I must apologize. I did not intend to come up as Anonymous. When the comment was being moderated, it had Joseph Marshall at the top of it, just like it should.
US Patriot has a very good point, and the data is available. Political Arithmatick shows that, unlike Obama, Gore started the race a full 10% behind GWB. Obama started 1% ahead of McCain. By day 250 Gore had crept up to -5% and he stayed 5% down for the next 21 weeks. Through this fallow period for Gore, Obama varied between 2-8% ahead of McCain.
Gore started to rise sharply 100 days before the election and peaked at +3% at 60 days. So GWB’s lowest number was 47% at 60 days. This is the highest “lowball” score of any candidate in 2000, 2004, or 2008 up to now.
Obama is +8 again at the same juncture now.
Gore’s edge lasted a mere 5 weeks before plummeting as sharply as he had risen, bottoming out at -3% a mere three weeks before the election and then bounced up to a very slight edge in the final popular vote, +0.5%.
This result was complicated by the fact that 3.74% of the popular vote went to fringe candidates.
Unfortunately, there is no direct way to track the electoral vote prediction at 60 days. The magic number was 269, there were several more EV’s in the consitently blue states than today, and the final totals were 271 Bush, 266 Gore.
What can be said, however, is that 2000 clearly changed from being a GWB blowout to a truly close election 75 days from the voting booth. Al Gore didn’t nearly win, GWB nearly lost. This bears no resemblance to the Democrats ahead first, Republicans clobber them later scenarios kited out above.
And, in fact, 2004 was also far closer than the EV totals suggest. Kerry’s highest poll score was +2%, GWB’s victory margin was only +2.4% and without Nader is likely to have been closer to +1.5%, though I think he still would have been the clear winner.
Overall, neither 2000 nor 2004 bear that much resemblance to the results we have seen so far. Nobody in the previous two elections has had an 8% lead this late in the game. Obama got ahead in May, stayed ahead all summer and is now farther ahead than he has ever been before. Not only that, he is farther ahead than any other 21st century candidate has been at 60 days away–a full 4% further ahead!
There are also no “10 to 15 point” convention bounces anywhere in this data, despite those numbers being thrown out so cavalierly above. Obama’s 5% jump above his own prior numbers in a single week is as good as it’s been in the last three elections.
I will repeat what I said in the first post: the McCain/Palin ticket is in trouble, and as far as I can interpret the data it is because McCain has made no inroads as yet on the undecided block of voters. Now maybe they can still pull the chestnuts out of the fire, but, like it or not, the chestnuts are clearly in the fire.
