Why is Kerry doing much better in state than national polls?

[lancdem]

I regularly check http://www.electoral-vote.com and http://www.dcpoliticalreport.com to see what's happening, and right now Kerry is definitely holding his own. In fact, I believe he's doing better than he was before the RNC. And a number of these polls have been done days after the convention.I realize they could go downhill next week (state polls may be a lagging indicator), but at least today he seems very much in this thing.

I just worry that Kerry supporters/Dems will keep hearing about the national polls, like the new Time one, and assume Bush is a shoo-in. How do we prevent that?

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Remind people of where Gore was at this time in 2000?

IIRC Gore was down by 10 or 12. Anyway Kerry's momentum is upward.

[lancdem]

2. Actually, Gore was ahead in early September

because the DNC had just ended. But that's still a good parallel because that lead evaporated in a few weeks like we hope Bush's does.

[billbuckhead]

3. Chimpy does very well in Red states

But there are not enough electoral votes in those states if can pick just one major state away or several smaller ones from the "purple" states.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. He does better in state polls because he gets local media coverage...

Rove, I assume, does not have a direct line into the earpiece, or to the editorial superior, of every local newsperson in the country.

[randr]

5. * is still campaigning is states he won and increasing

his lead in those places.
The fact that he needs to revisit states that should be in his pocket says more than any poll I have seen.

[DaveinMD]

6. One explanation

Shrub seems to be winning his solid starts by larger margins than Kerry is winning his. This can provide the distortion we are seeing. The Dems in those states will come home the polling will even out.

[Beetwasher]

7. The National Polls Will Not De-Motivate ANY Voters This Year

IOW, the "It's a shoe in and a done deal so there's no point in me voting" just ain't gonna happen this year...People are too motivated and paying attention at historic levels...Turn out will be HUGE this year.

[RevolutionStartsNow]

8. I hope you are right

Turnout is the key this year (as I suppose it is every election year), and I keep meeting people who have registered for the first time, or who have been registered but haven't been voting.

If we get the turnout numbers that I think we will, Kerry will win easily. But this is nothing to get complacent about. We need to make sure the big turnout actually happens.

[TomNickell]

9. National polls are actually scatterred broadly.....

Fox News (!?!) has a 4 point lead likely voters, 2 point lead Registered voters. Rasmussen tracking has it almost even.

A 2 or 4 point lead for an incumbent President coming out of his convention ain't real good news.

I still wonder about these numbers. The bumper sticker and yard sign indicators just don't match. I live in a normally very Repub city. I've -just- begun to see a few Bush and Cheney signs and bumper stickers. But many Kerry/Edwards signs. In '00 it was just the opposite.

Not scientific by a long shot, but an indicator of something.

[Hippo_Tron]

10. An indicator that this country is ready for change

[DaveinMD]

11. bumper stickers

are not an indicator of voting behavior, just the enthusiasm of the activists. I worked on a campaign down here in 1996 where our candidate won the bumber sticker battle at least 3-1. We lost 60-40. Republican activists never liked our opponent because she was a moderate Republican.

[Kierkegaard]

13. The fact that incidents like this are being widely reported

all over the country is excellent news, indeed. Maybe not very scientific, but the ground view certainly looks a LOT different than the picture the media harlots are trying to paint.

[VirginiaDem]

12. another reason

that overlaps with the one mentioned above about Bush having wider leads in his base states than Kerry: Rove/Bush/Cheney are aiming for high base turnout and ignoring the relatively very small group of undecideds. This could mean (and I've been suspecting this for a while now) that his increased support in the polls is mostly going to states he already has in the bag. It could be biased wishful thinking but then again it would explain the phenomenon...

[VirginiaDem]

14. so to clarify my above post

the Republicans normally have wider leads than the Democrats in their base states. That's one of the Dems electoral college advantages that nobody ever mentions. You don't need to win by 30 percent--you need to win by ten to fifteen so you're getting through comfortably but not wasting votes. The worst part about not having big, big advantages for the Dems is that every once in a while there's a big electoral blowout like we used to get back in the Cold War days. It's difficult to imagine a scenarios that would ever deliver the non-coastal west, Texas and the deep south to the dems.

My point is that this year this trait has been exaggerated by the base strategy. If we had more state polls in deadend places like Utah and Montana we could check.

[VirginiaDem]

15. the other explanation is

that Kerry isn't doing much better in the battleground state polls than in the national polls. He's doing marginally/significantly better when you adjust for bullshit numbers like we get out of Gallup and Newsweek and Time. Looking at Battleground, Zogby and some others and Kerry's down 3-5 points. In the battleground state polls he's running about even or a point or two up on average.