Thematically, this race is closest to Nixon/McGovern. We are at war, there is a clear choice in visons for the future, there is a noisy anti-war, anti-Bush crowd that has succeeded in infuriating most moderate conservatives and Kerry is a MA liberal to the left of Kennedy. The extremism of the BDS crowd has undoubtedly sickened moderate Dems and will significantly damage Dem turnout. The Acorn/ACT/Moveon morons have had all the impact of the Deaniacs in Iowa – which is to say none if not negative. Putting Moore in the box with Carter had to have been as stupid a move as Dukakis in a tank. Letting Sharpton into the primaries offended a fair portion of the Dem’s black constituency as well as an equally fair share of their Jewish constituency. Tack on the 1.4 million more Dems lost to the disparity in mortality demographics and I believe there is a fair chance that we are looking at a 44-46 million cap on votes for Kerry and 58-60 million votes for W. That would give a range of 56/44 – 58/42 which is within the range of probabilities that both you and I have been stating for six months.

And I didn’t even use any of those nasty formulas where the sigma gets tired and has to lay down.

I don’t recall the polls even suggesting that — although I was out of the country and wasn’t seeing the press as much.

It could be substantially worse for the Dems than appears at the moment. Using the actual ’00 turnout numbers for each state and current polling percentages for each state The Kerry numbers come out at 3.2 million less than Gore received in ’00. W is up about 320,000 using the same method for a gross change of over 3.5 million. I know the model is simplistic but it does provide another perspective.

Sandy, you’re exactly right — in fact, that’s one of the things that may be confounding these models, as George and I were talking about. Historically, not too many years ago, there were more Democrats than Independents, and more Independents than Republicans. Now, Republicans are tied with Democrats, or even ahead a little.

Being appropriately conservative, the pollsters’ models often reflect the previous election — but there is very good reason to suspect that registration has moved toward Republicans. And (with no data at all, just a feeling) I suspect that someone who changed their registration to Republican in the last four years is going to vote for Bush this week.

How does that skew the polls?

I once read after 2000 that about 15K people in Louisiana changed from dem to pub affiliation, there were others who went the other way, but not like that.

Historically, Republicans have underpolled due to a dispropotionate percentage of people who are too-busy-making-money-to-answer-the-damn-phone in the GOP column. (This did not hold for some reason in 2000. I don’t know why.) The cell-phone-only bunch is an 18- to 30-year-olds’ phenomenon. Everything I’ve seen is that Bush leads among this group by a substantial margin.

Both of these factors argue for systemic underpolling as Charlie (C) noted earlier.

There is no question the turnout will be massive this year. The question is, which side will have the stamina to wait in mile-long lines for hours? This also points to a problem for vote fraudsters: How many of them will wait in line for four hours to vote twice?

That’s always the kicker — does your sample have some kind of error you don’t account for? Is it really representative of the population that will really vote?

But I’ll note a couple of things: first, the KerrySpot a few days ago had an analysis of what the effect of different splits of the undecided would be; for Kerry to win, the undecided have to go almost exclusively to Kerry, more than 4 to 1. For Bush to win, the undecided have to go only 1 in 4 to Bush, and if they go about 1 in 3 to Bush I get my 300 electoral votes.

Second, someone last night (on TV) mentioned what they call people who are depending on undecided and unsampled voters to win.

Losers.