Election Watch

October 7, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. FORTIER:  Welcome to Election Watch.  I'm John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute and we are here as part of a series of election analysis that we do each election year, and that has been going on for 22 years here.

This is our final election watch before the election but I want to remind you that there is a post-election election watch and that is November 4th, and this one, the Thursday after the election, and this one is not a breakfast but a lunch, and your last opportunity to see this crowd until 2006, where we expect you back for the midterm elections.

A couple of housekeeping notes.  You'll find in front of you a handout here, the always helpful handout.  This one is especially interesting.  We are vouching for the authenticity of it.  It was prepared on a 1972 IBM Selectric typewriter.  It was also faxed from Abilene, Texas.  So we are sure that this is quite accurate, and it includes of course all of the polling data on our presidential election, some interesting notes on congressional races, and for those of you who want to go further afield, you'll note at the end, even some polling on the coming Australian election which precedes our own.  Apparently the Afghan polls didn't get in, Karlyn, is that right?  Yeah; yeah.

We are in a different setup today, it's a crowded room, and we are actually following a very detailed set of instructions as to the height of the able, what can be said among us, and Karlyn of course is following all the rules perfectly but we've been told that Norman, Bill, their ties are three shades two loud for the rules, but we will allow them to keep their ties on so we don't repeat the Superbowl half-time show fiasco and--

MR.        :  We paid for this microphone.

MR. FORTIER:  Let me introduce our panel, a panel that is well-known to all of us, and as I mentioned has been a consistent group together for the past 22 years.

To my left, Karlyn Bowman is a resident fellow at AEI, senior editor of the American Enterprise Magazine, writes a column in Roll Call, and most of you know her as our expert on public opinion.

Bill Schneider, also a resident fellow at AEI, is best known as a political commentator on CNN.  Also writes regularly in a column that appears in National Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

And Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at AEI, is a senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission, Transition To Governing Project, writes a column in Roll Call, and you've  seen him here and in other places in the media.

We're going to briefly, to put a head on what people are going to talk about, we're going to have Bill go first, who's going to discuss the state of the presidential race, Norm is going to look a little again at the presidential race and some of the congressional races, and Karlyn is going to walk us through, as she always does, our public opinion work here.

Just to say a few things about what's happened since we last met, September 7th.  Political time has been compressed.  We have events happening nearly daily.  Certainly the debate in Miami was the large event.  Also the vice presidential debate last night.  But other things--hurricanes in Florida, Martha Stewart going to prison.  Unexpected events.  Release of a report yesterday from an inspector in Iraq about weapons of mass destruction.

So we certainly had a number of events, some shifting in the political winds, and I'm going to turn it over to Bill Schneider to start and tell us where we are in the race today.

MR. SCHNEIDER:  Closer.  That's where we are.  Interestingly, you're probably familiar with this phenomenon which I will now document, but after the debate in Miami last week, several networks, including CNN, told viewers of the debate, and they found--all of them said that they believed Kerry had beaten George Bush, did a better job, the average margin was 13 points, 47 to 34, but that was consistent across three different polls of people actually watching the debate.

But that wasn't the end of it because of course a lot of people don't get their impression of who won and what it meant for several days.  They've got to watch us in the media, they've got to listen to their friends, they've got to talk around the water cooler.  They've got to confirm their impressions.

So by the end of the weekend, Sunday night, four more organizations had done polls and the average margin of Kerry's victory was 38 points instead of thirteen.  It was 60 to 22.

So the impression of the Kerry victory grew and grew and grew.  Essentially, people didn't make up their own minds, or they did, tentatively, on the night of the debate, but the impression that Kerry had had a very good night and Bush had had a poor performance grew quite sharply over the next three days, which is why there are such things as "spin rooms" and all kinds of paraphernalia associated with not just winning the debate but winning the analysis and the ...[?].

Where does the race stand?  Well, I've looked at a poll of polls, and I can tell you that five organizations polled people before that debate and then on the weekend afterwards.  Before the debate, the five polls showed Bush leading Kerry by six points, an average of 49 to 43.  After the debate, Bush's support went down by just one point on the average.  Kerry gained three.

So that the average now shows Bush two points ahead of Kerry among likely voters, 48 to 46, which is clearly very close, although seven organizations polled registered voters, and in those polls, among all registered voters is was even closer.  It was a one point lead for Bush, 47 to 46 instead of 48 to 46.

A couple of important things about these numbers.  There's no poll of likely voters that shows Kerry leading.  Three of them show an absolute "dead heat" and four show Bush ahead by anywhere from two to five points, and a couple of polls of all registered voters, Kerry is slightly ahead.  All registered voters are not going to vote but what it does suggest is that the higher the turnout gets, the better Kerry is likely to do.

A word about likely voters.  That's always a guess, and there's something of a controversy going on right now about the actual voter pool and whether polls are missing the people who vote.

Registration all over the country has been going up, you've seen the figures even here, locally, in Virginia.  I think it's about double from what it was four years ago.  We're seeing so much of a surge of voter registration, that registrars are hiring people, paying them overtime, they say they can't cope with the flood of both new registrants and absentee voter applications because a lot of states have loosened up on their rules for participation.

Every indication, enthusiasm about the election, interest following the campaign, every indication is that there's going to be higher turnout this time, the country is unusually energized and divided in this election.

Does that advantage either party? Well, there's a scattering of evidence that Democrats have done extremely well in their voter registration campaign, particularly in swing states like Florida and Ohio.

The New York Times did a pretty thorough study and they showed that in those two key swing states, Florida, the obvious ground zero from 2000, Ohio which is widely described as the new Florida of 2004--voter registration, new voter registration has surged in Democratic areas, five, six hundred percent.

It's gone up in Republican areas as well, though not nearly as high.

I remind you that that's half the game, registering new voters.  The other half of the game is getting them to the polls.  A lot of people register to vote because it means signing a sheet of paper, sending it in, but actually getting them to turn out at the polls also requires a serious and expensive effort.  It remains to be seen whether either party will have the edge in delivering those new registrants to the polls.  We can't be sure at this point.

Pollsters have factored into their likely voter models all the indications that turnout is likely to be up.  They're estimating a higher turnout than last time.  There could be, there will be, you can count on this, some kind of a surprise at the end.

You often find that in midterm elections in 2002, and in 1994, there was a late surge of Republican voters.  It's easier to dominate a midterm election with a late surge of turnout because midterm turnout is so much lower than presidential years, so that if you can organize a heavy voter turnout, as Republicans successfully did in 1994 and 2002, then it's easier to pull off a surprise.  Turnout is generally higher in a presidential election.

It's more difficult and more expensive to pull off a late surprise.  But pollsters do take this into account.  They ask people if they're registered to vote.  Anyone who's registered to vote is eligible to become a likely voter.  It is more difficult to become a likely voter if you've never voted before, no question about it, but let me assure you that that's not the only way.

There is a myth out there, that the only way you can become a likely voter is if you voted in the past.  That's not true.  That's one of the tests.  But there are other tests.  Interest in the election, enthusiasm about the election.  There are lots of questions that various polling organizations ask, that admit you or give you a score that will allow you into the likely voter pool.

True, new registrants will have a more difficult time because they are less likely to vote historically.  But if they show interest and enthusiasm and are following this campaign and show a determination to get out there and vote, which some of them do, then they can certainly get into the likely voter pool, and Democrats of course are counting on this late surge of new registrants to pull a surprise in November.

One final observation, an interesting one about what's happening in the campaign, that I'll simply point out to you, Norm has said many times, I've said many times, an election with an incumbent running for reelection is always a referendum on the incumbent.

The question that the voters face is should they rehire George Bush or should they fire him, the way they did his father, the way they did Jimmy Carter in 1980?

And that's always the central issue in the campaign.  This election campaign, so far, looks a little bit different.  It looks much like a referendum on John Kerry.  Here is a piece of evidence, interesting, from the Tuesday night debate, the vice presidential debate in Cleveland.

We actually looked at the transcript--I sort of play the role of the fact check nerd on CNN--

MR. FORTIER:  Factcheck.org or com?

MR. SCHNEIDER:  No.  I have no relationship with George Soros.  And one of the things we fact-checked, which I was curious about was: How many times did John Kerry's name get mentioned in that debate?  How many times did George Bush's name get mentioned in the debate?

The answer is, after exhaustive and careful checking, Kerry's name was mentioned 65 times in the debate.  Bush's name was mentioned eight.  Okay, I said, maybe that's not fair, because many times Dick Cheney referred to the president rather than Bush.

So we looked at the transcript more carefully and looked at all the times the president was mentioned, not John Kerry, when he is president, but when it specifically referred to President Bush.

So if you add together the references to Bush or the president, meaning Bush, the total number of mentions of Bush or the president equals thirty-five, still considerably lower than the number of times Kerry was mentioned, which suggests that the Republicans, in that debate at least, and on the campaign trail as well, I believe, have been pretty successful in casting this election, this campaign as a referendum on John Kerry, which is very strange and unusual.  It's not supposed to be.

That debate, over and over again, talked about Kerry's record as senator from Massachusetts, his record on taxes, his record on defense, what he said about Iraq, one way or the other, and John Edwards valiantly defended John Kerry but didn't spend a great deal of time going after the Bush record, and if you saw the speech that the president gave yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, the Democrats are calling that his Mulligan speech, the do-over to sort of set out the positions he didn't do very well in the Miami debate last week--he took that opportunity to set the agenda as, once again, a referendum on John Kerry.

A lot of that speech was more an attack on Kerry than a defense of his own record.  It is a very strange and unusual thing.  I don't know if it can last through the campaign but it is something that the Republicans have obviously deliberately done and so far appears to be working, and the strangest thing to me was that the day the Iraq study group report came out, saying clearly that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction or a nuclear program since the end of 1991, I was struck by the fact that John Kerry was not really heard from yesterday and George Bush didn't say a word about it.

So the campaign is taking a very odd turn, so far looking more like a vote on Kerry than a vote on Bush.

MR. FORTIER:  Norm Ornstein.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Thanks, John.  I'm gratified to see we have such a large crowd, a lot of people of course who've been here as regulars, and we know them all well, and several people I've net met before but I won't name names because you never know what videotape might emerge later on.

Let me start where Bill left off, and I do want to point, yet again, to a striking figure in your handout.  On that first page, which looks at matchups in October of the election year for a president seeking reelection, and again, October 1980, Jimmy Carter, 44, Ronald Reagan, 40.  The fact is that in October of 1980, the early part of October, we were facing a referendum on Ronald Reagan and it wasn't until the debate, one debate ten days before the election, that it turned back into a referendum on George Bush--or excuse me--on Jimmy Carter.

We are, I think, starting to move back towards more of a referendum on the president because we had one debate which basically got John Kerry into the game.

It began to move him to a point where he could clear the bar and be seen by voters who are uneasy about the status quo as a safe harbor.  He's not there yet and I think the vice presidential debate, the strategy of John Edwards, as much as anything, was to continue that movement towards reassuring people that Kerry has plans for what's ahead and that he is a safe harbor.

And we see in the tightening of the polls, in a variety of places, that that's working a little bit.  Now it's not there, and clearly, we see a different approach on the part of the president, but it's an approach that I think leads us, as we head towards the end, if Kerry does get a little bit further over that bar, towards an increasingly negative and acrimonious campaign, and you saw the unease of the Bush people, that it could turn back into that referendum on the incumbent with the very harsh speech he gave yesterday, that the President of the United States would be the one carrying that water and really hitting the challenger directly, I think is a sign of that.

It's also a sign that in an election this close, as Bill mentioned, turnout becomes key but the focus is really on the bases, and if you are an incumbent and you know voters are uneasy about the policy directions we're taking, your "ace in the hole" is to get your voters so charged up, that they turn out to the polls because they're with you no matter what's happening on the ground, and the best way to turn out your bases, once again, is to scare them to death.

Both parties are doing this and we saw, of course, the starkest example of it with the Republican National Committee mailing of about ten days ago, that focused on West Virginia and Arkansas, that said elect Kerry and he'll take your bibles away.

But we've seen it as well in the very active underground campaign to scare college students into believing that the reelection of George Bush means the reinstatement of the draft.

And you can believe that that's having some impact by the action of the House Republicans, bringing up without hearing or notice, under suspension, the Charlie Rangel bill to reinstate the draft, so that they could reassure people that there were no plans to reinstate a draft.

And I think we'll see it as well with an aggressive push by Democrats on the stem cell issue.

But if this stays in the dynamic that we have, I think we're going to see a level of acrimony and negativity that goes beyond what we've seen before, and keep that in mind for the post-election period.  First, a good part of it is going to be Democrats and their surrogates warning about voter fraud, and warning about plans to keep their constituents from voting.

Now they have some reasons out there to be concerned, including in some of the rulings made by Republican secretaries of state in Ohio and in Florida, and they have reason to be concerned because the heightened level of security which will focus on the possibility, the real possibility of an attack on the election, will mean security at polling places that could deter people from voting.

And we've had a sustained campaign to de-legitimize the touchscreen machines, a campaign which has not been helped by the actions of the companies that make those machines, but you have to be a little fearful here, that if the election is close, the feeling on the part of voters who've lost, that it was stolen, will be considerably greater than it was the last time.

And we have a lot of other elements out there that could make it even worse and could make the 36-day ordeal we faced in 2000 look like a picnic by comparison, if we're not lucky.

Bill mentioned registration and it is absolutely striking to see the increases in numbers.  I'd just make one other small point.  Wisconsin and Minnesota have same day voter registration.

The reason Jesse Ventura got elected governor was because a large number of young people who had paid no attention to politics suddenly got turned on by Jesse and went to the polls on election day, registered and voted, and we're going to see--many states now, the registration has closed.  In those that are still active, you'll see a different kind of campaign and you may see a late October surprise, something that turns on voters you want or turns off those you don't, at the end.

Also keep in mind that early voting has begun in a large number of states and has in fact expanded extensively.  In Iowa, 12 percent of voters have already voted, many of them voting before any of the debates, others having voted before we're going to have of course a whole series of potential surprises, and there will be many before the election itself.

Now you could posit that most of those who are voting are in the party bases, they get their ballots, they vote because they know how they're voting, but it's not clear that that's the case, and it means that as we project ahead and look at these late events, it's even more difficult to figure out what's going to happen or what impact they will have.

MR. SCHNEIDER:  Some of them probably voted for Howard Dean.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  And some of them voted for Howard Dean and no doubt many, including apparently some of the swift boat people, voted for Ralph Nader.

But when you look ahead and think that we have these Afghan elections which could result in something absolutely wonderful or could result in a debacle, the Australian elections, which could end up being another set-back for the president's coalition of the willing.  Where is Osama?  We still have a month and a half in the hurricane season in Florida and when I was down in Florida for the debate, there were parts of the state, Vero Beach, for example, still without electricity, even as recently as a couple of days ago, that could affect turnout.

Will Bill Clinton get healthy enough to get out there in the final two weeks to campaign in minority areas, and that would have probably a dramatic effect on turnout there.

The price of gasoline, and the possibility, even though that has not seemed to have a significant effect on prices at the pump right now, those could shoot up within the next week or two and make a difference.

What if US Airways goes out of business before the election?

MR.      :  [inaudible].

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Yes.  Well, not just the shuttle.  The loss of frequent flier miles and large numbers of jobs that would not be filled immediately.  And then of course Friday, there's an enormous amount of nervousness in both camps about the job numbers that will be released before the debate.

The common wisdom, which has been wrong every single month for at least the last six, is an increase of about 150,000 jobs, which is barely more than replacement level.  That would not be horrible news for President Bush but it certainly wouldn't be particularly good news.  And then many other things happening.

As we look at the House and Senate races, they're sitting, wondering basically whether this is going to end up for members running for reelection, or challengers facing them, as a focus on the micro level, what will happen between those candidates and within those races, or will there be some kind of a late trend?  And how much will the push in turnout, that is going to be basically done b the parties at the national level and by their outside group, shape congressional races in a secondary way?

We could see, for example, a sharp increase in turnout in a state where the internal dynamics favor one candidate but the larger forces could overwhelm that candidate.

Without any kind of larger force, Republicans are sitting in good shape in both the House and the Senate.  In the House of Representatives, the most striking thing is that the focus of intense activity has narrowed to an unprecedentedly low level.  We're talking many fewer than 30 seats that are really the chief focal point of both parties and it may be as few as fifteen or eighteen.

Now they have a wider zone and we'll see resources go to a larger number if trends continue or move in a different direction.  But the smaller the number of seats actively under contest, the greater the prospect that Republicans can hold their own because those seats are relatively evenly divided between the two parties.

One other interesting little X factor here, if there are Texas reporters in the hall, maybe we can get a comment.  Three ethics slaps at Tom DeLay in one week.  Will that have any impact in Texas, where many of the charges against DeLay, and at least one of the slaps taken by the ethics committee related to his effort to redistrict the second time around, that has placed five Democratic seats in Texas in jeopardy.

Will that have any impact on voters in Texas?  Probably not but it'll be interesting to see if it gets the kind of coverage in Texas that it's getting here, and it might actually energize some Democratic voters who otherwise have no particular reason to run.

But those seats make the Democrats' hopes of gaining a significant number, even to get back in the hunt, much less capturing a majority, dim.  They need a much larger tide and one question there is whether the actions of the Congress in the final couple of weeks here fall apart and leave a bad taste in people's mouths, reinforce the notion of a "do nothing" Congress, or can they at least get together and pass a intelligence reform that has a larger number able to declare victory and show that they're doing something.

In the Senate, Democrats have the disadvantage of having more seats at risk and more difficult seats in play, and basically each party has one seat that it holds that's pretty much a goner.

For the Democrats, the Georgia seat, and for Republicans, the Illinois seat.  Democrats of course are behind effectively 51 to 49.  If John Kerry wins, they need a net gain of one to capture the majority, and if that's the case, then John Edwards can be in the Senate and say that there are many Republicans he's never met in that body.  Or two, if Bush wins.

With South Dakota remaining too close to call, even if one gives a little edge to incumbent Tom Daschle there, we're probably seeing a race decided by the thousands of votes, and another greater controversy over Indian voter registration and turnout could make a difference.

Florida polls that probably don't mean very much but that show a dead heat between Betty Castor and Mel Martinez.

Louisiana with its bizarre all-candidate race on November 2nd, followed likely by a runoff that is probably unpredictable at this point.

South Carolina where Jim DeMint, the Republican, has a lead, but a case of foot-in-mouth disease may create a much tighter race there.

And North Carolina, where it appears that Erskine Bowles maintains a small but steady lead over Richard Burr, leaves Democrats in a position where they could end up losing two or three easily of their own seats, putting them that much more in a hole.  Gaining one, they have three opportunities but in each of those three Republican races, in Oklahoma and Colorado and in Alaska, the surveys suggest a narrow Democratic lead but a lead that's close enough, given the strongly Republican nature of Alaska and Oklahoma, and the intense competition in Colorado overall, that leaves it anything but a sure thing that they can hold their lead.

For those candidates, a little bit of a national tide towards the Democrats, a little bit more of a desire for change could make the difference between continuing to be in the minority or actually having a very narrow majority to go with either their own president or George Bush in a second term.

But finally, let me just say however we end up, the chances of some kind of bipartisan relationship and reasonable governing process over the next couple of years is, to use a phrase that's a favorite of President Bush's, slim to none and "Slim just left the building."

MR. FORTIER:  Karlyn Bowman.

MS. BOWMAN:  Thank you, John.  I'd like to begin by thanking Bryan O'Keefe and Michael, who's done so much work to make this handout possible, and we'll try of course, before the election, to send one more of these out to all of you by e-mail, and also to say a great vote of thanks to the conference staff who I think are even busier than we are in this election season.

I'd like to begin with a note about the business that I watch most carefully, the polling business.  Interestingly, it took Gallop two weeks to tell the country who had won the 1960 presidential debate.

In less than two hours after the first debate, in my inbox I had polls from several major organizations.  I'm not sure that's progress but it tells us a lot about technological changes in the polling business.

Let me just go through some of the polling data on the big issues as I have in past sessions.

First, Bush maintains a strong lead in nearly every poll on dealing with terrorism.

Second, although there are still few signs that the public believes the economy is improving, John Kerry has yet to convince voters that he has a clearer plan than the president for making it better.

Gas prices, as Norm mentioned, while clearly a hardship for some, haven't yet had a big impact on the race.

John Kerry has regained the lead as the candidate who can better handle the economy, something he had to do to be competitive in this race.

Third, the public remains divided on the wisdom of the Iraq war.  There are also considerable doubts, as the data on the bottom of page two of the handout show, about Iraq's future.

The number of people citing Iraq as the most important problem facing the country has gone up in nearly all recent polls.

The verdict on the president's handling of the situation there is decidedly negative.  If there is good news for the president on Iraq, it is that the American people still don't think that Kerry could do a better job there.

Fourth, health care, an issue that has been a secondary issue thus far in the campaign.  Americans, interestingly, are more worried about having their health care benefits cut back than they are about losing their jobs.

If it comes up in the second or third debate, it could rise on the pollsters' radar screen once again.  Kerry, like other Democrats generally before him, has a big advantage on handling health care .

Fifth, the polls have been see-sawing back and forth because the country is closely divided.

In the ABC News/Washington Post poll released last night, 37 percent of the likely voters sampled were Democrats, 36 were Republicans.  I go back to that stunning Gallop figure from January of 200 when they combined all of the interviews that they'd taken in 2003 on the part of the identification measure, 45.5 percent of Americans considered themselves Republicans and 45.2 percent considered themselves Democrats.

This is a rare moment of partisan parity, certainly in the 70-year history of public opinion polling.

As I mentioned at the last session, I'm watching three large and important groups--Independents, white Catholics, and the group the pollsters call "some college."  The polls of the past few weeks have suggested that these groups are in fact key to winning the election and we've included for you in the handout Gallop's and Pew's numbers on these and some other groups in the news, and you see a lot of volatility among these groups.

I think all of us on the panel feel that Nader will do less well than he did four years ago.

Just to give you some data, Nader is on the ballot in 33 states, there are legal challenges in nine, the Libertarian candidate, Badnarik, is on the ballot in 49 states, no legal challenges to that status.

The Green Party candidate, Cobb, on the ballot in 28 states with one legal challenge, and the Constitution Party candidate, Peroutka, on the ballot in 37 states with no legal challenges overall.

So I think the impact of those minor party candidacies, the cumulative impact is probably something that we should be watching.

Let me touch on something that we haven't talked about at all this year.  The presidential vote is the most personal vote that people cast.

The boost that George Bush got after the GOP convention was in part a result of a good convention, in part the result of a good speech, but I think it was much more about the fact that people Bush reminded people of what they liked about him.

He connected with the American people again, and of course Laura Bush has always connected with the American people.

Americans, as we know, are not very well-informed about the issues.

An Annenberg polling in late September, a bare majority, 51 percent, knew that Kerry favored changing the recently-passed Medicare legislation to allow reimportation of drugs from Canada.  The rest of the people in the poll though that either Bush favored the idea, both candidates favored it, or neither candidate did.

Only 47 percent, in the separate question, knew that it was Bush who favored allowing workers to invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market.

Only a third knew that George W. Bush favored eliminating the estate tax.

Sixty percent knew that George Bush favored making the recent tax cuts permanent but the other 40 percent said that Kerry or both candidates or neither candidate did, and so on and so forth.

When people who watched the first debate were surveyed by the LA Times after the debate, seven in ten said that neither of the candidates said a phrase or a sentence or something that stuck in their minds after the debates.

Yet when pundits and others score these debates, and assess the speeches, they tend to dwell on which candidate got his facts right or wrong.  This is unlikely to sway public opinion.

As polling guru Dan Yankelovich reminds us the press is the chief drum-beater for factual information, but the public, he says, doesn't distinguish between facts and values.  Yankelovich says the public weighs what they hear from others against their own convictions.  They assess the views of others in terms of what makes sense to them and, above all, they consult their feelings and their values.

Information is important, but as Yankelovich says, it is not the royal road to judgment.

Gallop has found throughout this campaign that people have said that a candidate's vision and leadership is more important to them than his positions on issues.

So I think it's very important at this stage of the campaign to look at how people are evaluating the candidates personally, and unfortunately, the polling evidence, here again, is somewhat ambiguous.

Both men have similar favorable to unfavorable ratios.  When asked by Newsweek whether Bush or Kerry are personally likeable, equal numbers say that they are.

When asked by CBS, however, which candidate is someone you like personally, Bush has a very big edge.

When asked by Fox which candidate is best described as genuine, Bush leads by 12 points.  Kerry is particularly weak for a Democrat on the so-called compassion issues.  In only one of the four new October polls to ask this question, Does Kerry have a large lead as caring about people like you, or understanding the problems of ordinary people?

In the three other polls Kerry and Bush are very closely matched.  Democratic candidates usually lead on this issue by a mile.  It doesn't mean they always win but they almost always have the advantage and Kerry doesn't.

Making compassionate conservatism a centerpiece of the 2000 campaign was and is important to Bush's current strength.

Those early impressions in our politics are very important.  Bush of course accentuated that with No Child Left Behind, and in recent polls, Bush and Kerry are competitive on the education issue, again a big surprise for a Republican.

If Kerry loses this election, some of it will surely be explained by Bush's strength on the commander in chief and the war on terror.  But at least some of it will be explained by Kerry's failure to gain ground on a traditional Democratic strength and that is this cluster of issues that people call the compassion issues.

One final note.  On election day, Americans will go to the polls for the 55th consecutive time, a record unbroken in modern democracies.  The bitter divisions that permeated Washington in 2000 never infected the rest of the country, which I think speaks to the extraordinary resiliency of our democracy.  At no time in that 38-day imbroglio in the aftermath of the election did Americans see the situation as a crisis.

Their views of the Supreme Court did not change.  Although many felt that Bush was not legitimately elected, every poll showed that people accepted him as a legitimate president.

In a question that asked people whether Bush won fair or square, it was asked many times in that 36-day period whether he won on a technicality or whether he stole the election, consistent pluralities said that Bush won fairly.  Around 20 percent consistently said that he stole the election.  Nearly everyone thought that his or her vote was counted correctly.

What might be different about this election than the one in 2000 was that in poll after poll in 20002 Americans said that they could live comfortably with either candidate.  It's less clear that that will be the case again this year.  So let us hope that whoever wins, wins big.  Thank you.

MR. FORTIER:  We're going to take some questions.  I'm going to ask a moderator's question while we get the mikes ready.

First, a point on the Senate, that Norm had mentioned that if the Democrats were to pick up one Senate seat and Kerry were to win, they would take control of the Senate.  That would actually only happen after a few months.

Senator Kerry would vacate his seat, Massachusetts has passed a law now that would leave the seat vacant, and you would have a 50 to 49 Republican Senate until that seat would likely be filled by a Democrat, and then you'd have an either Senate with John Edwards breaking the tie.

So you'd have something like the start that George Bush had, a close Senate and a switch of control somewhere in the middle.

The question I'm going to pose to Norman and to Bill is on the question of this increased registration, we've seen in the motor-voter registration law, that when people are able now to register when they get their licenses, when they go to social services, that that increases registration significantly but hasn't really increased voter turnout.

Is this different because the registration's going on during a campaign?  Is it because it's motivated or it is more like the motor-voter experience where we expect not much change in turnout because of that?

MR. ORNSTEIN:  I would expect that it would lead to an upsurge in turnout this time and it's not just that mechanically, Americans come together and other groups are out there rounding up signatures to get people registered.  Hearts are beating a little bit faster now but, you know, to imagine that the surge in turnout is going to be ten, twelve, fifteen percent of voters is not accurate.

And keep in mind, as well, that really, we're talking about the increase in turnout in the small number of battleground states.  There aren't the same kinds of efforts going on in states that are not battlegrounds.

MR. SCHNEIDER:  I would just point to this figure.  44 million, 43.5 million people watched the vice presidential debate this time.  Four years ago, the number was less than 30 million.

I mean, there are just many, many indications that there's a lot more interest, a lot more division in this election than before, and that there will be higher turnout.  How much higher, where it will be concentrated, to what party's advantage, not clear.  Much depends on the organizations that are put forth, and that tends to vary state by state.

In some states last time, there was a heavy turnout by African American voters to benefit the Democrats, like Florida, where there was a surprisingly large minority turnout.  In other states, the African American turnout just didn't materialize because it wasn't well-organized.

I like to say that, you know, there are two kinds of 50/50 elections.  Clearly, 2000 was a 50/50 election but as Karlyn indicated in a fascinating comment, that was 50/50 where people were saying "whatever," they could live with either candidate.

It's like taking a poll and asking people, What would you prefer--what do you like better--apple pie or chocolate cake?  The answer is probably going to be pretty close to 50/50 because most people say, I don't know, apple pie, chocolate cake, I like them both, and they pick at random.

A lot of people in 2000, when the election was very closely divided, were saying one day they like Bush, one day they like Gore, they felt as if they could live with either candidate.  In that election, Bush definitely had the image of a moderate, somewhat in the mode of his father, a compassionate conservative, he had governed as a conciliator in Texas and he didn't have the image of a hard-line conservative Republican.

So a lot of people thought they could, believed that they could live with either guy.  This 50/50 is different.  This 50/50 is much more intensely divided, it's much higher-pitched, you've got chocolate cake haters and apple pie haters, and that's something that we didn't see in 2000.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  One other comment on the registration side is that we're going to see acrimonious battles, including leading to the courts on these issues.

In Florida, where the secretary of state basically said she would not count a large number of ballots because of what is a technicality in effect.  They had not checked the box saying they were citizens but the signature basically put them on record.  That's been taken to court.

In Ohio, where the secretary of state said that registration had to be done on very heavy paper, almost cardboard, if it were going to be counted, instead of just regular paper, he's now stepped back from that.

But there have been basically orders issued by the secretaries of state, in both cases, to local jurisdictions about how to count votes and how to count registrations, that are being challenged in a number of places, and it just adds to the problem that Karlyn was talking about, of people believing that they may be illegitimately barred from voting.

MR. FORTIER:  Okay.  We're going to go to the audience.  Please identify yourself and wait for the microphone.  We'll start here.

QUESTION:  Miles Benson with Newhouse Newspapers.  This is obviously a very tight election.  What we've seen, jobs numbers very discouraging for the incumbent.  We've seen this recent weapons of mass destruction report undermining the rationale for going to war in Iraq.

We've heard Ambassador Bremer say there were not enough troops on the ground to do the job.

We had the vision of the debate performance of the president, the other day, widely agreed, subpar performance, yet the race remains very, very close.

What would it take to break this race open if these things don't do it?

MR. FORTIER:  Did people hear through the microphone that question?  Okay.  I won't repeat it then.  I'll throw it out.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Take it back to those 1980 numbers, Miles.  People are reluctant to move from the devil they know to the devil they don't know until they're comfortable with the devil they don't know.  There's another factor here, though, which Karlyn emphasized, which I think is very important, and while I looked at the first debate much more as Kerry v. Kerry than Kerry v. Bush, this was Kerry's opportunity to get over that bar of acceptability as a safe harbor.

Now I think Bush's performance in the remaining two debates becomes significant because there are going to be large numbers of people unhappy about where we've been going but who still retain the sense of Bush as a leader in turbulent times.

That may give him a little bit of a breakwater against a tide overcoming him.  If he, like Al Gore, takes the second debate and the third debates without learning, apparently, the lessons from the first one, then he may lose that status and then the unhappiness that people have over the current situation I think would be a much bigger problem for him.

But given that, we're likely to see it stay fairly close.  What we also know, though, is that we are a prisoner of events and the president, in some ways, is a prisoner of events.

An incumbent can control some of those events, but pick one example.  Ramadan starts in less than ten days.  We know a year ago, there was a major offensive, five car bombings at the beginning of Ramadan.

We know that the terrorists in Iraq would like to ratchet up their activities leading to our election and their election, and we know that Mr. Allawi, to his audience at home, gave a rather grim assessment, considerably more grim than the one that he gave here.

If we get a lot of turmoil and some terrible set of incidents, that may dominate the news enough that if Kerry can continue to get over the bar, that the president really does have a problem in late October.

MR. FORTIER:  You were next and please identify yourself, and we'll try to spread it around the room, so--

QUESTION:  David Franke, New Media News Corp.  I have two questions.  One is on the charts here, the October matchup.  You have Kerry with 46 percent of the vote while in the first column at the bottom, the Gallop shows Kerry with 49 or 48 percent, so those don't seem to--

MS. BOWMAN:  One are registered voters and the others are likely voters.

QUESTION:  One's registered and one's--

MS. BOWMAN:  [inaudible] likely.  Yeah.  We want to compare like to like in that column on the right.  So those are all the registered voter numbers.

QUESTION:  Okay.  And the second question I had is the one group that I've heard is enthusiastic this year about Bush would be the white evangelicals, the Christian right, and yet I've seen no polling data or statistics as to whether they are actually coming out with new voter registration, and how much more likely they are to vote and so forth.

Do you have any data on that?

MS. BOWMAN:  You should look at the Annenberg poll, they do have some data on their Web site.  They did an interesting poll, a while ago, in which they argued that the white evangelicals were about 27 percent of the total vote.  This year, that's larger than Hispanics and African Americans combined.  They appear to have been contacted more often than African Americans and Hispanics by the Kerry campaign, white evangelicals being contacted by the Bush campaign, and they appear much more enthusiastic in that poll about Bush than they were four years ago.

MR. FORTIER:  If you remember, some of you may have been here, Karl Rove sat at this very table and mentioned that they had anticipated four or five million more evangelical votes in their model in 2000, and they weren't sure where they had gone.  So that's certainly a focus of theirs.

I'm almost, turned my back to this side of the room but I want to spread it around, and then I'll go over here.

QUESTION:  I'm Jeffrey Winnegrad [ph].  I edit a newsletter called Focus Israel and I have two questions.  Number one, what do you estimate the importance of the Muslim vote in states such as Michigan and New Jersey and perhaps elsewhere?

And number two, has Bush made any inroads with the Jewish community?  Thanks.

MR. SCHNEIDER:  There's a scattering of evidence concerning Muslim voters, I don't know how reliable it is.  There have been some polls that I think are reliable, that indicate a very sharp turn against President Bush among Muslim voters.  Is that your impression, Karlyn?

MS. BOWMAN:  That's right [?].

MR. SCHNEIDER:  That the Muslim vote, which is important in a couple of states, Michigan, Illinois, which is already strongly for Kerry--Michigan appears to be, I wouldn't say safe, certainly not safe, but tilting towards Kerry.  The Muslim vote, small as it is, appears to be anti Bush.  I'm not sure it's pro Kerry but certainly anti Bush.

Has Bush made inroads among Jewish voters?  You might imagine he would.  He's been the staunchest pro Israel president.  Kerry has made it clear, there is no daylight between him and Bush.  You may want to quarrel with that, but essentially, the message that Kerry gives is he takes the same position on Israel and the Middle East that Bush does but he would be more aggressive in pursuing a peace plan, he says, than the Bush administration has been.

And so far, what we know of the Jewish vote is that Bush has not made significantly higher inroads.  That's a bit of a surprise.  I think he got 19 percent of the Jewish vote last time, 21, something like that.  The Jewish Republican vote has been as high as 35, some estimates are 40 percent for Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984.

It doesn't appear that Bush will get anything close to that.  He will have trouble breaking 30 percent this time, because while many Jewish voters appreciate his support for Israel, they don't see a big difference between him and John Kerry on that issue and they see huge differences on everything else, and Iraq, anger over the Iraq war may be far more important than the very minor differences between them over Israel.

MR. FORTIER:  We had a question here.  If you could wait for the mike and identify yourself.  Long distances to cover.  Right in the middle there.

QUESTION:  I'm John Mulligan from the Providence Journal and I want to thank Karlyn for reminding us of a good pre debate angle and that is what you consider to be Kerry's surprising weakness in these Democratic areas of traditional strength, and I just want to ask the panel about how that sets the table for the debate.

What can Kerry do about it and what can Bush do to maintain that unusual advantage?

MS. BOWMAN:  Well, for Bush, interestingly, I think the town hall format may enable him, if he does well, to connect with people, and to strengthen an area where he's shown surprising strength thus far.

MR. SCHNEIDER:  Karlyn mentioned these figures from the Gallop poll.  They've asked people several times, What's more important to your vote? the candidates' positions on the issue or their personal qualities of leadership and vision?

Leadership and vision, personal qualities, have consistently been more important than the issues, and importantly, those who cite personal qualities like leadership and vision, vote for Bush.  Those who cite the issues vote for Kerry.  So clearly the issues are working for Kerry.

There's one issue, really only one where Bush consistently has the advantage, and that's the war on terror.

On Iraq, people who say their big concern is Iraq, the economy, health care, they all vote for Kerry.

So the personal qualities have tended to favor Bush, particularly strength, leadership, vision, determination, and there have been a lot of doubts about John Kerry on those qualities, and that's where I think Bush has built up his lead.

That could change.  In 2000, it wasn't a vote about personal qualities, it was really a vote about issues, and it was very close because the issues were pretty closely matched.

But this year seems to be more personal than usual and it's on that personal dimension that so far Kerry has not really been competitive with Bush.  That could change in a moment in a debate.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  You know, one of the more interesting little twists this week was the heavy attention paid to this Web site, Kerryhatersfor Kerry.com, and that means, in part, of course, that the anti Bush motivation more than the pro Kerry sentiment helps to drive this, and that's one reason why we'll see negativity on both sides, because they're trying to drive their bases.

Also this week, John Kerry enlisted the Reverend Jesse Jackson to go out very aggressively in minority areas to help turn out the vote and we've got Bill Clinton lurking in the background.

I would expect, in the next two debates, that you're going to see Kerry focus, if he can, on some of those issues like poverty and race that will motivate his own voters, that will try and move them out, and we're going to see, just as we'll see an intense Bush campaign to get out those Christian conservatives, and much of it done in a subterranean fashion, not through broadcast ads, we're going to see an intense effort in minority communities, much of it subterranean, designed to shake them up and probably scare them as well.

MR. FORTIER:  We have another question here and then I'll come back in this direction.

QUESTION:  Joe Meier, Council on Foreign Relations.  On the last page we see Bush's lead over Kerry subgroups, and the Pew and Gallop polls differ widely and in such a closely-contested election it seems those points will matter greatly.  What's your take on that and how do you reconcile that?

MR.      :  Karlyn?

MS. BOWMAN:  I wish I could reconcile it.  I don't think I can.  We've seen a lot of volatility in the internals of these polls.  Some of the polls have small samples.  The polls seem to be--Pew is internally consistent within itself as is Gallop, consistently, but there are a lot of question marks in my mind about these numbers, and if I had added ABC to it, you would have seen even more question marks, so--

QUESTION:  [inaudible].

MS. BOWMAN:  It's too hard to say at this point overall.

MR. SCHNEIDER:  You have to do a poll of polls.  I mean, that's the only sensible things.  One of the reasons why you see a lot of variability in polls is that there are more polls, they come out more often, they take more measurements, so there are going to be more numbers.

The only sensible thing to do, we try to do it on a regular basis, is look at all the polls together and you'll get a sense of how things are moving.  You have to kind of average them.  The report that I gave you was based on an average of five polls taken before and after the first debate.   A six point edge was the average before the debate, the presidential debate.  A two point edge after the debate.

But if you look at all five polls next to each other you'll probably got nuts.

MR. FORTIER:  Right here.

QUESTION:  Thank you.  Gary Mitchell from The Mitchell Report.  I want to ask a question that really looks at the swing state factor from two perspectives.  One is on those factors that, Karlyn, that you focused on, where Bush clearly has the lead on terrorism and on that cluster of compassion issues, is there a way to know whether that factor holds in swing states or whether--in other words, is there a way to know how those factors hold in swing states?

The second and related question is, Is it possible that we could sort of have a reverse factor in this election, which is in swing states where there are key Senate or gubernatorial elections that might drive turnout, could that change, for example, taking Colorado--could the Salazar-Coors race be the lead factor in turnout and lead to a surprise in November?

MR. ORNSTEIN:  On the latter question, Gary, I think having a heightened interest in some of the Senate races and an awful lot of advertising there probably does generate some votes.

But if you had to rank order, given the intensity over this presidential contest, it's more likely that that will influence the Senate outcome than the other way around.

And of course also keep in mind that most of the Senate battlegrounds are not in highly competitive presidential states, which means that since they're going to get no attention in the presidential contest, it becomes a little bit of an X factor in terms of interpreting them.

I've only seen the trial heat numbers, really, for the battleground states in these areas.  Is there more on those questions?

MS. BOWMAN:  I confess, I'm just skimming the state polls at this point.  I think it's too early to pay a lot of attention to them.  But if you look at a state like Ohio, his advantage on terrorism isn't going to help.  The real issue is the economy.  The same is true in Pennsylvania.  The same is true in Michigan and some of the other battleground states overall.

So I'm not sure that these big advantages he has really help him a lot in some of those swing states.

MR. FORTIER:  A question here, and then maybe we'll have time for one more question after that.

QUESTION:  Thank you.  Rosho Klajenhow [?] from the Indian embassy.  My question is regarding the, some of the questions that are posed in the debates, and these are important questions, relevant questions, very highly-debated questions.

For instance, let's say in the vice presidential debate, I think Senator Edwards also said the war--that it is not Saddam Hussein who attacked us.  Also I think this was a very strong point made by South Korea during the presidential debate.

Now neither President Bush nor Vice President Cheney really came back and responded to it, and one of the major blanks of the administration is to show that the war in Iraq is a part of the war on terror.

My question is, I mean, why doesn't the administration or these participants, president, vice president, why don't they respond? because this is a very important question, and if they don't respond so very effectively, do you think  this is going to have an impact in terms of how the voters and how the electorate looks at that they don't, that the administration doesn't really have any convincing argument to say that the war in Iraq is really a part of the war on terror?

MR. SCHNEIDER:  My impression is that George Bush says that every day.  He says the war in Iraq is an integral part of the war on terror.  The country is actually pretty much divided over that.  I think a slight majority--

QUESTION:  [inaudible].

MR. SCHNEIDER:  He has various explanations but he says that, you know, the lesson of September 11th is that we cannot allow people to strike first, we have to act preemptively.  I, he said yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, we could not take the risk of Saddam Hussein being able to give information and weapons to terrorists.

He described it this time as a risk.  The explanations have varied but the president is absolutely adamant in saying, repeatedly, that the war in Iraq, in his view, is one act, one part, inseparable from the war on terror.

The Democrats of course dispute that.  They call it a diversion from the war on terror that has left the country and the world more vulnerable, and then there's this interesting debate over Kerry's remark that the terrorists are pouring over the border to Iraq and the president says, "And that's why it's part of the war on terror," and Kerry's answer is, "No, that's why it's made the situation more vulnerable."

So you're getting this very strange debate.  But the fact is that's one of the president's most ardent arguments, I think.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  It also underscores the puzzlement that Bill mentioned right at the beginning, of why Kerry didn't jump all over this report yesterday, which is an attempt, which would be a way to drive a wedge between these two issues.

You raised one issue also that I think is worth underscoring.  That is the enormous power ahead for Charles Gibson and Bob Schieffer.  The questions asked in the debates are those of the moderators.  They make their own decisions.

In the town hall debate that Charles Gibson will moderate, the questions will come from people in the audience but he'll decide which of those questions to ask, and so just as an example, Gwen Ifill in the vice presidential debate, with a limited number of questions, each of which gets a two-minute answer, a 90-second response, and then possibly another minute, two of her questions related to gay marriage.

There wasn't one on stem cells, there wasn't one on the environment.  There were a lot of areas that could benefit either side, that were not brought up, and the closer you get to this, the more there's an emphasis on terrorism and Iraq, or an emphasis on jobs and health care.

Whether candidates are on the defensive or on the offensive will have something to do with the decisions made by these two journalists.

MR. SCHNEIDER:  It's important to note in this town hall the viewers--sorry--the participants, the audience will write the questions, submit them to the moderator, butt the rules stipulate that while the audience member will ask the question, if he or she strays from the question submitted to the moderator, the moderator can cut them off and say, Sir, or madam, that is not the question you have submitted, and force the to ask the question that they submitted in advance.

They can't vary, they can't go away from the question they asked or ask something different, and they cannot ask a follow-up question, and unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, in the famous debate with Bush, when a viewer asked a question about the national debt, they cannot leave the lectern and walk over and talk to the questioner face to face, the way Bill Clinton did so effectively.

Those are all prohibited by the rules.

MR. FORTIER:  Feeling empowered by Norm's comment of the importance of moderators, I am going to actually cut off the questions here.  But two points.  First, you will find in your packet a very important sheet which has a contest, for those of you who want to beat the experts up here.  Please feel free to fill that out and to leave it with us or to fax it in, and of course there'll be a gift at the end and that will be our October surprise.  We won't tell you what that is.

And then second, just to remind you of the date of the final Election Watch which is November 4th and is lunch and not breakfast, so we will not see you at 8:00 a.m. but in the middle of the day on November 4th.

Thank you and we're done.