Electoral Vote Predictor 2004:   Kerry 249   Bush 232

Data in Excel format Battleground states Info about the states Previous report Next report News   Strong Kerry (109) Weak Kerry (107) Barely Kerry (33) Exactly tied (57) Barely Bush (50) Weak Bush (40) Strong Bush (142) Needed to win: 270

Aug. 30

New polls: FL IA NY PA

News from the Votemaster

Nobody is going to win. For the first time since this site went live on May 24, neither candidate has the required 270 votes in the electoral college because three states are now tied. A new Research 2000 poll in Florida puts Kerry and Bush at 46% each with Nader at 2%. A new Gallup poll in Pennsylvania puts Kerry and Bush at 47% each, with Nader at 2%. The latter poll is bad news for Kerry because he had been leading in Pennsylvania for some time now. Colorado is also tied.

With the RNC starting today, today's totals are the baseline against which the Bush Bounce can be measured. If the massive demonstrations in New York are peaceful with everyone singing Kumbaya, they could hurt Bush by showing the country that there is a lot of opposition to his policies. On the other hand, if they are violent, we could have a repeat of 1968, in which violent demonstrations in Chicago and the police reaction to them convinced many voters that Democrats were rabble and they were safer with Richard Nixon. It will take at least a week to chart the results.

Thanks to all your generous donations, I have started advertising the site on some of the more popular blogs. I have chosen a mix of liberal, conservative, and libertarian blogs. Not all the ads have appeared yet as some of them have an ad backlog. Here is where the first batch of ads will run:

I am go to look into college newspapers in some swing states as a possible place to advertise.

To see what effect the ads are having, I have installed Brad Barrett's Webalizer to produce statistics at www.electoral-vote.com/stats. The stats page will be updated daily. The previous day's statistics will be at www.electoral-vote.com/old-stats. It is important to realize that Webalizer analyzes the server log, which seriously underestimates the traffic due to caching. When you request a page, your Internet provider keeps a copy in a cache on its hard disk. If another customer asks for the same page, the page is served from the Internet provider's cache so there is no record of this second hit at the server. Using other methods, a very crude estimate of the real traffic can be obtained by taking the number in the Visits column and increasing it by roughly 1/3. The Webalizer script runs at 4 a.m. EDT, so the first four hours of the current day will always be shown. Many of these hits are due to the 7 million Americans overseas, many in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific.

-- The votemaster

WWW www.electoral-vote.com