Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 283 Bush 246
|
|
| Oct. 31 | New polls: AR CO CT FL IL IN IA MD MI MN MO NV NH NJ NM OH OR PA UT VA WV WI |
 |
Welcome
FAQ
Donations
Electoral college
Electoral college graph
Political humor
Political websites
Articles and books
Kerry and Bush records
Senate races 
Enhancements 
Posters News from the Votemaster
It was bound to happen and it happened. Today we have more state polls than there are states. There are 54 new polls in 22 states today. Furthermore, the lead has changed in five states, and all five changes favor Kerry. As a result, Kerry has now passed Bush in the electoral college. If today's results are the final results Wednesday morning, John Kerry will be elected as the 44th President of the United States, with 283 votes in the electoral college to George Bush's 246. But don't count on it. Many of Kerry's leads are razor thin. Counting only the strong + weak states, Bush leads 229 to 196, with 113 electoral votes in the tossup category Kerry's leads in the tossup states mean little to nothing. The turnout Tuesday will determine who wins.
Let's take a look at what happened state by state. New polls in Iowa, Michigan and New Mexico reverse Bush's previous leads and now favor Kerry by 1% in each case, well within the margin of error (about 4% in most cases). New Hampshire, which had been in the Bush column is now tied at 47% each. Finally, New Jersey is now safely back in the Kerry column with an 8% lead. Kerry retains his lead in Florida and Bush retains his lead in Ohio.
Mason-Dixon, Rasmussen, and Zogby all released multiple polls yesterday in many of the battleground states. Here is a table summarizing the results. The last column shows the Kerry-Bush-Tied score, including all the polls even those not shown (also Strategic Vision).
| State | Mason-Dixon | Rasmussen | Zogby | K-B-T |
| Florida | Bush by 4% | Bush by 1% | Kerry by 2% | 1-2-0 |
| Iowa | Tied | Kerry by 1% | 2-2-1 | |
| Michigan | Kerry by 2% | Kerry by 3% | Kerry by 1% | 3-0-0 |
| Minnesota | Bush by 1% | Bush by 1% | Kerry by 3% | 2-2-0 |
| New Mexico | Bush by 4% | Bush by 9% | 1-2-0 | |
| Nevada | Bush by 6% | Tied | Bush by 4% | 0-2-1 |
| Ohio | Bush by 3% | Bush by 1% | Bush by 5% | 0-4-0 |
| Pennsylvania | Kerry by 2% | Kerry by 2% | Kerry by 3% | 4-0-1 |
| Wisconsin | Kerry by 2% | Kerry by 2% | Kerry by 8% | 3-2-0 |
Since Friday, I am also producing a map showing an average of the nonpartisan polls with a lookback window of 3 days. To see it, click on Averaged polls on the menu.
Now let's take a quick look at the national Zogby tracking poll. This poll is especially interesting because the 2000 data for the same period is available. Kerry has now edged into the lead, holding a statistically insignificant 1% lead over Bush. Also noteworthy is that Ralph Nader has picked up a bit of support and could once again throw the election to Bush.
| Candidate | E-10 | E-9 | E-8 | E-7 | E-6 | E-5 | E-4 | Final |
| Kerry | 46% | 45% | 46% | 47% | 46% | 47% | 47% | |
| Bush | 48% | 48% | 49% | 48% | 48% | 47% | 46% | |
| Nader | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 2% | |
| Other | 1% | 1% | 1% | 0% | 1% | 2% | 2% | |
| Undecided | 4% | 5% | 3% | 3% | 4% | 3% | 3% |
Now let's compare these results to 2000. Here are the corresponding numbers. The sums are not 100% due to roundoff error. Comparing these two tables, Kerry is in a far better position than Gore was at this point in 2000. Not only is he not trailing by 4%, he is actually slightly ahead. On the other hand, there are few undecideds left because they have already broken for the challenger, as they usually do.
| Candidate | E-10 | E-9 | E-8 | E-7 | E-6 | E-5 | E-4 | Final |
| Gore | 43% | 42% | 42% | 41% | 42% | 42% | 42% | 48.38% |
| Bush | 44% | 45% | 45% | 46% | 45% | 45% | 46% | 47.87% |
| Nader | 5% | 5% | 5% | 4% | 5% | 5% | 6% | 2.74% |
| Other | 1% | 1% | 1% | 2% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1.01% |
| Undecided | 7% | 7% | 7% | 7% | 7% | 7% | 7% | 0% |
As everyone knows, Bush supports amending the constitution to forbid same sex marriages, although he knows full well that this amendment has zero chance in Congress and will be completely forgotten after the election. The purpose of supporting it was to rally the 4 million evangelicals who didn't vote for him last time. It didn't work. The Los Angeles Times reports that he has less support among evangelicals than he had last time. Like other Americans, they are also concerned about health care, jobs and other issues. That's probably why last week and said it was OK with him if the states allow civil unions. In other words, forget the evangelicals and concentrate on the soccer moms in the Midwest who are fairly tolerant of civil unions. Well, that's politics for you.
The page with hits from universities has been updated. Compiling this list requires processing the October log, which has now grown to over 4 GB, just for the HTML pages. I received a request for compiling the hits from British Universities, so here is the list from the .ac.uk domain. Of course, it may mostly reflect where American exchange students are studying. Canada is harder to do since Canada does not have a single subdomain that can be grepped for. (That word is not yet in Webster's, but UNIX people know what I mean.)
In the event of an attack on the site, please try www.electoral-vote3.com, www.electoral-vote4.com, etc. In the coming days I will update the site multiple times/day. Whenever I change the main site, half a dozen 60 MB files get shipped out. It takes a while so the backups aren't as fresh as the main site, so use the main site unless it becomes unreachable. I just upgraded each of the main servers to 2 GB each. They should be able to handle a thousand requests/sec each now. Just getting those down will require a very large attack. Getting all the servers down will be nearly impossible.
And Sunday wouldn't be Sunday without a new cartoon of the week.
Tomorrow is the big day when the Votemaster comes out of the closet into broad daylight. If you are curious, be sure to check back tomorrow.
Projected Senate: 46 Democrats, 52 Republicans, 1 independent, 1 tossup
| Click here to tell a friend about this site. |
|
To bookmark this page, type CTRL-D (Command-D on Macintoshes). If you are visiting for the first time, welcome. This site has far more about the election than just the map. See the Welcome page for more details.
|
|
