corrente

Hello everyone! This is Tom Spencer, historian, writer, teacher, and author of the now defunct Thinking It Through blog over at the History News Network. I hope that some of you remember me. In the months since I hung up my other blog in November, I've also been guest blogging periodically over at Seeing the Forest as well.

Anyway, I'm excited to announce that I'm going to be guest-blogging when the mood strikes me here at Corrente with Leah, Lambert, Tresy and the Farmer. I'm really looking forward to it.

So, with all the preliminaries out of the way, on to tonight's post.

I'm still trying to figure out why Karl Rove is acting so cocky. Despite his bluster, W's poll numbers are continuing to drop and, as Ruy Teixeira pointed out a couple of days ago, W's not even doing that well in the swing states:

The Gallup report above provides further analysis of their latest poll. In the report, they break down states into red (Bush won by 5 percent or more), blue (Gore won by 5 percent or more), and purple (the margin of victory for Gore or Bush was less than 5 percent; this includes of course almost all the swing states the current campaigns are likely to focus on). In blue states, Kerry is ahead of Bush 55 percent to 42 percent among likely voters. Not unexpected. But in purple, swing states, he is ahead of Bush by even more, 55 percent to 39 percent.

Heck, Teixeira even points out that Kerry's not doing that badly in the red states:

In 2000, Gore lost the Gallup red states by 57 percent to 41 percent, carried the Gallup blue states by 55 percent to 40 percent, and the purple states (Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin) were a dead heat, at 48 percent to 48 percent. Today, the Gallup data (using likely voters and throwing in Nader to make the comparison more exact) show Kerry also losing in the red states, though by less (51 percent to 45 percent), running about the same in the blue states as Gore did in 2000 (55 percent to 42 percent), and doing much better than Gore did in the purple states (52 percent to 39 percent).

What this means is that Kerry's overall lead in the Gallup poll is in no way traceable to running up the vote in the blue states; he's simply holding the Gore lead in those states. Instead, Kerry's lead over Bush is driven by exactly what the Kerry campaign would want: strongly improved performance, relative to Gore, in swing states and whittling down Bush's lead in the red states.

In light of this analysis, it's interesting to look at a Barron's analysis by John Zogby of state-by-state polling (both his own and others) that shows Kerry holding 85 percent of the blue state (defined here in the traditional way as states Gore carried, no matter how small the margin) electoral votes plus New Hampshire, Bush holding only 63 percent of the red state electoral votes, and 136 electoral votes in play. The electoral votes in play, in Zogby's analysis, are distributed over twelve states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), eight of which were carried by Bush in 2000 and only four by Gore, meaning that the Republicans have much more turf to defend than the Democrats.

That turf may be very difficult to defend if the Gallup purple state calculations are any indication of how voters in this very similar group of in play swing states are leaning. Its a long way to November, I'll grant you, but the Kerry campaign has got to be happy with how this election campaign is starting out.

In short, this article about Rove is just bluster folks. It's just some plain old-fashioned "what me worry?" posturing. Rove's trying to keep the rats in his own party from jumping off the sinking ship.

W and the boys have looked over the same state-by-state polls. They're beginning to realize they're in real trouble -- and so are Republicans in congress.

If this trend continues (and it very well may not), I can't help but wonder what strange things we're going to see from a White House that is struggling mightily to stay in the political game.