we be seeing a kind of replay of 1980? "Every campaign is different," Wirthlin said. But "the parallels between our challenge (in '80) and what Kerry faces are quite striking."

One key task, he said, was to lay out a positive vision: "Running a more reassuring set of messages and images against a president who is under pressure and faces his own challenges is clearly advised."

So Democrats gathering in Boston can cite some historical reasons to be hopeful this year. Of course, history never is doomed to repeat itself.