 2004 Presidential Election
President Bush is leading Senator Kerry 51% to 42% in Colorado according to a recent Rocky Mountain News/News4 poll. I guess it's the twin endorsements from the Rocky and the Post. 
From the article, "Millions of advertising dollars, more than a dozen campaign stops and months of swing state attention have left Colorado where it started in this presidential race - with President Bush up comfortably over John Kerry - a Rocky Mountain News/News4 poll found. Bush leads Kerry 51 percent to 42 percent, apparently breaking open a race that a News poll showed statistically tied in September and close two weeks ago...Kerry could still win Colorado, Weigel added, but he needs to win big with the state's largely young, newly registered voters - and he needs them to hit the polls hard. Republicans seem confident that won't happen, based on tracking numbers that show substantially more Republicans than Democrats have already voted here, either by absentee ballot or at early voting locations. Democrats who've seen similar numbers still hold out hope for an Election Day push that gets Kerry over the top. They say Republicans almost always do better in early and absentee voting."
James Humes penned a historial perspective on presidential elections nastiness for today's Rocky [October 30, 2004, "Fractious finales"]. Humes writes, "The Republicans were a brand new party founded to ban slavery in the western territories. Because the Democratic Party was split in 1860 with both Northern and Southern candidates, Abraham Lincoln won with a minority of the popular vote (although winning an electoral majority.) To the South and much of the North, Lincoln was considered not only a 'radical' but also a rube. Editorials labeled this ugly, ungainly hick from the West an 'ape' or 'baboon.'"
John Perry Barlow: "Tens of thousands more Americans died in vain after John Kerry inquired of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 'How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?' Unbelievably, in light of subsequent events, they essentially died defending Richard Nixon's pride and honor. Kerry had the balls to say so. Whatever he did or didn't do on the Mekong, he was a hero that day."
Electoral-vote.com: "We have a record 44 polls today. If this keeps up we are soon going to have more polls than there are states. Florida wins with seven new polls today. By Tuesday we may be able to make a pretty decent Gaussian distribution just from the daily Florida polls. The most recent Florida poll, from Zogby puts Kerry ahead there 47% to 45%, with a margin of error of 4%. Yesterday he was behind by 1% there, so this is a jump of 3% in one day for Kerry. Of the seven Florida polls, four put Bush ahead and three put Kerry ahead. It is as close as it could be there."
"Kerry has also pulled ahead again in Pennsylvania, 47% to 44%. yesterday it was tied at 47% each. However, Bush has now pulled ahead by 1% in Ohio, a gain of 4% from yesterday. Bush has also edged ahead in Colorado (by 1%) and Iowa (by 1%). According to Strategic Vision (R), New Jersey is tied, but to correctly interpret a Strategic Vision poll, you have to subtract about 4% or 5% from Bush's score, so although I have included it on the map in my effort to bend over backwards to be impartial. New Jersey is really safe for Kerry and the map score should really be Kerry 258, Bush 280."
"To get a better idea of what you can believe and what you can't, a good starting place is the sum of the strong and weak states given in the map legend. Currently Bush leads slightly with 218 votes in the electoral college. Kerry has 191, and 129 are up for grabs. It could go either way."
"Since Zogby is polling all the swing states every day now, the map is getting a bit one sided. Also, many of the pollsters are clearly partisan, monkeying with the data to make it look like their horse is ahead. There is no reason to doubt Zogby's honesty or accuracy, but it would be better to look at multiple pollsters. Consequently, I have made a new map that excludes the pollsters that admit they only work for one side. It does include pollsters like Gallup, which is officially neutral but appears to be including far too many Republicans in the samples. This new map always includes the most recent poll in each state, and then goes back up to 3 days to look for other polls to average in. A given pollster is used at most once and partisan pollsters are not used at all. The new map and spreadsheet use the suffix 'z' and are on the menu under the name Averaged map. It gives a score of Bush 263 to Kerry 248, but remember, tiny shifts in a few states can alter this score radically."
"Here is an update on yesterday's Zogby tracking poll. Kerry has pulled even with Bush. Each one is polling 47%. Four years ago, Gore was behind Bush by 3% at this point in the campaign, yet he ultimately won the popular vote. There is less room for movement tis time because there are fewer undecideds, but it is always possible that some voters will change their minds due to events occuring in the U.S. or abroad."
9:19:19 AM 
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